Laws of Form conference (online)

 A second Laws of Form conference will start shortly.   August 3 - 6th.  Find a registration form by scrolling down on their Home Page.

If you can't attend in Liverpool, you can participate through Zoom (when registering, opt to participate remotely).

It does not cost to attend, although they do invite contributions.

For reference, we have posted about LoF in the past, so for some context, please check out the old posts, through the attached Label:  Laws of Form

"The theme of this book is that a universe comes into being when a space is severed or cut apart"

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.

G. Spencer-Brown has reached his 90th year

This man is mostly known for his enigmatic yet accessible book, The Laws of Form. If you don't understand the maths, you may enjoy the verbal interpretations, especially if you treat them as some kind of poetic language, rather than something literal (can anyone really translate maths into words?)

Here you can find him talking to the AUM Conference in 1973, at Esalen, introduced by John Lilly.

You can easily Google plenty of interesting and interactive sites based on The Laws of Form - we have offered links to them in the past, e.g. The Markable Mark, which has practical tools to play with.

It can prove hard to find copies of the more poetic books he wrote under the name James Keys: i.e Only Two Can Play This Game [Julian Press, 1972], 23 Degrees of Paradise [Cat Books, 1970], etc) but they seem like a necessary compliment to his more technical work.

Wiki lists him as a polymath: "He describes himself as a "mathematician, consulting engineer, psychologist, educational consultant and practitioner, consulting psychotherapist, author, and poet."

 Personally, I would love to find out more about his interactions with R.D.Laing.

 Still, this remains a birthday greeting, and not a definitive site of cross-references.

For RAW fans, of course, you may recognise an assortment of chapter sub-headings and references cut up into the Schrodinger's Cat trilogy... "That which is not allowed is forbidden", etc.

LIVING IN A NOVEL


Let there be a form distinct from the form.
­G. Spencer-Brown, Laws of Form

-0-

"Choronzon" was a mind­construct of the primates specializing in the Enochian version of Cabalistic magick. Talking out of two sides of their mouths at once, as was typical of primate mystics, the Cabalists said that Choronzon was the astral embodiment of all the illusions and deception on Terra (especially all the egotism and malice). They added that Choronzon was also a part of the psyche of the student which had to be faced and conquered before Illumination was complete. When asked whether Choronzon was then outside or inside, they usually answered "Both." This reply made no sense at all until G. Spencer Brown published his Laws of Form.

-0-

He exhaled a fog of cannabis molecules and returned his attention to his favorite
bedtime reading, Brown's Laws of Form:

To cross again is not to cross

-0-

FORM: In the sense of G. Spencer Brown, a mathematical or logical system necessary

to systematic thought but having the inevitable consequences of imposing its own deep

structures upon the experiences packaged and indexed by the form. See: The Copenhagen Interpretation

-0-

Footnote:

The opening line of LOF is "The theme of this book is that a universe comes into being when a space is severed or cut apart" .

You may find parallels in Zen Buddhism, in relation to the idea of the Mutual Arising of Opposites:

When you cling to a hairbreadth of distinction,
 heaven and earth are set apart.
 If you want to realize the truth,
 don’t be for or against.

There are other translations of this idea from the Xinxin Ming...

See also:   Sanskrit - Pratītyasamutpāda

A useful reference site on Observer Web

Good summary of LOF in Wikipedia

Cuttingup Space, Part 2: The Laws of Form  on the  Particulations blog

A design for an experimental course, with LoF as the focus.

Too much of nothing

I always felt a lot of curiosity about the apparent world I lived in, but was never even offered the idea of a Creator god as a child  (although I knew from school that many people did choose to believe something that odd).

It seemed clear to me that Universe had no beginning or end that we could perceive, and I discovered the lovely word ‘infinite’ along with all the paradoxes inherent in it.

 Once you get into the self-referential, bootstrap theory, mutually arising phenomena, and all that – your attention naturally gets drawn to the field within which all this supposed activity goes on – Nothingness, the Void, the Ether, the Plenum, the Tao.

"Tao gives birth to one,

One gives birth to two,

Two gives birth to three,

Three gives birth to ten thousand beings.”

Whatever you call it can never come close, because definitions (by definition) draw a line (an outline) around something.  Attempts were made to use the negative “Neti Neti” (Not this, not this) but it didn’t help me much to imply an Absence rather than a Presence.  Nagarjuna applied recursive logic to this problem…

So when I stumbled over The Laws of Form, the book rang bells in my head, even if I don’t really understand advanced maths and symbolic logic, etc.  The second half of the book does attempt to put the formulae into natural English, clearly enough, at least, for me to get just a glimpse of what a profound attempt to describe ‘things and events’ can emerge out of nothing spontaneously (or something like that).

 G Spencer Brown starts from the first step of “Making A Distinction” on the blank field.  For argument’s sake we will use a circle, which divides the space into an inside and an outside.

"The theme of this book is that a universe comes into being when a space is severed or cut apart.”

A curiously similar phrase turns up in Zen

“If there's even a hair’s breadth of difference, heaven and earth are clearly separated. How do you understand this?"   Hsin Hsin Ming

 Sengcan said, "The supreme Way is without difficulty – it is only averse to discrimination."

If you want to play with the ideas found in G Spencer Brown's enigmatic book, the Markability site offers not only clarification, but interactive tools and exercises to really understand.