Wednesday, October 09, 2019

First make a distinction...


I find myself working with a reading group, currently “The Widow’s Son” (the second of the Historical Illuminatus trilogy).  Buy the new edition from Hilaritas Press, or work from an old one, if you wish.  We have reached maybe halfway.

In the process of looking closely at the text, a fleeting reference came up to “The Laws of  Form” by G Spencer Brown.  We have a couple of posts in the past of this blog, about this text, which you can find with the tags at the end of this post.  They also contain quite a lot of links to other related material…


I decided to follow up, a little (I love spin-offs) and discovered a recording of GSB’s voice, when he presented some talks at the AUM Conference (1973). Fascinating, as ever, to hear the voice of a writer.

As well as the recording of the first part of the first session, you can find slightly erratic transcripts of four sessions online.  Comparing the sound recording to the transcript of session one suggests that the transcripts of the other three sessions might prove incomplete or inaccurate.  Hard to tell.

It becomes obvious why RAW found him interesting, as the basis of his investigation lies in engineering (logic circuits for transistors), not abstract thinking (formal logic).



Here's audio of the last 30 minutes, before GSB left.  You will find the text in the transcripts above.



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