Reading behind, as my mail server was down all weekend... On Sat, 13 Dec 2003, Lawrence DeBivort <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wroteL:
>Honest to God, Joe said that he thought Spencer-Brown was only >'beginning' to understand the doors he himself had opened with his new >algebra. Joe thought that such problems as the Four-Color theorem could >be solved by the laws of form and the distinctions approach, and later >Max was to claim that he had done so. But Joe didn't try to explain laws >of form to me, and my sense is that the book remains the best source even >today, though Spencer-Brown has more recently termed it all wrong. > >My reaction to the book was very similar to yours. I used to joke with >another friend that we should sleep with it under our pillows and hope to >get it through some sort of pillow transference. What an elegant, dense >book! With a few others, it holds pride of position in my library. > >More recently, I have wondered whether some of laws of form might be >thought of as a hyper-sophisticated Venn tool. I'd be very interested in >your thoughts on all of this. > >I have another friend who actually hired Spencer-Brown on for some >consulting many years ago. The thing went sour, I think because >Spencer-Brown had a hard time working with others, and especially others >who did not immediately admit his genius. > >More recently, this same friend met again with Spencer-Brown, who >ruefully said that maybe interpersonal relations were important after >all, and that things might have gone better for him had he understood >that earlier in his life. > >Cheers, >Lawry I am suprised and pleased that Spencer-Brown's Laws of Form are being discussed here. I first encountered them about thirty years ago courtesy of a grad student, and I was immediately struck by their elegant simplicity. I agree that they say something very profound with their economy. I have since read analyses by mathematicians who have dismissed them after demonstrating (in the manner that Heisenberg's matrix formulation was shown to be equivalent to Schrodinger's equation) that the Laws of Form are formally equivalent to Boolean logic, however I don't find the dismissal justified. Besides the fact, which I have not seen addressed in those discussions, that as described in the book's introduction, the development of the LoF came about because of a need to explain a solution to a routing problem that could not be proved using Boolean tools, thus implying that the LoF are not in fact equivalent to Boole's formulation, the sheer economy and simplicity of the structure is so superior to the Boolean form that I am unable to understand why they haven't totally supplanted the Boolean forms. And the manner in which the expressions collapse, coupled with the principle that all variables should be regarded as concealed operator strings, just screams the announcement of a revolutionary advance in the approach to the understanding of logical constructions. To really absorb and embrace these functions one is forced to imbibe of the spirit of fluidity and contingency which underlies their formulation, a complete opposite to the stolid dictatorial nature of the Boolean forms they replace. I took some standard Boolean stuff as part of my electronics some years later, and wanted very much to parallel the course content with a LoF study on my own, as I suspected I would have a firmer and swifter grasp of the content thereby, but unfortunately I had never acquired my own copy of the book, and I could not seem to locate one anywhere, something which quite puzzled me at the time. I had forgotten the details, this being around the time I first discovered that my memory was no longer solidly reliable, and that I really ought to have taken much more verbose notes in all those courses I had sailed through. At any rate, my contact with the LoF thus languished for quite some time, til it occurred to me to look on the web, once that was available, and I rediscovered them in many forms there. Check for instance the educator who uses "pancake math" to teach laws of form to elementary school students (now there's a fortunate set of youngsters!). As with all things which offer a glimpse at something more profound, they do attract whackos, and some of the web pages out there reflect that, but there are a few solid sites, as well. -Pete Vincent >> -----Original Message----- >>From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >>[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Keith Hudson >>Sent: Sat, December 13, 2003 11:52 AM >>To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >>Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >>Subject: RE: [Futurework] They've lost my IQ score! >> >> >> Lawry, >> >> I much enjoyed your account of Joe, too. >> >> But, if I may, let me just select one thing from it -- when you asked >>Joe: >> >> "Does Max [G. Spencer] Brown really make any sense?" >> >> What did he say? >> >> In times past I have spent weeks and weeks puzzling over his system >>and What it really means. It's beautiful in all sorts of ways and, in >>fact, I used it in some papers I wrote about the cortex about 15 years >>ago. But, just like quantum theory which no one understands, though >>physicists use it, I used Spencer-Brown's system but didn't understand >>it! I felt intuitively it was right because it was so succinct and >>all-ecompassing. If Joe explained it then I would love to know what he >>said. >> Keith _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://scribe.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
