It's Elemental

Category: Philosophy

  • An Esoteric Guide to Spencer Brown’s Laws of Form #5

    An Esoteric Guide to Spencer Brown’s Laws of Form #5

    (New readers will want to start with the first installment.)

    We ended the last installment with a recognition that the Laws of Form naturally led GSB to an understanding of both the necessity and importance of the realm of imaginary numbers.  We will continue this elaboration.

    You are likely familiar with the paradoxical sentence: “This sentence is false.”  Is it false or true?  The answer is yes, and it depends on when you ask me.  It was this kind of paradox that drove Russell and Whitehead into creating their Theory of Logical Types, which was designed specifically to prevent this kind of thing from simply ever coming up in the first place.  GSB is not so limited, and understands the importance of formally including paradox in his calculus.  So how does he deal with this?

    He points out that we are driven to a higher order of logic, one that includes re-entry. In the first Esalen lecture, GSB states that (more…)

  • An Esoteric Guide to Spencer Brown’s Laws of Form #4

    An Esoteric Guide to Spencer Brown’s Laws of Form #4

    (New readers will want to start with the first installment.)

    We ended the last installment having come to realize something of the esoteric significance of the taijitu, or yin-yang, form, in something of an extended tangent. We return now to the text.

    GSB himself seemed to understand the importance of the Laws of Form, even if there were some of these more subtle specifics which were not apparent to him (or at least which he did not explicitly recognize).  Having reached this point (literally we are still on page 1 of LoF), the vast majority of the rest of the work in LoF is seen to be secondary.  Yet there are many valuable indications which deserve connection to esoteric principles, and the point of this exploration is to show that such connections are not arbitrary. So, to return to the actual content of LoF now, after this long but foundational detour, we can note that he says:

    LoF p. 5

    • Let any token [of the mark] be intended as an instruction to cross the boundary of the first distinction.

    That is, every mark is an invitation to cross it; every distinction is a call to make that distinction, not to simply point it out, but also to DO it, to MAKE the distinction.  In other words, the whole thing is ACTIVE, not passive, it is not descriptive but PRESCRIPTIVE.  Of course, the esoteric significance of this should be obvious, because precisely what distinguishes esoteric work from, say, philosophy or other disciplines, is (more…)

  • An Esoteric Guide to Spencer Brown’s Laws of Form #3

    An Esoteric Guide to Spencer Brown’s Laws of Form #3

    (New readers will want to start with the first installment.)

    We ended the last installment noting that the first distinction must be of distinction, but this must be considered as a complex, recursive creation and simultaneous crossing of a boundary that is just precisely the boundary between that very activity of its creation and the fact of it as created.

    To get at this another way, we can point out that the Glanville has actually hit on elements in this direction already, but (it seems) hasn’t quite put it together in the same way.  Remember that the whole time we have been talking about the first distinction we are also talking about “the observer”, which we could call a “self”.  It may even be worth revisiting some of the above text with that implicit translation in mind.  I remind you of this because, Glanville, in his essay The Self and the Other: The Purpose of Distinction, is exploring solutions to the problem of infinite regression that arise when the mark doesn’t distinguish itself from its value, and he uses “self” and “other” to hold the logic of “mark” and “value”, which is perfectly fine.

    Glanville notes that we have a set of relations that are implicit in each other: that between self and other: “the fundamental distinction between self and other [read: between the mark and its value] cannot be more fundamental than the distinction of the self, nor can it be less so: another circularity, another reduction of hierarchy” (p. 3).

    Except that this isn’t a reduction of hierarchy. It is actually (more…)

  • An Esoteric Guide to Spencer Brown’s Laws of Form #2

    An Esoteric Guide to Spencer Brown’s Laws of Form #2

    (New readers will want to start with the first installment.)

    Let us continue our beginning:

    LoF p. 1

    • We take as given the idea of distinction and the idea of indication, and that we cannot make an indication without drawing a distinction. We take, therefore, the form of distinction for the form.

    If this doesn’t strike you as having a “mystical” flavor, then you are drinking the wrong concoction.  I’m not going to try to explain this, but rather I’m going to try to re-frame it; you could say, in GSB-approved language, that I’m going to re-mark it.  The important thing to note about this, the very first “official” sentence of the LoF, is that it is recursive.  Let’s be clear: the Laws of Form (not the book, the LAWS) are only possible because of a recursion, a throwing back on itself of itself.  But a throwing back of what onto itself?

    Well, “nothing”, of course; but nothing understood as what everything would be if it were.

    But of course nothing doesn’t remain nothing (well, it does, but it doesn’t), because here we are.  The question GSB is really attempting to get at is the question: (more…)

  • An Esoteric Guide to Spencer Brown’s Laws of Form #1

    An Esoteric Guide to Spencer Brown’s Laws of Form #1

    (A full PDF of this article can be had here.)

    George Spencer Brown (in his spirit, I would like to say: “Let George Spencer Brown = GSB”), a logician, engineer, and teacher, wrote a curious little book called Laws of Form, that inspired countless interesting people of widely varying backgrounds.  The book is not a book of mathematics, nor is it a book of logic, although if you were to read it this is likely what you’d say.  It is, rather, an attempt to enact something prior to both.  Indeed, GSB feels that his work actually forms (meaning both “is” and “shapes”) “the basic forms [same double-meaning] underlying linguistic, mathematical, physical, and biological science” (p. v of the 1972 edition).

    If you haven’t read Laws of Form (LoF), I quite recommend it, and it is actually quite short.  Even if you don’t want to follow along with the meaty theorems and proofs, the prose and context is definitely worth chewing on.  What is fascinating to me is that the work can also be read with an esoteric eye, which is to say, with a sensitivity to the form and nature of spiritual experiences.  This is not at all a departure from what GSB intended: in his other works he quite openly discusses this connection (see Only Two Can Play This Game published under his pen name, James Keys).  Even in LoF he prefaces the preface with this quote from Blake:

    “Tho’ obscur’d, this is the form of the Angelic land.”

    So what I would like to do is to show that within the LoF are a number of coherent relations to principles that are rightly considered esoteric: they are (more…)

  • Notes on the roots of epistemology in recursion

    Notes on the roots of epistemology in recursion

    threefold recursive spiral of knowing
    Unity in distinction, distinction in unity.

    There is a necessary recursion at the very heart of epistemology. Epistemology can never be founded upon a principle of linearity, where thinking traces its origin to something that lies before thinking, and somehow emerges or grows out of it, because the very existence of this “before”, whatever its nature, must always be assumed BY THINKING itself, as a distinction within thinking.

    Therefore, the only proper starting point for an epistemology is the fundamental distinction OF distinction itself, by thinking FOR thinking, which constitutes the basis of all further distinction, and is implicit in it. The fundament of epistemology must be the recursive distinction of distinction. The nature of this self-distinction (distinction of distinction by distiction) is implicitly infinitely recursive, and identifies the very nature of thinking to be at its root one of distinction. Its implicit infinitude is a key aspect of thinking’s foundation, with definite consequences. It means that thinking is fundamentally (not secondarily) FREE: its potential to distinguish is unlimited. There is nothing that lies outside of thinking’s potential.

    The consequences of this are more than epistemological, they are ontological. Thinking, infinite in its potential, is (more…)

  • A Theoretical Beginning

    A Theoretical Beginning

    Every moment of transformation enacts an epistemology.  Part of what it means to be human is to have the potential to awaken to this fact, and more: to recognize that the recognition of the inescapable relation between action and epistemology leads to the unfolding of a life-long quest and question: how do I know? Exploration of this question, always implicitly present but seldom asked, yields consequences for the entirety of human life, from the most mundane actions to the deepest soul struggles.  Once one sees that it is impossible, as a living system, to escape epistemological concerns at even the most trivial level, such concerns form an ever-present background to the unfolding of one’s life. (more…)