It's Elemental

Tag: Laws Of Form

  • 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 #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…)