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diff --git a/gsb_esalen.otx b/gsb_esalen.otx index 4591fc0..6080872 100644 --- a/gsb_esalen.otx +++ b/gsb_esalen.otx @@ -7,26 +7,60 @@ \fontfam[fbb] \typosize[11/13] -\def\dq#1{``#1''} -\def\booktitle#1{{\it\dq{#1}}} -\def\essaytitle#1{{\it\dq{#1}}} -\def\journaltitle#1{{\it #1}} -\def\term#1{{\it\dq{#1}}} -\def\e#1{{\it #1}} +\def\dq#1{“#1”} +\def\booktitle#1{{\it #1}\/} +\def\essaytitle#1{{\it\dq{#1}}\/} +\def\journaltitle#1{{\it #1}\/} +\def\term#1{{\it\dq{#1}}\/} +\def\e#1{{\it #1}\/} \long\def\Q#1{{\leftskip=1in\parindent=0pt #1\par}} \def\cbrk#1{\vskip 1em \hfil #1 \hfil\vskip 1em} \def\dinkus{\cbrk{* * *}} \def\title#1{\cbrk{{\typosize[24/]#1}}} \def\subtitle#1{{\hfil\noindent\typosize[9/]\it #1\nl}} \def\ttl#1{\vbox{\vskip 1em{\tt #1}\vskip 0.5em\hrule\vskip 0.5em}\nobreak} -\def\textsuperscript#1{$^{\textstyle #1}$} -\def\spkr#1{{\tt #1:}} -\long\def\transcript#1{{\parindent=0pt\parskip=1em\leftskip=0.1in\rightskip=0.1in\hangindent=1#1\par}} -\def\aside#1{{\sl\tt [#1] }} -\def\endnote#1{\hfil{\bf\tt #1}\hfil} +\def\textsuperscript#1{{\typosize[8/]$^{\textstyle\rm #1}$}} +\def\spkr#1{{\tt #1:} \hangindent=1em} +\long\def\transcript#1{{ + \parindent=0pt\parskip=0.5em + \hangindent=1em\hangafter=1 + #1\par\vskip 0.5em}} +\def\aside#1{{\it\tt [#1] }} +\def\endnote#1{\vfill\hfil{\bf\tt #1}\hfil\vfill} \def\ednote#1{\fnote{\fontfam[DejaVu]#1}} +\def\ld{\ld } +\def\B#1{{\tt #1}} -This discussion of \booktitle{Laws of Form} was led by George Spencer-Brown at the Esalen Institute in California, March 19--20, 1973. After two days, Spencer-Brown left, leaving the followers without their sage. +% --- design + +\_def \_secfont {\_scalemain\_typoscale[1200/]\it} + +\_def\_printsec#1{\_par + \_abovetitle{\_penalty-151}\_bigskip + {\_secfont \_noindent \leaders\hrule depth -4pt height 5pt\hfill\hskip 1em #1\_nbpar}\_insertmark{#1}% + \_nobreak \_belowtitle{\_bigskip}% + \_firstnoindent +} + +\_def\_chapfont{\_scalemain\_typoscale[\_magstep3/\_magstep3]\it} + +\_def\_printchap #1{\_vfill\_supereject \_prevdepth=0pt + \_vglue\_medskipamount + {\_chapfont \_noindent % \_mtext{chap} % \_printrefnum[@]\_par + \_nobreak\_smallskip + \_noindent \_raggedright #1\_nbpar}\_mark{}% + \_smallskip\hrule\_smallskip% + \_nobreak \_belowtitle{\_bigskip}% + \_firstnoindent +} + +\def\authorskip{\vskip 2em} + +\null\vfill + +This discussion of \booktitle{Laws of Form} was led by George Spencer Brown at the Esalen Institute in California, March 19--20, 1973. After two days, Spencer Brown left, leaving the followers without their sage. + +\vfill The sessions were audiotaped by Kurt von Meier and transcribed by Cliff Barney. @@ -35,55 +69,59 @@ The sessions were audiotaped by Kurt von Meier and transcribed by Cliff Barney. \vskip 1em {\tt originally posted at -http://www.lawsofform.org/aum/index.html} +http:\slash \slash www.lawsofform.org\slash aum\slash index.html} \vskip 1em \hrule \vfill +\break + +\maketoc + \chap Prolog: Gurus in the Mud -{\leftskip 0pt1fil\parindent=0pt\parskip=0pt + {\parskip=0pt +\rightline{By Cliff Barney} - By Cliff Barney +\rightline{{\tt cbarney@newmedia.com}}\par} +\authorskip -{\tt cbarney@newmedia.com}\par} -Despite its grand name, and its spectacular setting at the Esalen hot baths in a cliff by the sea, the AUM\fnote{\dq{AUM} is an acronym for \dq{American University of Masters,} created by the always inventive Alan Watts.} conference on the \booktitle{Laws of Form} proved something of a bust for many of the participants, who failed to achieve intellectual enlightenment in the week it lasted. Nor was it a success for the intellectual focus of the show, British mathematician G. Spencer-Brown, who fell out with the sponsors and left after spending only two days of the scheduled seven. Without Brown, the others organized tentative seminars around various ways to ask \dq{What do you suppose he meant?} They didn't have a lot of success. +Despite its grand name, and its spectacular setting at the Esalen hot baths in a cliff by the sea, the AUM\fnote{\dq{AUM} is an acronym for \dq{American University of Masters,} created by the always inventive Alan Watts.} conference on the \booktitle{Laws of Form} proved something of a bust for many of the participants, who failed to achieve intellectual enlightenment in the week it lasted. Nor was it a success for the intellectual focus of the show, British mathematician G. Spencer Brown, who fell out with the sponsors and left after spending only two days of the scheduled seven. Without Brown, the others organized tentative seminars around various ways to ask \dq{What do you suppose he meant?} They didn't have a lot of success. -\booktitle{Laws of Form}, the calculus, and G. Spencer-Brown, who put it into the marked state, had enjoyed an ambiguous reputation since the book, \booktitle{Laws of Form}, was published in 1969.\fnote{George Allen and Unwin Ltd, London.} - Brown himself was an enigma: on one side, he was a student of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell, the logico\slash mathematical heavyweights of the early 20\textsuperscript{th} Century, and Russell had praised the book. On the other, Brown was notoriously eccentric and had published, as well as mathematics, poetry and belles-lettres in which he hinted at deeper meaning to his mathematics than mere descriptions of functionality. One epigraph to \booktitle{Laws of Form} is from William Blake: \dq{Tho obscured, this is the form of the Angelic land.} This is not simply a pun; in the text that follows, Brown promises to show laws that operate where the concepts of mathematics and religion have degenerated and are not distinguished. +\booktitle{Laws of Form}, the calculus, and G. Spencer Brown, who put it into the marked state, had enjoyed an ambiguous reputation since the book, \booktitle{Laws of Form}, was published in 1969.\fnote{George Allen and Unwin Ltd, London.} Brown himself was an enigma: on one side, he was a student of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell, the logico\slash mathematical heavyweights of the early 20\textsuperscript{th} Century, and Russell had praised the book. On the other, Brown was notoriously eccentric and had published, as well as mathematics, poetry and belles-lettres in which he hinted at deeper meaning to his mathematics than mere descriptions of functionality. One epigraph to \booktitle{Laws of Form} is from William Blake: \dq{Tho obscured, this is the form of the Angelic land.} This is not simply a pun; in the text that follows, Brown promises to show laws that operate where the concepts of mathematics and religion have degenerated and are not distinguished. For reasons that will be suggested below, the Esalen meeting left most of its participants more puzzled at the end than when they had assembled. \booktitle{Laws of Form} has remained almost an intellectual curiosity, largely ignored by the mainstream and investigated mostly on the fringe, both mathematical and mystical. For a long time, the book was out of print in the United States. However a new edition has now been published,\fnote{Cognizer Connection, Portland, OR, 1995.} and a German translation, \booktitle{Formenkalkul}, was published in 1994.\fnote{By Suhrkamp.} -There seems to be a resurgence of interest in Brown's calculus. A World Wide Web search on \texttt{\dq{\booktitle{Laws of Form}}} returns links to half a dozen url's, one of which yields a bibliography of work on Spencer-Brown and the \booktitle{Laws of Form} that contains hundreds of items. There is even a \booktitle{Laws of Form} home page. One computer scientist, William Bricken of the University of Washington, has interpreted \booktitle{Laws of Form} as a computer language (\texttt{LOSP}) and has built the language into a chip that is now powering a very fast video board for virtual reality applications. In 1994, \textit{EE Times}, a trade magazine, printed several articles on the use of the \booktitle{Laws of Form} in designing logic circuits (their original application). Several computer scientists, including the inventor of the computer language called Forth, Chuck Moore, were at that time designing logic circuits that use imaginary values in calculating states, thus simplifying chip design, as demonstrated in the \booktitle{Laws of Form}. +There seems to be a resurgence of interest in Brown's calculus. A World Wide Web search on {\tt\dq{Laws of Form}} returns links to half a dozen url's, one of which yields a bibliography of work on Spencer Brown and the \booktitle{Laws of Form} that contains hundreds of items. There is even a \booktitle{Laws of Form} home page. One computer scientist, William Bricken of the University of Washington, has interpreted \booktitle{Laws of Form} as a computer language ({\tt LOSP}) and has built the language into a chip that is now powering a very fast video board for virtual reality applications. In 1994, \e{EE Times}, a trade magazine, printed several articles on the use of the \booktitle{Laws of Form} in designing logic circuits (their original application). Several computer scientists, including the inventor of the computer language called Forth, Chuck Moore, were at that time designing logic circuits that use imaginary values in calculating states, thus simplifying chip design, as demonstrated in the \booktitle{Laws of Form}. -The scientists are thus plugging onward, but the mystics and metaphysicians, not understanding math, have mostly given it up. This is too bad because \booktitle{Laws of Form} is too rich to be left to the scientists. Therefore perhaps it is time, twenty-three years after the AUM conference, to stir this pot again. Kurt von Meier and I were among the twenty or so people present that March week at Esalen to meet and talk with Brown. It was a transforming experience. I had no idea what I was getting into, beyond the prospect of spending a few pleasant days on the California coast, steaming in the Esalen sulphur baths and basking the intellectual glow of the hip literati of the day---Alan Watts, John Lilly, Ram Dass, Heinz von Foerster, Karl Pribram, Michael Murphy, Charles Tart, Stewart Brand, John Brockman, various other scientists, artists, psychologists willing at least to speculate that there might be some formal relationship between hard science and math and the more spiritual pursuits that were then beginning to become popular. At that time, Lilly was seriously trying to talk with dolphins and had not yet announced that he was a visitor from another star system. Watts, an Anglican clergyman, had become a cult figure in the hippie world with his lively, entertaining books on the psychedelic experience and Buddhism. (Even today, more than twenty years after his death, Watts's taped lectures are still broadcast and sold.) Brand's \textit{Whole Earth Catalog} had enchanted a whole new demography with its stunning array of concise reviews and pointers to offbeat products and intellectual resources that were considered useful for living independent, productive lives. +The scientists are thus plugging onward, but the mystics and metaphysicians, not understanding math, have mostly given it up. This is too bad because \booktitle{Laws of Form} is too rich to be left to the scientists. Therefore perhaps it is time, twenty-three years after the AUM conference, to stir this pot again. Kurt von Meier and I were among the twenty or so people present that March week at Esalen to meet and talk with Brown. It was a transforming experience. I had no idea what I was getting into, beyond the prospect of spending a few pleasant days on the California coast, steaming in the Esalen sulphur baths and basking the intellectual glow of the hip literati of the day---Alan Watts, John Lilly, Ram Dass, Heinz von Foerster, Karl Pribram, Michael Murphy, Charles Tart, Stewart Brand, John Brockman, various other scientists, artists, psychologists willing at least to speculate that there might be some formal relationship between hard science and math and the more spiritual pursuits that were then beginning to become popular. At that time, Lilly was seriously trying to talk with dolphins and had not yet announced that he was a visitor from another star system. Watts, an Anglican clergyman, had become a cult figure in the hippie world with his lively, entertaining books on the psychedelic experience and Buddhism. (Even today, more than twenty years after his death, Watts's taped lectures are still broadcast and sold.) Brand's \e{Whole Earth Catalog} had enchanted a whole new demography with its stunning array of concise reviews and pointers to offbeat products and intellectual resources that were considered useful for living independent, productive lives. -Among the entries in the Catalog was a review of \booktitle{Laws of Form} signed by Prof. von Foerster. And what a review it was! \dq{At last the \booktitle{Laws of Form} have been written,} it began, surely one of the most arresting sentences possible, implying compactly that \booktitle{Laws of Form} existed and that at least one person had been eagerly awaiting their publication. \booktitle{Laws of Form}, von Foerster wrote, was \dq{a 20\textsuperscript{th}-Century transistorized version of Occam's razor.} +Among the entries in the Catalog was a review of \booktitle{Laws of Form} signed by Prof. von Foerster. And what a review it was! \dq{At last the \booktitle{Laws of Form} have been written,} it began, surely one of the most arresting sentences possible, implying compactly that \booktitle{Laws of Form} existed and that at least one person had been eagerly awaiting their publication. \booktitle{Laws of Form}, von Foerster wrote, was \dq{A 20\textsuperscript{th}-Century transistorized version of Occam's razor.} The review was accompanied by a brief excerpt from the book---terse, even cryptic: -\begin{itemize}[label=---. nosep, itemsep=0.5em] - \item Draw a distinction. - \item Call it the first distinction. - \item Call the space in which it is drawn the space severed or cloven by this distinction. - \item Call the parts of the space shaped by the severance or cleft the sides of the distinction or, alternatively, the spaces, states, or contents distinguished by the distinction. - \item Let any mark, token, or sign be taken in any way with or with regard to the distinction as a signal.... -\end{itemize} +\begitems\style x + * Draw a distinction. + * Call it the first distinction. + * Call the space in which it is drawn the space severed or cloven by this distinction. + * Call the parts of the space shaped by the severance or cleft the sides of the distinction or, alternatively, the spaces, states, or contents distinguished by the distinction. + * Let any mark, token, or sign be taken in any way with or with regard to the distinction as a signal\ld +\enditems Draw a distinction? What did that mean? Why did it matter what we called it? What was Brown getting at? That was the point of the AUM conference, since a lot of people, none of them principally mathematicians, were beginning to read into the idea of \dq{distinction} something basic about the way that human beings organized information and in fact constructed their entire reality. So if one could in some way codify the idea of distinction, hmm, well, perhaps that might be worth looking into, especially if one were a psychologist or a therapist or an anthropologist or any kind of religious, artistic, or social analyst looking for a firm scientific peg on which to hang one's aura. Lilly and Watts prevailed on George Gallagher, a Hawaiian psychiatrist, to put up some money, rented part of Esalen for a week, hired Brown as a lecturer, and sent out invitations to their friends and colleagues to come and hear him, gratis. It was an invitation not to be turned down. I obtained entrance to this illustrious group only through my association with Kurt, then as now a professor of art and mythology at California State University, Sacramento, and an old friend of John and Toni Lilly's. I had just moved in with Kurt and his family at the quaint Diamond Sufi ranch in the Napa Valley, and we were casting about for intellectual pursuits. The AUM conference looked like just the ticket. Kurt was a natural for the list; a true polymath, he combines a thorough grounding in his academic discipline, art history, with a wide-ranging interest in all of the arts and sciences, and a willingness actually to learn and practice other disciplines, rather than simply to read and write about them. Kurt has shown his classes a thousand ways in which all human culture is one, in lectures delivered with the precision and detail of a Joseph Campbell and frequently in the style of the late Lord Buckley. -I had no such claim to entry but had long been trained in the art of free-loading by the profession that knows it best, journalism. I called a friend who was an editor and wangled an assignment to cover the AUM conference for the Saturday Review, a venerable magazine then publishing its final feeble editions from San Francisco. The editors cooed over the guest list, chortled over the site (a hot springs where people of both sexes took off their clothes and sat naked together in the baths), and gave the piece a working title: Gurus in the Mud. (They must have confused it somehow with the mud baths in Calistoga north of San Francisco.) +I had no such claim to entry but had long been trained in the art of freeloading by the profession that knows it best, journalism. I called a friend who was an editor and wangled an assignment to cover the AUM conference for the Saturday Review, a venerable magazine then publishing its final feeble editions from San Francisco. The editors cooed over the guest list, chortled over the site (a hot springs where people of both sexes took off their clothes and sat naked together in the baths), and gave the piece a working title: Gurus in the Mud. (They must have confused it somehow with the mud baths in Calistoga north of San Francisco.) So it was that we rolled up our magic carpet and piled into my Volkswagen bus one Sunday and rolled down the valley toward Esalen---not just Kurt and I, but his lady friend Mary Evans as well, with their baby Amanita, and our friend Paula Reineking and her current boyfriend Chuck, who were then also living at the ranch. The others hadn't exactly been invited, but in those days we went everywhere together. In 1973, Esalen was at the beginnings of its popularity as the center for innovative therapeutic and psychological activity. Its hot baths, steaming out of a Big Sur cliff high over the Pacific ocean, had been made the centerpiece of a bustling commerce in spirituality and health. Fritz Perls had done much creative work on the practice of Gestalt therapy while in residence there. Pioneering research on psychedelic drugs had taken place in Esalen's friendly environs. The practice of communal nude bathing hinted at sexual adventure. Doing a weekend at Esalen soon became fashionable for many folks searching for new answers to existential angst. So many came that the Esalen management invested in a motel a few miles up the road from its main center to handle the overflow. It was here, in the South Coast motel, that the AUM conference took place. -Spencer-Brown showed up, British to the nines, and plunged gamely into a discussion of the \booktitle{Laws of Form}; but from the very start, the audience's unfamiliarity with mathematics caused the discussion to flounder. Brown tried to make clear the difference between mathematics, a calculus, and the interpretation of that calculus; but the conferees had trouble with even this simple distinction. We got tangled up in the idea of the mathematics of a state of mind---how could there be such a thing? +Spencer Brown showed up, British to the nines, and plunged gamely into a discussion of the \booktitle{Laws of Form}; but from the very start, the audience's unfamiliarity with mathematics caused the discussion to flounder. Brown tried to make clear the difference between mathematics, a calculus, and the interpretation of that calculus; but the conferees had trouble with even this simple distinction. We got tangled up in the idea of the mathematics of a state of mind---how could there be such a thing? Even more subversive to our goal of understanding, however, was the difference of opinion, unknown to us at the time, between Brown and the sponsors, particularly John Lilly. Apparently it concerned money, but whatever its substance, it resulted in Brown packing up after two days and heading back to England, leaving the rest of us with the rest of the week to tease out some of the clues he had left. Lilly and Watts organized a series of seminars in which individuals could give their own interpretations of the \booktitle{Laws of Form}, in the hope that from this rough collaboration could come some sort of consensus. This was not, alas, to be, although some of the presentations, particularly that of Heinz von Foerster (himself a logician of note) managed to shed light on the process of calculating without numbers. Kurt, who from the very first understood Brown's method, if not his matter, gave a version of the Buddha's Flower Sermon---he silently covered a blackboard with symbols of the calculus, wrote at the bottom "Homage to all teachers," and bowed himself out. A rump underground, led by Stewart Brand, washed its hands of the whole affair on grounds that Brown himself had let us all down, and a few people actually went home, foregoing the remaining days of Esalen hospitality. @@ -101,11 +139,11 @@ We began to look at formal structures, dice, and probabilities with new eyes. Fr We knew we could never calculate with them. Painstakingly, I had puzzled out the process of pattern recognition by which the \booktitle{Laws of Form} carries out its transformations; having done so, I could see that one would need intensive mathematical training to become adept in their use. (I have never seen this aspect of the \booktitle{Laws of Form} discussed. Transformations in the \booktitle{Laws of Form} are made by substituting one pattern for another, the patterns being shown by the calculus to be equal in value. The patterns themselves may be of any scope and may change from step to step in a demonstration. It is not always obvious---in fact it is seldom obvious---where to look to see pattern similarities.) -Nevertheless, one could still invoke the power of the calculus simply by seeing how it is structured, how it inevitably grows and develops out of the initial instruction quoted above, \dq{\emph{Draw a distinction.}} The difference between this kind of injunctive language and the descriptive language that we use most of the time took on ever greater significance. As a student and teacher of Gestalt therapy, I was familiar with Fritz Perls's remark that injunctions, commands, constitute the clearest form of communication; however I still considered the indicative mood as the main vehicle of speech and the imperative as a mere appendage. Brown insisted that instructions must maintain an inner coherence that is not demanded of descriptions, and pointed out that it is not a matter of opinion what the result of carrying out an instruction will be, whereas descriptions constantly give rise to differences of opinion. That is, if I give you a musical score, which may be interpreted as a series of instructions, and say \dq{Play this music,} it is not a matter of opinion what the music will sound like. (Whether the music is pleasant or not may definitely be a matter of opinion.) After many years of living with this distinction I find myself increasingly uninterested in anyone's opinion about anything. +Nevertheless, one could still invoke the power of the calculus simply by seeing how it is structured, how it inevitably grows and develops out of the initial instruction quoted above, \dq{\e{Draw a distinction.}} The difference between this kind of injunctive language and the descriptive language that we use most of the time took on ever greater significance. As a student and teacher of Gestalt therapy, I was familiar with Fritz Perls's remark that injunctions, commands, constitute the clearest form of communication; however I still considered the indicative mood as the main vehicle of speech and the imperative as a mere appendage. Brown insisted that instructions must maintain an inner coherence that is not demanded of descriptions, and pointed out that it is not a matter of opinion what the result of carrying out an instruction will be, whereas descriptions constantly give rise to differences of opinion. That is, if I give you a musical score, which may be interpreted as a series of instructions, and say \dq{Play this music,} it is not a matter of opinion what the music will sound like. (Whether the music is pleasant or not may definitely be a matter of opinion.) After many years of living with this distinction I find myself increasingly uninterested in anyone's opinion about anything. -The first thing I did on returning home was to write, with Kurt's felicitous assistance, the piece for \emph{Saturday Review}. Given their vision of the various Masters rolling around in mud, the editors did not look favorably on my account of turning the calculus into some form of New Age music. Before they could reject it completely, however, the \emph{Saturday Review} itself folded,\editornote{Owned.} and I was left with an orphan manuscript. I sold it for \$100 to my friend Don Stanley, who was then editing a lively Marin County weekly called the \emph{Pacific Sun}, and in due course it saw print, plugged on page one and with marvelous illustrations by a staff artist, in one of which Brow's visage replaces the Charioteer on the seventh Tarot key. The piece drew two letters, both of which cast aspersions on my intelligence, if not my basic sanity; still, I was happy enough to be published. +The first thing I did on returning home was to write, with Kurt's felicitous assistance, the piece for \e{Saturday Review}. Given their vision of the various Masters rolling around in mud, the editors did not look favorably on my account of turning the calculus into some form of New Age music. Before they could reject it completely, however, the \e{Saturday Review} itself folded, and I was left with an orphan manuscript. I sold it for \$100 to my friend Don Stanley, who was then editing a lively Marin County weekly called the \e{Pacific Sun}, and in due course it saw print, plugged on page one and with marvelous illustrations by a staff artist, in one of which Brow's visage replaces the Charioteer on the seventh Tarot key. The piece drew two letters, both of which cast aspersions on my intelligence, if not my basic sanity; still, I was happy enough to be published. -Kurt, meanwhile, began teaching \booktitle{Laws of Form} to his art history classes at Sacramento State. Together we devised a syllabus and put together a reading list that embraced texts as far apart as the \booktitle{I Ching}, Robert Graves's \booktitle{The White Goddess} and D'Arcy Thompson's classic \booktitle{On Growth and Form}, with the transcript of the Esalen conference as a centerpiece. \dq{\emph{Learn to draw distinctions,}} Kurt told his astonished students, who were accustomed to being told \dq{Repeat after me....} +Kurt, meanwhile, began teaching \booktitle{Laws of Form} to his art history classes at Sacramento State. Together we devised a syllabus and put together a reading list that embraced texts as far apart as the \booktitle{I Ching}, Robert Graves's \booktitle{The White Goddess} and D'Arcy Thompson's classic \booktitle{On Growth and Form}, with the transcript of the Esalen conference as a centerpiece. \dq{\e{Learn to draw distinctions,}} Kurt told his astonished students, who were accustomed to being told \dq{Repeat after me\ld .} And together, we began composition of \dq{\booktitle{The Omasters},} our fantastic fictive account of how the \booktitle{Laws of Form} could be promulgated to the world. It was Kurt's idea to tell it as a kind of Sufi teaching story, and he began to make up characters and situations, mingling Tarot cards and current headlines into an utterly riotous adventure that combined space opera, a parody of the American dream, and an East-West fantasy farce. We would haul our typewriters out on the deck and write alternate pages, exchanging them and cackling with glee as we read aloud to whoever would stay around long enough to listen. There weren't many of the latter, and although Kurt and I had a lot of fun, we wound up with stacks of manuscripts and tapes and a reputation as possibly loony or possibly onto something really big, with no possibility of anyone else ever knowing which it was. @@ -113,7 +151,7 @@ We had one flirtation with mainstream publishing, when John Brockman induced an After three years, the Napa Valley community began to break up and I found myself needing to go back to civilization and start earning a living. It was time to move on from the \booktitle{Laws of Form}. We made a big bundle of all of our manuscripts and mailed it off to Brown at his last known address in Cambridge, England, together with a letter saying how much we had enjoyed writing them and that we hope he liked them too. -A few weeks later he called us on the telephone from Cambridge. We were the only people at Esalen who'd got it, he said. He'd love to come to the States and visit us and how would we like to get together on a new publishing venture? He would offer as capital some fifty thousand copies of his latest book, a dictionary of music in which tunes were classified according the sequence of their musical intervals. (I have never actually seen this book.\fnote{Parsons, D., \booktitle{The Directory of Tunes and Musical Themes.} Spencer-Brown \& Co., Cambridge, England, 1975.}) He also sent along a wonderful manuscript, a group of fables called \booktitle{Stories Children Won't Like} (never published, so far as I know), and announced that he had discovered a proof for the four-color theorem using the \booktitle{Laws of Form}.\fnote{At this time two American mathematicians had announced "proof" of this classic theorem (which states that four colors are sufficient to color a map on a surface of genus 0) that was actually a kind of demonstration, since it used a computer to exhaustively test all possible maps. Brown took a different approach and tried to prove that any map could be generated by four colors. A book by Brown on the four-color theorem was announced by Scribner's in 1974, but it apparently never saw print.} +A few weeks later he called us on the telephone from Cambridge. We were the only people at Esalen who'd got it, he said. He'd love to come to the States and visit us and how would we like to get together on a new publishing venture? He would offer as capital some fifty thousand copies of his latest book, a dictionary of music in which tunes were classified according the sequence of their musical intervals. (I have never actually seen this book.\fnote{Parsons, D., \booktitle{The Directory of Tunes and Musical Themes.} Spencer Brown \& Co., Cambridge, England, 1975.}) He also sent along a wonderful manuscript, a group of fables called \booktitle{Stories Children Won't Like} (never published, so far as I know), and announced that he had discovered a proof for the four-color theorem using the \booktitle{Laws of Form}.\fnote{At this time two American mathematicians had announced "proof" of this classic theorem (which states that four colors are sufficient to color a map on a surface of genus 0) that was actually a kind of demonstration, since it used a computer to exhaustively test all possible maps. Brown took a different approach and tried to prove that any map could be generated by four colors. A book by Brown on the four-color theorem was announced by Scribner's in 1974, but it apparently never saw print.} Of course Kurt and I were delighted and immediately put ourselves at Brown's disposal. We had been working with no outside encouragement for three years, and here the fellow calls up and says yep, that's it, let's play ball. We knew we were right, understand. We had already shrugged off the feedback, from a well-known biographer of Wittgenstein, that we were mathematical innocents whose interpretation would be laughed at by Brown. Still, to have direct contact with the source was stimulating, to say the least. @@ -121,43 +159,45 @@ The story of what happened when Brown---or James Keys, his alter ego, as we came We had many other adventures of a similar order, some of them uproariously funny, and we never got anywhere in promoting Brown's literary venture. In fact I never found out what it was. We did promote a couple of Brown seminars, at Nepenthe near Esalen and at Wilbur Hot Springs in Colusa County, and then we went our separate ways. James moved to Palo Alto, where he taught for a while at Stanford University and at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. The last time I saw him he was living in a house with no furniture, and he took twenty dollars from me at Frisbee golf. -Enlightening as it was, our experience with Spencer-Brown himself was only a coda to the sessions Kurt and I held in Oakville during the writing of the ur-text, \booktitle{The Omasters.} The fact that we are not accomplished writers of fiction (consider how few people are) does not affect our vision of the \booktitle{Laws of Form} as a powerful paradigm. And Brown himself remains a figure worth study. I am unqualified to comment professionally on the \booktitle{Laws of Form} as mathematics; I have, however, earned my bread for forty years as a writer and editor, during which time I learned something about prose construction, and I am perfectly clear on the fact that, whatever his merits as a mathematician, Brown is one of the great prose stylists of the century. He uses words with great precision, he writes clearly and simply, and he has command of the basic forms of English. +Enlightening as it was, our experience with Spencer Brown himself was only a coda to the sessions Kurt and I held in Oakville during the writing of the ur-text, \booktitle{The Omasters.} The fact that we are not accomplished writers of fiction (consider how few people are) does not affect our vision of the \booktitle{Laws of Form} as a powerful paradigm. And Brown himself remains a figure worth study. I am unqualified to comment professionally on the \booktitle{Laws of Form} as mathematics; I have, however, earned my bread for forty years as a writer and editor, during which time I learned something about prose construction, and I am perfectly clear on the fact that, whatever his merits as a mathematician, Brown is one of the great prose stylists of the century. He uses words with great precision, he writes clearly and simply, and he has command of the basic forms of English. Some of this mastery spills over into Brown's speech, and the Esalen transcript is a remarkable document. Brown talked for four sessions over two days, presenting in one form or another his vision of what amounts to the mathematics of consciousness. The text is witty and subtly funny, as well as explicitly descriptive of some of the connections Brown makes between the language of mathematics and the language of experience. -Whether this text can still find an audience 23 years after its creation may be questionable. Still, a considerable literature has grown up around Spencer-Brown and the \booktitle{Laws of Form}; the Internet bibliography ranges over mathematical, metaphysical, practical and even fictive aspects of the \booktitle{Laws of Form}. There is apparently an audience for this material, although it is formed of many distinct parts. +Whether this text can still find an audience 23 years after its creation may be questionable. Still, a considerable literature has grown up around Spencer Brown and the \booktitle{Laws of Form}; the Internet bibliography ranges over mathematical, metaphysical, practical and even fictive aspects of the \booktitle{Laws of Form}. There is apparently an audience for this material, although it is formed of many distinct parts. A few years ago, when the editor of \booktitle{Formenkalkul} sought to print the Esalen transcript, with our introduction, along with the German text, Brown demurred. He no longer fully supported his remarks at Esalen, we were informed. Nevertheless, though old and disowned, the Esalen text yet retains baraka, we think, and is certainly worth reading if only for pleasure. It currently exists as a 110-page typescript, which I transcribed in 1973 from tapes made by Kurt von Meier. If there is sufficient interest in it on the web, I will have it scanned and enter it here. -\chapter{Introduction: The First Message From Space} - By Cliff Barney and Kurt von Meier - -{\leftskip=0.25in\it\noindent - Lave a whale a while in a whillbarrow (isn't it the truath I'm tallin ye?) to have fins and flippers that shimmy and shake. Tim Timmycan timped hir, tampting Tam. Fleppety! Flippety! Fleapow! +\chap Introduction: The First Message From Space +\rightline{By Cliff Barney and Kurt von Meier} +\authorskip - \noindent Hop!\par} +{\leftskip=0.35in\rightskip=0.35in\it\noindent + Lave a whale a while in a whillbarrow (isn't it the truath I'm tallin ye?) to have fins and flippers that shimmy and shake. Tim Timmycan timped hir, tampting Tam. Fleppety! Flippety! Fleapow! +\vskip 1em + \noindent Hop!\par} +\vskip 1em -\sec The Wanderings of MAN: +\sec The Wanderings of {\tt MAN:} This introduction to the transcript of G. Spencer Brown's remarks at Esalen Institute March 19--20, 1973, draws inspiration from Karl Pribram's suggestion that it be cast in the form of a Sufi story, which teaches by its own example. Upon examining the text, we find that, for those who care to cross into the vision of the morality play, the voices of \B{LILLY:}, \B{BATESON:}, \B{WATTS:}, \B{VON MEIER:} and the others, particularly the universal, anonymous questings of \B{MAN:}, ever seeking to get it just right, make up, with the patient, measured, precise explanations of \B{SPENCER BROWN:}, the Touring Champ, the antiphonal chorus accompanying the Unveiling of the Mystery. We experience G. Spencer Brown's \dq{informal} discussion of the \booktitle{Laws of Form} as one of the possible manifestations of the long-awaited first message from Space. It is about Time. (The opposed thumb, at the fifth crossing, was the stroke enabling what is manifest to be grasped.) We call attention to Brown's discussion\fnote{In \e{Session 2, Prime Numbers}} of the properties of the number 2311, prime factorial plus one for 11, which is the fifth prime and the number whose powers give the coefficients, or constant aspects, of the binomial expansion, $(a+b)^n$. Melvin Fine, the Hasidic mandarin, has called our attention to the fact that Leibniz knew these same coefficients to govern the hexagrams of the I Ching, according to the number of yin and yang lines in each group. It did not cross our path until much later that 2311 is also the index to the sequence listed by N. J. A. Sloane, in the invaluable \booktitle{A Handbook of Integer Sequences}% -\fnote{Sloane, N. J. A., \booktitle{A Handbook of Integer Sequences}, Academic Press, New York \& London, 1973, pp. x, 181.} +\fnote{Sloane, N. J. A., \booktitle{A Handbook of Integer Sequences}, Academic Press, New York \& London, 1973, pp.\ x, 181.} as a \dq{friendly beginning} for communication with Betelgeuse. Sloane calls the name of sequence 2311 as \dq{non-cyclic simple groups.} Brown refers to it as \dq{Big M Plus One}.% -\fnote{We note here the remarkable \dq{coincidence} that Big M Plus One, or 2311, is reflected as 1132 A. D., when \dq{Men like ants or emmets wondern upon a groot hwide Whallfisk which lay in a runnel,} on p. 13 of \booktitle{Finnegans Wake}, by Joyce, James (Viking Press, New York, 1955). We have elsewhere discussed the reflection of the other Joycean year, A. D. 566, as 665 A. D., date of the Synod of Whitby, at which King Oswy of Northumberland bowed to the wishes of his Kentish queen and her Roman advisors and accepted the solar reckoning for the date of Easter; thus cutting the cord, as Yeats put it, that bound Christianity to the Druids, and setting the course of the Western yang empire.} +\fnote{We note here the remarkable \dq{coincidence} that Big M Plus One, or 2311, is reflected as 1132 A. D., when \dq{Men like ants or emmets wondern upon a groot hwide Whallfisk which lay in a runnel,} on pp.\ 13 of \booktitle{Finnegans Wake}, by Joyce, James (Viking Press, New York, 1955). We have elsewhere discussed the reflection of the other Joycean year, A. D. 566, as 665 A. D., date of the Synod of Whitby, at which King Oswy of Northumberland bowed to the wishes of his Kentish queen and her Roman advisors and accepted the solar reckoning for the date of Easter; thus cutting the cord, as Yeats put it, that bound Christianity to the Druids, and setting the course of the Western yang empire.} Betelgeuse being in the armpit of Orion, we might look for a glyph of this message in the figure of the first martyr, according to the Western tradition St. Puce, the flea reported by hearsay to have been impaled by the Roman centurion's merciful spear. However the tradition is perhaps somewhat richer if we focus on Orion as the (blind) Wanderer, which, according to Robert Brown (!) Jr., cited by Richard Hinckley Allen in \booktitle{Star Names\slash Their Lore and Meaning},% \fnote{a 1963 Dover reprint of \booktitle{Star-Names and Their Meanings}, first published by G. E. Stechart in 1899} -of page 304, we may do. Here, as Dr. Fine reminds us, we meet Lź, the Wanderer, hexagram #56 in the subtle ordering of the I Ching offered by the Duke of Chou, or \#13, the number of Dionysus, in the simpler binary notation of Boolean logic.% +of page 304, we may do. Here, as Dr. Fine reminds us, we meet Lź, the Wanderer, hexagram \#56 in the subtle ordering of the I Ching offered by the Duke of Chou, or \#13, the number of Dionysus, in the simpler binary notation of Boolean logic.% \fnote{\e{Above} Li, the Clinging, Fire; \e{below} Ken, Keeping Still, Mountain; this hexagram, Lź, the Wanderer, may be mapped into binary numbers as 001101, or 13 to a decimal base.} The Wanderer is also Wotan, Odin, through whose 540 doors went 800 warriors% \fnote{Orion as Wanderer is revealed in the constellation's earlier name, {\tt ***}, from {\tt ***}, \dq{roaming.} The word \dq{Orion,} Allen says, is from Greek {\tt ***}, which is cognate to English \dq{warrior.}} each to fight the Wolf, thus making up a force of 432,000 warriors: one for each year, we learn from Joseph Campbell, of the reign, between the Creation and the Flood, of 10 mythical Sumerian kings, and one-tenth the number of years in the Hindu kapla. Campbell argues persuasively% -\fnote{Campbell, Joseph, \booktitle{The Masks of God: Oriental Mythology}, The Viking Press, New York, 1970 (Compass edition), pp. 115--130.} +\fnote{Campbell, Joseph, \booktitle{The Masks of God: Oriental Mythology}, The Viking Press, New York, 1970 (Compass edition), pp.\ 115--130.} that these numbers refer to the precession of the equinoxes. The Sumerian number system was based on the \e{soss} (60, the second term in the series as published by Sloane, though actually the first in the sequence of non-cyclic simple groups), and $432\times 60=25,920$, the number of years required for the earth to make one complete nutational wobble, one trip through the Zodiac, if we figure the precession at the Sumerian rate of 50 seconds of arc per year, or 72 years per degree,% \fnote{Modern observers put it at 50.27 seconds per year, for a 25,780.783 year round trip.} and the 22\textsuperscript{nd} number in the Sloane sequence.\fnote{432 appears between the 6\textsuperscript{th} and 7\textsuperscript{th}, and 12\textsuperscript{th} and 13\textsuperscript{th}, terms in the first derivative, in the calculus of finite differences, of the Sloane sequence.} @@ -167,19 +207,19 @@ The number 54(0) we associate with SHAKUHACHI UNZEN, who practices the 54 steps What story? What sort of message can we read in this rendering of the spoken word of the Brown messenger? We note that the oracle of the tortoise is specifically referred to on several occasions.\fnote{Session 2} Although little is known about consulting this oracle, we deduce from the fact that among the earliest Chinese artifacts are tortoise shells with writing on them that the secret concerned writing itself. During the Shang Yin dynasty (1523--1027 B. C.) the priests of the royal court divined the secrets by heating the shell until it cracked and then noting how the cracks intersected the 13 interior and 25 circumferential divisions grown naturally by the tortoise. When the written language went public, the oral tradition went into silence, exile, cunning. For public consumption we are referred to the vegetable oracle, the yarrow stalks of the I Ching. -The tortoise gives us the transformation to a new constellation, Lyra, known as the Little Tortoise, or Shell, \dq{thus going back to the legendary origin of the instrument from the empty covering of the creature cast upon the shore with the dried tendons stretched across it} (Allen, p. 283). This is later Apollo's lyre, sevenstringed, discovered by Hermes, inventor of dice, three of which can permute the 56 minor arcana (Wotan again) and two the 21 major arcana, which, with the Fool, who is \e{hors commerce}, make up the deck of cards known as the Tarot, whose name has the same root as \dq{tortoise} (indo-european \e{wendh}, to turn, wind, weave), which is also the root of \dq{wander.} The twisting of the snakes on Hermes' staff, or perhaps the right-hand DNA double helix. One can pick up the skein at any point and begin to tease out a thread that will lead one through the labyrinth. +The tortoise gives us the transformation to a new constellation, Lyra, known as the Little Tortoise, or Shell, \dq{thus going back to the legendary origin of the instrument from the empty covering of the creature cast upon the shore with the dried tendons stretched across it} (Allen, pp.\ 283). This is later Apollo's lyre, sevenstringed, discovered by Hermes, inventor of dice, three of which can permute the 56 minor arcana (Wotan again) and two the 21 major arcana, which, with the Fool, who is \e{hors commerce}, make up the deck of cards known as the Tarot, whose name has the same root as \dq{tortoise} (indo-european \e{wendh}, to turn, wind, weave), which is also the root of \dq{wander.} The twisting of the snakes on Hermes' staff, or perhaps the right-hand DNA double helix. One can pick up the skein at any point and begin to tease out a thread that will lead one through the labyrinth. -"This is indeed amazing." So wrote Brown upon surmising that the world we know is constructed "in order (and thus in such a way as to be able) to see itself." (\booktitle{Laws of Form}, p. 105; notes to Chapter 11, reflected 1's, "Equations of the Second Degree," or self-referential functions) We are referred to the maze at Knossos, where the spider lady, Ariadne, had Theseus dangling by a string. We take hold of the string: LABYRINTHOS, from LABYRIS, not Greek but a Lydian word for "double axe." And we use the iconic representation of the double axe, {\tt [missing graphic]} as a framework upon which to construct the map of the labyrinth.% -\fnote{Cf. Richardson, L. J. D., \booktitle{The Labyrinth}, Dover, pp. 285--296, especially p. 291.} +"This is indeed amazing." So wrote Brown upon surmising that the world we know is constructed "in order (and thus in such a way as to be able) to see itself." (\booktitle{Laws of Form}, pp.\ 105; notes to Chapter 11, reflected 1's, "Equations of the Second Degree," or self-referential functions) We are referred to the maze at Knossos, where the spider lady, Ariadne, had Theseus dangling by a string. We take hold of the string: LABYRINTHOS, from LABYRIS, not Greek but a Lydian word for "double axe." And we use the iconic representation of the double axe, {\tt [missing graphic]} as a framework upon which to construct the map of the labyrinth.% +\fnote{Cf. Richardson, L. J. D., \booktitle{The Labyrinth}, Dover, pp.\ 285--296, especially pp.\ 291.} We are being told here that all representations of life, e. g. stories, myths, fables, pictures, mathematics, are explicitly representations of themselves, self-referential. Re-presentations. And the thread we hold, that leads us out of the labyrinth, where no path seems to go anywhere, since they all come back on themselves, is language; we follow it to learn the order of the labyrinth. With the text (i.e. \e{teks}, to weave, fabricate) as a clue to the identity of the Vajrayogini as the mythical Joyce James, one can anywhere and everywhere pick up the thread upon which Brown has strung the pearls he has divined. \sec Points of View Nevertheless, to make an expression meaningful, "we must add to it an indicator to present a place from which the observer is invited to regard it." (Page 103, \booktitle{Laws of Form}.) These pages reflect in one facet of the crystal mirror the vision of the real (meaningless), the true, the false, and the imaginary, mapped out on the plain crossed by G. Spencer Brown. The text, for instance, purports to be a transcript of the words Brown spoke at the South Coast Motel, a mile or so down the road from the sulphur baths at Big Sur, California, on the occasion of the AUM conference conceived by Alan Watts and John Lilly (the Master passing over the pole on the occasion of the last full moon before the vernal equinox). Confirmatory evidence for this viewpoint, definitely northern hemisphere (London) may be obtained from Henry Jacobs, Box 303, Sausalito, Calif. 94965, in the form of audio tapes of the conference. Anyone who listens to these tapes can verify that Spencer Brown's remarks are reproduced here with close, if not perfect, fidelity. -Arriving at Cape Town, however, we cast the net tied by N. J. A. Sloane and catch the icon of an all-of-a-piece, multidimensional message to inner space---that is, the space of the eternal regions, where we find numbers, including the number represented, in the Arstic notation, as "2311".% +Arriving at Cape Town, however, we cast the net tied by N. J. A. Sloane and catch the icon of an all-of-a-piece, multidimensional message to inner space---that is, the space of the eternal regions, where we find numbers, including the number represented, in the Arstic notation, as "2311."% \fnote{"2311" is only one of the names assumed by Big M Plus One. This number is constructed by adding 1 to 2310, which is "prime factorial" for 11---that is, the product of all the primes up to and including 11: $2\times 3\times 5\times 7\times 11$. Under this alias, Big M Plus One is prime, not divisible by any numbers except itself and 1. In his next manifestation, however, as 30,031 (prime factorial plus 1 for 13), our space messenger is composite. Thus he confirms Brown's assurance, that "if you go on long enough, getting the final factorial, adding one, you will find one that is not prime; but that doesn't matter, because it will be divisible by a prime (in this case, two, 59 and 509) that is bigger than the biggest prime (13) you have used to produce it." As a messenger of Apollo, 11\textsuperscript{th} god on Olympus, Big M Plus One is pristine, prime; as a representative of Dionysus, the 13\textsuperscript{th}, he is ecstatic, beside himself.} -Here nothing is hidden, since the space is created "before the time came for time to begin," as Brown says C. E. Rolt says in his (Rolt's) introduction to the \booktitle{Divine Names} of Dionysius the Areopagite, and the eyes of the (one-way) blind are opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped. Messages from and to space are all around us, and we have only to read them. "In nature are signatures\slash needing no verbal tradition,\slash oak leaf never plane leaf".% +Here nothing is hidden, since the space is created "before the time came for time to begin," as Brown says C. E. Rolt says in his (Rolt's) introduction to the \booktitle{Divine Names} of Dionysius the Areopagite, and the eyes of the (one-way) blind are opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped. Messages from and to space are all around us, and we have only to read them. "In nature are signatures\slash needing no verbal tradition,\slash oak leaf never plane leaf."% \fnote{\e{Canto LXXXVII}, Ezra Pound} Caught in the net of number, Big M Plus One provides name, rank, and serial, as required by convention, and stands revealed in an entirely different role, the index of non-cyclic simple groups and thus a nodal transfer point to the one-eyed Wotan, who braided the hairs of the Night Mare's tail.% \fnote{See \essaytitle{The Theory of Braids}, by Emil Artin in The American Scientist, Vol. 38, No. 1, pp. 112--119, January, 1950, and other references cited for the article \essaytitle{Group Theory and Braids} in Martin Gardner's \booktitle{New Mathematical Diversions} from Scientific American, Simon \& Schuster, New York, 1966.} @@ -195,7 +235,7 @@ Shakuhachi's guide and guru is the busboy who, in the same teahouse for which th The Eisteddfod is arranged by the country's No. 22 vice president, Woody, that he may receive advice on how best to proceed, he having been thrust into a position resembling power when the president and the first 21 vices were wiped out at Ahab McGaff's Double Cross Saloon in Las Vegas (Vega being the alpha star in Lyra). Woody, who travels from national park to supermarket parking lot in the Last of the Winnebagoes, a superbly outfitted camper equipped with heliport, swimming pool, and satellite reception station, is assisted by the mysterious agents of the Sufia, among whom we note the Bodhisufi Bismullah Tariq and Melvin Fine, the Chasidic mandarin. -In this context Joyce James appears as an aide to the llama Al Paca, liaison man between the Sufia and the spiritual materialist arm, MaFie, or MyFee, which is simultaneously trying to fix the Eisteddfod in favor of Ahab and his all-girl security force, the Kritiquettes, and, through Ahab's Miasma Beach cousin Jackie, to produce it for global television. She discovers the Spencer-Brown text while researching the form of distinction that appears in the medieval vision of quests, which were tragedies, and pilgrimages, which were comedies.% +In this context Joyce James appears as an aide to the llama Al Paca, liaison man between the Sufia and the spiritual materialist arm, MaFie, or MyFee, which is simultaneously trying to fix the Eisteddfod in favor of Ahab and his all-girl security force, the Kritiquettes, and, through Ahab's Miasma Beach cousin Jackie, to produce it for global television. She discovers the Spencer Brown text while researching the form of distinction that appears in the medieval vision of quests, which were tragedies, and pilgrimages, which were comedies.% \fnote{See J. Holloway, \booktitle{Figure of Pilgrim in Medieval Poetry}, unpublished doctoral thesis, Berkeley, 1974} The document presents the Joycean hypothesis that \booktitle{Laws of Form}, with its demonstration of the generation of Time, offers a means of mapping cultural transformations which themselves reflect our own transformations as refugees in Time. @@ -265,11 +305,11 @@ We made many other devices, and during this time I realized that, unfortunately, After we had been using the new principles for about a year, most of the discoveries had been made. I wasn't quite sure of the theoretical basis of some of them. For example, to realize that what we were using in the tunnel was imaginary Boolean values to get a perfectly safe, reliable answer, which was quite definite. This I didn't realize for another six years. But most of the principles, by that time, I did realize. They were the whole of the mathematical basis of what we were using, which was switching algebra, commonly called Boolean algebra and the algebra of logic. -I must point out for emphasis at this time that the switching use and the use in checking a logical argument are two entirely different applications from the same mathematics. The same mathematics underlie both, but it is not the same as any one of its interpretations. In other words, the mathematics in \bt{Laws of Form} is not logic, logic is one of many of its interpretations. Just as, when one does electronics, the electrical application is not itself the mathematics but one of the interpretations of mathematics. +I must point out for emphasis at this time that the switching use and the use in checking a logical argument are two entirely different applications from the same mathematics. The same mathematics underlie both, but it is not the same as any one of its interpretations. In other words, the mathematics in \booktitle{Laws of Form} is not logic, logic is one of many of its interpretations. Just as, when one does electronics, the electrical application is not itself the mathematics but one of the interpretations of mathematics. \sec Boolean Mathematics -Logic, in other words, is itself not mathematics, it is an interpretation of a particular branch of mathematics, which is the most important non-numerical branch of mathematics. There are other non-numerical branches of mathematics. Mathematics is not exclusively about number. Mathematics is, in fact, about space and relationships. A number comes into mathematics only as a measure of space and/or relationships. And the earliest mathematics is not about number. The most fundamental relationships in mathematics, the most fundamental laws of mathematics, are not numerical. Boolean mathematics is prior to numerical mathematics. Numerical mathematics can be constructed out of Boolean mathematics as a special discipline. Boolean mathematics is more important, using the word in its original sense: what is important is what is imported. The most important is, therefore, the inner, what is most inside. Because that is imported farther. Boolean mathematics is more important than numerical mathematics simply in the technical sense of the word "important." It is inner, prior to, numerical mathematics---it is deeper. +Logic, in other words, is itself not mathematics, it is an interpretation of a particular branch of mathematics, which is the most important non-numerical branch of mathematics. There are other non-numerical branches of mathematics. Mathematics is not exclusively about number. Mathematics is, in fact, about space and relationships. A number comes into mathematics only as a measure of space and\slash or relationships. And the earliest mathematics is not about number. The most fundamental relationships in mathematics, the most fundamental laws of mathematics, are not numerical. Boolean mathematics is prior to numerical mathematics. Numerical mathematics can be constructed out of Boolean mathematics as a special discipline. Boolean mathematics is more important, using the word in its original sense: what is important is what is imported. The most important is, therefore, the inner, what is most inside. Because that is imported farther. Boolean mathematics is more important than numerical mathematics simply in the technical sense of the word "important." It is inner, prior to, numerical mathematics---it is deeper. \sec Origins @@ -277,9 +317,9 @@ Now at the beginning of 1961, the end of 1960, having set out, first of all, as \dinkus -This was all that was needed to make the whole of the construction which is detailed in \bt{Laws of Form}, and which will suffice for all the switching algebra, train routing, open/shut conditions, decision theory, the feedback arrangements, self-organizing systems, automation---and, amusingly enough, the logic by which we argue, the logic that is the basis of the certainty of mathematical theorems. In other words, the forms of argument which are agreed to be valid in the proof of a theorem in mathematics. To give you a simple one: "If $x$ implies not-$x$, then not-$x$." That is a commonly used argument\ld\ I can be sure that it is valid by the principles of the mathematics itself that underlies it. +This was all that was needed to make the whole of the construction which is detailed in \booktitle{Laws of Form}, and which will suffice for all the switching algebra, train routing, open\slash shut conditions, decision theory, the feedback arrangements, self-organizing systems, automation---and, amusingly enough, the logic by which we argue, the logic that is the basis of the certainty of mathematical theorems. In other words, the forms of argument which are agreed to be valid in the proof of a theorem in mathematics. To give you a simple one: "If $x$ implies not-$x$, then not-$x$." That is a commonly used argument\ld\ I can be sure that it is valid by the principles of the mathematics itself that underlies it. -The arguments used to validate the theorems in \bt{Laws of Form}, as we now begin to see, are themselves validated by the calculus dependent upon those theorems. And yet, in no way is the argument a begging of the question. Now this is rather hard to understand, and perhaps it may come up in discussions later. \e{Principia-principii}, begging the question, it not a valid argument; it is a common fallacy. In no way is the question begged but in producing a system, in making its later parts come true, we use them to validate the earlier parts; and so the system actually comes from nothing and pulls itself up by its own bootstraps, and there it all is. +The arguments used to validate the theorems in \booktitle{Laws of Form}, as we now begin to see, are themselves validated by the calculus dependent upon those theorems. And yet, in no way is the argument a begging of the question. Now this is rather hard to understand, and perhaps it may come up in discussions later. \e{Principia-principii}, begging the question, it not a valid argument; it is a common fallacy. In no way is the question begged but in producing a system, in making its later parts come true, we use them to validate the earlier parts; and so the system actually comes from nothing and pulls itself up by its own bootstraps, and there it all is. Nowhere does this become more evident than in this first and most primitive system of non-numerical mathematics; and I am quite sure---no, I will not say I am quite sure, when one says "I am quite sure" it means one is not quite sure---and I guess, I guess that why it is a branch of mathematics so neglected hitherto is that it is a bit too real. It is a bit too evident what game one is playing when one plays the game of mathematics. @@ -319,7 +359,7 @@ I believe the principle by which you can prove that you can color the surface of Therefore, you proceed by stages, the last learned is the first unlearned, and this way you could proceed safely. Related to what is in the books, we know they say that in order to proceed into the Kingdom, one must first purify oneself. This is the same advice, because the Kingdom is deep. What we talk of in the way of purification is the superficial muck that has been thrown at us. First of all that must be taken off, and the superficial layers of the personality must be purified. If we go to the Kingdom too soon, without having taken off the superficial layers and reconstructed in a simpler way, then there is a collapse. The advice is entirely practical. It is not a prohibition. There is no heavenly law to say that you may not enter the Kingdom of Heaven without first purifying yourself. However, if you do, the consequences may be disastrous for you as a person. -This is why in psychological, in psychotherapeutic treatment, normally the defenses are strong enough. As the psychiatrists will usually tell you, "If I push in this direction, you will be able to withstand me if you really need to." And it is much the same in all medicine. A rule I learned---I guess one learns it here, John, in the treatment of physiotherapy, manipulation of the limbs, etc.---we are allowed to go and pull them around with our little strength, but not to use machinery, because that may break something. The body can normally defend against one other body, and you don't usually break anything as long as you use one physiological equipment against one other. Usually the same; one mind against one other, the other mind is strong enough to withstand it. Start using other methods, drugs and/or mechanical treatment, and there you may do damage. You may get past defenses which were there in order that the personality should not be broken down too much, too soon. +This is why in psychological, in psychotherapeutic treatment, normally the defenses are strong enough. As the psychiatrists will usually tell you, "If I push in this direction, you will be able to withstand me if you really need to." And it is much the same in all medicine. A rule I learned---I guess one learns it here, John, in the treatment of physiotherapy, manipulation of the limbs, etc.---we are allowed to go and pull them around with our little strength, but not to use machinery, because that may break something. The body can normally defend against one other body, and you don't usually break anything as long as you use one physiological equipment against one other. Usually the same; one mind against one other, the other mind is strong enough to withstand it. Start using other methods, drugs and\slash or mechanical treatment, and there you may do damage. You may get past defenses which were there in order that the personality should not be broken down too much, too soon. \transcript{\spkr{WATTS} There is a value assumption in here about what is broken down. What is disaster, what does that mean? @@ -335,31 +375,31 @@ This is why in psychological, in psychotherapeutic treatment, normally the defen \spkr{SPENCER BROWN} Now, basically, once we have gone into the second degree, and it applies in numerical mathematics as elsewhere, you have added another dimension to your system. In going to higher degrees, you don't really add; because, when you start with the form, the form is just having drawn a distinction. You now have two states. It's the simplest, widest term I could possibly use here--states on earth, any thing, you see, states of minds anything at all. You have two states, which are distinguished. That is all you need.} -Now, the whole of the first degree equation in the Boolean form are in terms of these two states. When you do this peculiar thing of making something self-referential that is making the answer go back into the expression out of which the answer comes, you now automatically produce this set of possibilities which are well-known in numerical mathematics and of which everyone's been terrified of looking at in Boolean mathematics And Russell/Whitehead were so frightened of these, that they just had a rule with no justification whatsoever that we Just don't allow it, we don't even allow people to think about this. +Now, the whole of the first degree equation in the Boolean form are in terms of these two states. When you do this peculiar thing of making something self-referential that is making the answer go back into the expression out of which the answer comes, you now automatically produce this set of possibilities which are well-known in numerical mathematics and of which everyone's been terrified of looking at in Boolean mathematics And Russell\slash Whitehead were so frightened of these, that they just had a rule with no justification whatsoever that we Just don't allow it, we don't even allow people to think about this. -Now what nobody saw was that in numerical mathematics we had this going for years. As I showed in the preface to the American edition to \bt{Laws of Form}, any second degree equation---perhaps, for those of you who don't know it, perhaps I should put it up on the blackboard if nobody has objections to my using chalk. +Now what nobody saw was that in numerical mathematics we had this going for years. As I showed in the preface to the American edition to \booktitle{Laws of Form}, any second degree equation---perhaps, for those of you who don't know it, perhaps I should put it up on the blackboard if nobody has objections to my using chalk. -You see, what Whitehead/Russell didn't allow, was a self-referential statement; they didn't allow to say that this statement is true. \aside{"This statement is false" written on board.} Suppose that this statement is true, then it can't be true because it says that it is false. O. K. then, supposing it is false, then it must be true because it says that it is false. And this is so awful, so terrifying, that they said, "Right. We will produce a rule. We call it the Theory of Types to give it a grand name." The Theory of Types says---it is as much unlike what it says as possible, so that when someone says, "Well, what is the rule by which you can't have this?"---"It's the Theory of types," so that the people who are learning think that there is a huge theory, you see, and when you understand this theory you will realize why it is that you can't have such a thing. There is no such theory at all. It is just the name given to the rule that anything like this you must do this to. \aside{Erases it.} That is the Theory of Types. +You see, what Whitehead\slash Russell didn't allow, was a self-referential statement; they didn't allow to say that this statement is true. \aside{"This statement is false" written on board.} Suppose that this statement is true, then it can't be true because it says that it is false. O. K. then, supposing it is false, then it must be true because it says that it is false. And this is so awful, so terrifying, that they said, "Right. We will produce a rule. We call it the Theory of Types to give it a grand name." The Theory of Types says---it is as much unlike what it says as possible, so that when someone says, "Well, what is the rule by which you can't have this?"---"It's the Theory of types," so that the people who are learning think that there is a huge theory, you see, and when you understand this theory you will realize why it is that you can't have such a thing. There is no such theory at all. It is just the name given to the rule that anything like this you must do this to. \aside{Erases it.} That is the Theory of Types. What they hadn't done was scratched out something like this. \aside{Writes $x^2+1=0$.} I'll just put it in the mathematical form. You see, Russell, as a senior wrangler, or second wrangler, in mathematics, should have been familiar with this equation. But he never connected it with what he had done. -Now here is an equation which admittedly had a bad name for years. But it was so useful that all of phase theory in electricity depends on it. So let's fiddle with it. Here is our equation. We want to find the roots. We want to find the possible values of $x$. So let's fiddle with this and have a look for them. Well, here we go. Here we just subtract one from both sides; now we'll divide both sides by $x$. Well, $x^2$ divided by $x$ is $x$, equals $-1$ over $x$. Well, now, we see that we have in fact a self-referential equation. Everybody can see that. Let's have a look at this equation $x=-1/x$, and see whether it is amenable to any form of treatment, psychiatric or something. You have to psychoanalyze it. +Now here is an equation which admittedly had a bad name for years. But it was so useful that all of phase theory in electricity depends on it. So let's fiddle with it. Here is our equation. We want to find the roots. We want to find the possible values of $x$. So let's fiddle with this and have a look for them. Well, here we go. Here we just subtract one from both sides; now we'll divide both sides by $x$. Well, $x^2$ divided by $x$ is $x$, equals $-1$ over $x$. Well, now, we see that we have in fact a self-referential equation. Everybody can see that. Let's have a look at this equation $x=-1\slash x$, and see whether it is amenable to any form of treatment, psychiatric or something. You have to psychoanalyze it. -The thing that makes the former statement so worrying, so frightening, is that we have the assumption that the statement, if it means anything at all, is either true or false. Here, we have the assumption that the number system runs \ld-1, -2, -3, zero, 1, 2, 3\ld\ and it goes on infinitely in an exact mirror both ways. So we assume that the number is not zero---zero is meaningless in the logic form. The statement is not meaningless. It is either positive or negative. We have got to make that analogy here. We equate "positive" with "true, n and "negative" with "false"---it doesn't matter which is which. So here is our number system as defined. Here is our equation from which we are supposed to find the possible values that $x$ can take. Now, we know that the equation must balance...so first of all we'll seek the absolute numerical value of $x$, irrespective of the sign, whether it's positive or negative. Now suppose $x$ were greater than one---not bothering about the sign for the moment---suppose it were greater than one---then this clearly would be---not bothering about the sign---less than one. If $x$ were less than one, then you have got something bigger over something smaller, this would be greater than one. So the only point at which it is going to balance numerically is if $x$ is a form of unity. Because you can see perfectly well that if this is greater then that would be smaller, if that is smaller, this would be greater. +The thing that makes the former statement so worrying, so frightening, is that we have the assumption that the statement, if it means anything at all, is either true or false. Here, we have the assumption that the number system runs \ld-1, -2, -3, zero, 1, 2, 3\ld\ and it goes on infinitely in an exact mirror both ways. So we assume that the number is not zero---zero is meaningless in the logic form. The statement is not meaningless. It is either positive or negative. We have got to make that analogy here. We equate "positive" with "true, n and "negative" with "false"---it doesn't matter which is which. So here is our number system as defined. Here is our equation from which we are supposed to find the possible values that $x$ can take. Now, we know that the equation must balance\ld so first of all we'll seek the absolute numerical value of $x$, irrespective of the sign, whether it's positive or negative. Now suppose $x$ were greater than one---not bothering about the sign for the moment---suppose it were greater than one---then this clearly would be---not bothering about the sign---less than one. If $x$ were less than one, then you have got something bigger over something smaller, this would be greater than one. So the only point at which it is going to balance numerically is if $x$ is a form of unity. Because you can see perfectly well that if this is greater then that would be smaller, if that is smaller, this would be greater. -So we have only got two forms of unity---plus one, minus one. So we'll try each in turn. So suppose $x$ equals plus one, now we'll substitute for $x$ in this equation and we have minus one over plus one equals minus one. $+1=-1/-1=-1$. So you've got plus one equals minus one. So try the other one, there is only one more. x equals minus one. Now we have minus one equals minus one over minus one equals plus one. $-1=-1/-1=+1$. So we have exactly the same paradox this time. Instead of "true" and "false," we have got "plus" and "minus." So using the Theory of Types consistently, the whole of the mathematics of equations of degree greater than one must be thrown out. But we know perfectly well that we can use this mathematics. What we do here is that effectively we have an oscillatory system---just as in the case of \bt{Laws of Form}, if you put it mathematically, we have $x$ cross equals $x$, $(x)=x$, or a cross going back into itself, $@x$). +So we have only got two forms of unity---plus one, minus one. So we'll try each in turn. So suppose $x$ equals plus one, now we'll substitute for $x$ in this equation and we have minus one over plus one equals minus one. $+1=-1\slash -1=-1$. So you've got plus one equals minus one. So try the other one, there is only one more. x equals minus one. Now we have minus one equals minus one over minus one equals plus one. $-1=-1\slash -1=+1$. So we have exactly the same paradox this time. Instead of "true" and "false," we have got "plus" and "minus." So using the Theory of Types consistently, the whole of the mathematics of equations of degree greater than one must be thrown out. But we know perfectly well that we can use this mathematics. What we do here is that effectively we have an oscillatory system---just as in the case of \booktitle{Laws of Form}, if you put it mathematically, we have $x$ cross equals $x$, $(x)=x$, or a cross going back into itself, $@x$). Supposing it is the marked state, then it puts the marked state back into itself, and the marked state within a cross produces the unmarked state outside. $(())=.$ So this rubs itself out and so you get the unmarked state fed back in, and so out comes the marked state again. \dinkus -Well, you see here the paradox which was overlooked by Russell, who wasn't a mathematician, although he was senior wrangler, and by Whitehead, who was, although he wasn't, well\ld\ Russell was a mathematician, he wasn't a man of mathematics. Whitehead was a man of mathematics. Russell knew the forms, but he actually had no instinctual ability in mathematics. Whitehead actually had. But Russell, being a stronger character, was able to program Whitehead, and you will see this if you examine the last mathematical work Whitehead wrote, which is called the \bt{Treatise on Universal Algebra with Applications, Vol. 1}. I asked Russell where Vol.---I said I had never been able to get \bt{Vol. 2}, and Russell said, "Oh, he never wrote it." So it's all sort of a mystery. But the mathematical principles of algebra, in the usual complicated way, are set out, including the Boolean algebras, in this volume produced in 1898, an only edition. By that time Russell, who was the stronger of the two characters, had got together with Whitehead to do \bt{Principia Mathematica}, which nobody was ever going to digest\ld\ It was a very ostentatious title, because they had chosen the title which Newton had used for his greatest work. +Well, you see here the paradox which was overlooked by Russell, who wasn't a mathematician, although he was senior wrangler, and by Whitehead, who was, although he wasn't, well\ld\ Russell was a mathematician, he wasn't a man of mathematics. Whitehead was a man of mathematics. Russell knew the forms, but he actually had no instinctual ability in mathematics. Whitehead actually had. But Russell, being a stronger character, was able to program Whitehead, and you will see this if you examine the last mathematical work Whitehead wrote, which is called the \booktitle{Treatise on Universal Algebra with Applications, Vol. 1}. I asked Russell where Vol.---I said I had never been able to get \booktitle{Vol. 2}, and Russell said, "Oh, he never wrote it." So it's all sort of a mystery. But the mathematical principles of algebra, in the usual complicated way, are set out, including the Boolean algebras, in this volume produced in 1898, an only edition. By that time Russell, who was the stronger of the two characters, had got together with Whitehead to do \booktitle{Principia Mathematica}, which nobody was ever going to digest\ld\ It was a very ostentatious title, because they had chosen the title which Newton had used for his greatest work. -Incidentally, it is an extraordinary thing in the academic world---people are very silent about these things---but it was a very, very presumptuous title, I think, to take for this work. \aside{Inaudible comment, to the effect, "Hasn't `Laws of Form' been used?"} Oh, no, nobody has used that title before---no, sir. If I had called it "Laws of Thought," that was used, many people have used that title, but it was not laws of thought. Oh, no, you are on the wrong track, sir. I am not being presumptuous in taking that title\ld\ I have called the book what it is, I have not done what Russell/Whitehead did and taken a very great book and called it by the same title. That is totally different. +Incidentally, it is an extraordinary thing in the academic world---people are very silent about these things---but it was a very, very presumptuous title, I think, to take for this work. \aside{Inaudible comment, to the effect, "Hasn't `Laws of Form' been used?"} Oh, no, nobody has used that title before---no, sir. If I had called it "Laws of Thought," that was used, many people have used that title, but it was not laws of thought. Oh, no, you are on the wrong track, sir. I am not being presumptuous in taking that title\ld\ I have called the book what it is, I have not done what Russell\slash Whitehead did and taken a very great book and called it by the same title. That is totally different. Now, this is what they overlooked in the formulation of the Theory of Types, which simply says you mustn't do this. However, both Russell and Whitehead had done it to get their wranglerships, get their degrees. But they had not done the simple thing of reducing this equation to this to see exactly what it was. -In fact, if you go to the Boolean forms and use something like this---there's your output---and you take it back in, input there and these are transistors used in a particular way, you have what is called a memory. And, if you put "minus" instead of "plus" there, $x^2-1=0$ \e{instead of} $x^2+1=0$, now what we have here, back in this form here, is our equation. Now we'll put it all in brackets and we'll take out the answer. Now we have exactly the same thing. And just as this is a memory circuit, if this is the marked state here, that must be the unmarked state.\fnote{Transmission of Spencer Brown's marks on the blackboard has been absorbed elsewhere in the system. We invite outside constructions. The general discussion concerns re-entry at an odd level and at an even level. If odd, as in $(x)$, we get marked state in and unmarked out, an oscillation. If even, $((x))$ we get marked in, marked out, a memory.} And if this is unmarked state, we've got no marked state here, so this will be marked. And we have a marked state feeding itself back into there, and if you rub that out and this goes unmarked, you still have marked here, so it remembers. Equally, if you now put a marked state here, that must be unmarked, and then you can take that off and it doesn't matter because now since you have got unmarked and unmarked this becomes marked, and this, you remember, is unmarked. Similarly here, if you put "plus one" for $x$, you get plus one over plus one equals plus one, \e{in} $x=1/x$, there is no paradox. You can also find a different answer for $x$, and that is minus one. You get plus one over minus one equals minus one, so that's all right too. So you have, in effect, a memory circuit, and if you put it this way, you can see that. You have an equation with two roots, and this is similarly an equation with two roots. Whatever root you get out, you put back ins and it remembers itself. If you are getting out "plus one," it feeds plus one in there, and it remembers it's plus one. You have a thing to knock it off and turn it into minus one; it feeds a minus one into there and out comes minus one, here, and it remembers it's minus one. Any equation of the second degree that is not paradoxical---that goes through two stages and not one---are the same, and this is a way of producing a memory circuit electronically. It is exactly analogous to this memory circuit numerically. And where, in fact, you put it back, instead of here, you put it back through an odd number such as one, now you have a paradoxical circuit. Because whatever it gets out it feeds back in and it changes. And if you turn that into "minus," $x^2=-1$, you now have a paradoxical equation. It can't remember, it just flutters. +In fact, if you go to the Boolean forms and use something like this---there's your output---and you take it back in, input there and these are transistors used in a particular way, you have what is called a memory. And, if you put "minus" instead of "plus" there, $x^2-1=0$ \e{instead of} $x^2+1=0$, now what we have here, back in this form here, is our equation. Now we'll put it all in brackets and we'll take out the answer. Now we have exactly the same thing. And just as this is a memory circuit, if this is the marked state here, that must be the unmarked state.\fnote{Transmission of Spencer Brown's marks on the blackboard has been absorbed elsewhere in the system. We invite outside constructions. The general discussion concerns re-entry at an odd level and at an even level. If odd, as in $(x)$, we get marked state in and unmarked out, an oscillation. If even, $((x))$ we get marked in, marked out, a memory.} And if this is unmarked state, we've got no marked state here, so this will be marked. And we have a marked state feeding itself back into there, and if you rub that out and this goes unmarked, you still have marked here, so it remembers. Equally, if you now put a marked state here, that must be unmarked, and then you can take that off and it doesn't matter because now since you have got unmarked and unmarked this becomes marked, and this, you remember, is unmarked. Similarly here, if you put "plus one" for $x$, you get plus one over plus one equals plus one, \e{in} $x=1\slash x$, there is no paradox. You can also find a different answer for $x$, and that is minus one. You get plus one over minus one equals minus one, so that's all right too. So you have, in effect, a memory circuit, and if you put it this way, you can see that. You have an equation with two roots, and this is similarly an equation with two roots. Whatever root you get out, you put back ins and it remembers itself. If you are getting out "plus one," it feeds plus one in there, and it remembers it's plus one. You have a thing to knock it off and turn it into minus one; it feeds a minus one into there and out comes minus one, here, and it remembers it's minus one. Any equation of the second degree that is not paradoxical---that goes through two stages and not one---are the same, and this is a way of producing a memory circuit electronically. It is exactly analogous to this memory circuit numerically. And where, in fact, you put it back, instead of here, you put it back through an odd number such as one, now you have a paradoxical circuit. Because whatever it gets out it feeds back in and it changes. And if you turn that into "minus," $x^2=-1$, you now have a paradoxical equation. It can't remember, it just flutters. \dinkus @@ -381,7 +421,7 @@ How often do you use this operator, $i=\sqrt{-1}$, which is derived from the par It is really an oscillation defining time; but it is the first time, and, therefore, being the first time, the oscillations are without duration, so the wave has no shape at all. Just as the space or the first distinction has no size, no shape, no quality other than being states. This is one of the things that tend to upset people. It is part of the mathematical discipline that what is not allowed is forbidden. That is to say, what you don't introduce, you can't use. And until you have introduced shape, size, duration, whatever, distance, you can't use it. -In the beginning of \br{Laws of Form}, we defined states without any concept of distance, size, shape---only of difference. Therefore the states in \bt{Laws of Form} have no size, shape, anything else. They are neither close together nor far apart, like the heavenly states. There is just no quality of that kind that has been introduced. It's not needed. +In the beginning of \booktitle{Laws of Form}, we defined states without any concept of distance, size, shape---only of difference. Therefore the states in \booktitle{Laws of Form} have no size, shape, anything else. They are neither close together nor far apart, like the heavenly states. There is just no quality of that kind that has been introduced. It's not needed. The same with the first time. The first time is measured by an oscillation between states. The first state, or space, is measured by a distinction between states. There is no state for a distinction to be made in. If a distinction could be made, then it would create a space. That is why it appears in a distinct world that there is space. @@ -393,8 +433,7 @@ Again, when you first construct time, all that you are defining is a state that, There were some books written about time by a man called J. W. Dunn that I read when I was a schoolboy. I realized that he must be right. I also was sufficiently aware of the social context to go along with the general opinion that he was off his head. He wasn't. He was dead right. Time is a seriality, and he was quite right. In order to get a time such as the one we experience, you have to put it back on itself, because in our time you have duration, which you can measure; and you can only measure the duration with another time. In the first time, you have no time in which to measure how long your duration is, and so, naturally, you can't have any duration. Time is something you have to feed back into itself several times. Like the space of this room, where you can actually measure it--you have to have space to measure space. -\transcription{ -\spkr{LILLY} Is that frequency of oscillation either zero or infinity? +\transcript{\spkr{LILLY} Is that frequency of oscillation either zero or infinity? \spkr{SPENCER BROWN} It is neither. No, it has no duration at all. Just as you can't specify the size of the states of the first distinction. @@ -432,7 +471,7 @@ This is why in all mystical literature, people say, "Well, it is absolute nonsen The theory of communication is absolute nonsense. There is no reason whatsoever why you should understand what I am saying, or why I should understand what you are saying, if I don't recognize from the blah, blah, noises coming out of your mouth, that mean nothing whatever, where you have been. You make the same noises that I make when I have been there, that is all it is. -For example, Rolt, in his brilliant introduction to the \bt{Divine Names} by Diongsius the Areopagite, begins describing the form at first, and then he actually describes what happens when you get the temporal existence. It is all the same thing, but he is describing it in terms of religious talk, theorems become angels, etc. When he comes to the place, which he says most beautifully, having described all the heavenly states and all the people therein, etc., and he says, "All this went on in absolute harmony until the time came for time to begin." This is quite senseless. But it is perfectly understandable to someone who has seen what happens, who has been there. One cannot describe it except like this. It is perfectly understandable. Re had described the form and then he had done that, and this is the time for time to begin. +For example, Rolt, in his brilliant introduction to the \booktitle{Divine Names} by Diongsius the Areopagite, begins describing the form at first, and then he actually describes what happens when you get the temporal existence. It is all the same thing, but he is describing it in terms of religious talk, theorems become angels, etc. When he comes to the place, which he says most beautifully, having described all the heavenly states and all the people therein, etc., and he says, "All this went on in absolute harmony until the time came for time to begin." This is quite senseless. But it is perfectly understandable to someone who has seen what happens, who has been there. One cannot describe it except like this. It is perfectly understandable. Re had described the form and then he had done that, and this is the time for time to begin. \sec Mathematics and Its Interpretations: Nots and Crosses @@ -446,27 +485,27 @@ Grammar is the analysis of the constructions used in speech, and logic is the an Now when we are interpreting whenever are using the mathematics\ld\ we write $a$ for "it hails," and $b$ for "it freezes." If it hails, then it freezes; either it doesn't hail or it freezes. And in the primary algebra we can write, "$a$ cross $b$," $(a)b$. The primary algebra does not mean that. We have given it that meaning for the purpose of operation, just as we may take a whole system of wires, electric motors, etc., and we can put it into a mathematical formula, or we can take some cars and weights, etc., and put them in one of Newton's formulae for findings acceleration. But the formula is not about cars, and so on and so forth; nor is this formula about statements in logic. Just as here we have used $a$ to represent the truth value of the sentence, "it hails," and $b$ to represent the truth value of the statement "it freezes," we are in fact applying, because we recognize the structure is similar, the states of the first distinction to the truth values of these statements. We recognize the form of the thing. And in fact, "not" ; is in this case, although it is represented by the cross, the cross itself is not the same as "not. n Because if it were---well, we can see obviously that it isn't, because, in this form we have represented "true" by a cross and "false" by a space\ld\ if you represent "true" by a space and "false" by a cross, then wherewith our "not"? We have swapped over and identified the marked state with untrue this time, and the unmarked state with true. And here we have identified it with untrue. Change over the identification, which we may do, and now here is the statement. And if this were "not," this would now have two "nots"---but it is not "not." We have only made it representative of "not" for the purpose of interpretation, just as well can give a color a number and use that in altering an equation. But the number and the color are not the same thing. This is not "not" except when we want to make it so. But it has a wider meaning than "not" in the book. -\transcription{\spkr{WATTS} Well, it means that it is distinct from. +\transcript{\spkr{WATTS} Well, it means that it is distinct from. \spkr{SPENCER BROWN} No, no---it means "cross."} -\sec Marked State/Unmarked State +\sec Marked State\slash Unmarked State -If you go back to the beginning of the book, you see---you remember this is not what really happens, because nothing happens. We represent what doesn't actually happen but might happen if it could. We represent it in the following way: we may draw a closed curve to represent a distinction, say the first distinction. Now we have a form. And we will mark one state, so, in fact. The mark is, in fact, shorthand for something like that, because it is only a bracket we marked it with. If we don't mark it with a bracket, we find that we have to mark it with a bracket, as I show in the notes.\fnote{Chapter 2, \bt{Laws of Form}.} +If you go back to the beginning of the book, you see---you remember this is not what really happens, because nothing happens. We represent what doesn't actually happen but might happen if it could. We represent it in the following way: we may draw a closed curve to represent a distinction, say the first distinction. Now we have a form. And we will mark one state, so, in fact. The mark is, in fact, shorthand for something like that, because it is only a bracket we marked it with. If we don't mark it with a bracket, we find that we have to mark it with a bracket, as I show in the notes.\fnote{Chapter 2, \booktitle{Laws of Form}.} -\transcription{\spkr{WATTS} Well, you have got it in the frame of the blackboard. +\transcript{\spkr{WATTS} Well, you have got it in the frame of the blackboard. -\spkr{SPENCER BROWN} Never mind about that. Now, let there be a form distinct from the form. Let the mark of the form be copied out of the form into such another form. Bet any such copy of the mark be taken as---a token of the marked state. Bet the name as the token indicate the state. I missed out a sentence. Bet the token be taken as the name, and let the name indicate the state---right.\fnote{See p.4 \bt{Laws of Form}.} Now, here, this indicates the state. We now derive our first equation from Axiom One---if you call a name twice or more, it simply means the state designated by the name by which you call it. So we have the first equation $()()=()$.} +\spkr{SPENCER BROWN} Never mind about that. Now, let there be a form distinct from the form. Let the mark of the form be copied out of the form into such another form. Bet any such copy of the mark be taken as---a token of the marked state. Bet the name as the token indicate the state. I missed out a sentence. Bet the token be taken as the name, and let the name indicate the state---right.\fnote{See p.4 \booktitle{Laws of Form}.} Now, here, this indicates the state. We now derive our first equation from Axiom One---if you call a name twice or more, it simply means the state designated by the name by which you call it. So we have the first equation $()()=()$.} Then, let a state not marked with a mark be called the unmarked state, and let any space in which there is no token of the mark designate the unmarked state. in other words; we did away with the second name. This is essential. It's the fear of doing away with the second name that has left logic so complicated. If you don't do away with the second name, you can't make the magic reduction. -\transcription{\spkr{BATESON} Are you saying that the name of the name is the same as the name? +\transcript{\spkr{BATESON} Are you saying that the name of the name is the same as the name? \spkr{SPENCER BROWN} No, no, no. I said here, if you call a name twice, it is the same as calling it once. Your name is Gregory. If I call you twice, it is still calling you.} What people have done is that they have given a name always to both states. There is no need to do that; you have got quite enough to recognize where you are, because you do a search, and if you find the mark, you know you are in the marked state. If you do a search and you don't find it, you know you are in the unmarked state. So that, mathematically, is all that is necessary. So you don't do the second thing. There has been already fear, you see, to have a state unmarked. -\transcription{\spkr{MAN} How did the printer feel about this. It must have driven him crazy. +\transcript{\spkr{MAN} How did the printer feel about this. It must have driven him crazy. \spkr{SPENCER BROWN} Oh, he didn't like it--he kept putting things in. The printer and the publisher went absolutely haywire because of equations like this, $(())=$. @@ -480,7 +519,7 @@ There is no rule that is overt anywhere in mathematics which says this may not h Now to go on to what I was going to say, which is: next we want to use the mark, which could be a circle. We want to use it. We haven't, in fact, discovered its shape. In the second equation, we discover, really, what the shape is. And we'll see it is inevitable. Having marked one side-if there is no mark, then we know we are on the other sides -\transcription{\spkr{WALTER BARNEY} Those $m$'s\ednote{?} are outside the circle or inside the circle? +\transcript{\spkr{WALTER BARNEY} Those $m$'s\ednote{?} are outside the circle or inside the circle? \spkr{SPENCER BROWN} Well, this one is outside. @@ -490,7 +529,7 @@ Now to go on to what I was going to say, which is: next we want to use the mark, First of all, we have taken the mark as a name. And if you call a name twice, you are simply indicating the same state twice, and indicating the same state twice is the same as indicating the same state once. Now, instead of just calling this $m$, let us give it certain properties. Bet it be an instruction to cross the first distinction. -Now here is our illustration of the first distinction.\fnote{For illumination of what follows, see pp. 82--83 in the notes to Chapter 2, \bt{Laws of Form}.} Now this is why we've drawn this line on our blackboard, because here is an illustration of the first distinction. Here is a record of instructions referring to the first distinction---right. Now let $m$, the mark, be taken as an instruction to cross the boundary of the first distinction. So, if one is here, m says go there. If one is here, m says go there. O. E.? m is now not a name, so we can ring that for the moment, don't confuse yourself with that, m is now an instruction. And all m means is "cross." So whenever you hear or see it, you've got to step over the boundary. That is all it means. Now, we will produce more conventions. +Now here is our illustration of the first distinction.\fnote{For illumination of what follows, see pp. 82--83 in the notes to Chapter 2, \booktitle{Laws of Form}.} Now this is why we've drawn this line on our blackboard, because here is an illustration of the first distinction. Here is a record of instructions referring to the first distinction---right. Now let $m$, the mark, be taken as an instruction to cross the boundary of the first distinction. So, if one is here, m says go there. If one is here, m says go there. O. E.? m is now not a name, so we can ring that for the moment, don't confuse yourself with that, m is now an instruction. And all m means is "cross." So whenever you hear or see it, you've got to step over the boundary. That is all it means. Now, we will produce more conventions. \dinkus @@ -512,7 +551,7 @@ Now let us put the marked state in here, and we can do that simply by putting an Now to make a distinction between algebra and arithmetic, I should go to the common distinction which is made in the schoolbooks, where you have---there are two subjects in kindergarten, perhaps a little beyond kindergarten---a subject called arithmetic, which is taught to you first, and then we have algebra, which is what the big boys and girls get onto and look rather superior about. First of all, let me explain---this word keeps coming up, "out on a plain"---that even arithmetic is not what is taught at school. Mathematics certainly isn't. What the child is first taught is the elements of computation---the computation of number, not of Boolean values. He is taught the elements of computation, which is wrongly called arithmetic. Whereas arithmetic is the--- -Let's be clear, for the moment. I'll go back and start again. We should approach this slowly and deviously. I don't want to give the game away before we have got there. In arithmetic, so-called, which the child is---it is true that it doesn't begin with arithmetic, because the child is given an object, two object, three objects, four objects, and he is---I don't think that he is taught that there is something called a number, but he is then taught to write "one, two, three, four," etc., and he is not given that there is somewhere between that---that it one object, that is two objects and that and that, that, that---there is somewhere between these a non-physical existing thing called a number. As I point out in \bt{Only Two},\ednote{\bt{Only Two Can Play This Game}.} a number is something that is not of this world.\fnote{See Note 4, pp. 134--5.} That doesn't mean to say that it does not exist---it surely does. In fact, there are many extant groups of numbers. +Let's be clear, for the moment. I'll go back and start again. We should approach this slowly and deviously. I don't want to give the game away before we have got there. In arithmetic, so-called, which the child is---it is true that it doesn't begin with arithmetic, because the child is given an object, two object, three objects, four objects, and he is---I don't think that he is taught that there is something called a number, but he is then taught to write "one, two, three, four," etc., and he is not given that there is somewhere between that---that it one object, that is two objects and that and that, that, that---there is somewhere between these a non-physical existing thing called a number. As I point out in \booktitle{Only Two},\ednote{\booktitle{Only Two Can Play This Game}.} a number is something that is not of this world.\fnote{See Note 4, pp. 134--5.} That doesn't mean to say that it does not exist---it surely does. In fact, there are many extant groups of numbers. \transcript{\spkr{VON MEIER} Exstacy? Exstasis. @@ -528,21 +567,21 @@ As we got a little older still and went to the university, we learned different I have given the game away now. This is the difference between an algebra and an arithmetic. The algebra is about the variables, or is the science of the relationships of variables. It is a science of the relationships of the variables when you don't know or don't care what constants they might stand for. Nevertheless, the constants aren't irrelevant, because whatever arithmetic this is an algebra of, if you were to substitute constants for this variables, $a$, $b$, etc., then these formulae still will hold. -A lot of people have said, you see, "How can you have an arithmetic without numbers?"---as the primary arithmetic in \bt{Laws of Form} is without numbers, we will go back in a moment to that. But just at the moment will emphasize, or return to, for memory purposes, the fact that the definition---the difference between algebra and arithmetic is that arithmetic is about constants, the algebra is about variables. The arithmetic is a science of the relations of constants. +A lot of people have said, you see, "How can you have an arithmetic without numbers?"---as the primary arithmetic in \booktitle{Laws of Form} is without numbers, we will go back in a moment to that. But just at the moment will emphasize, or return to, for memory purposes, the fact that the definition---the difference between algebra and arithmetic is that arithmetic is about constants, the algebra is about variables. The arithmetic is a science of the relations of constants. In a common arithmetic for university purposes, which for a less vulgar name is called the Theory of Numbers, is the same thing. The Theory of Numbers is arithmetic, it's common arithmetic. The Theory of Numbers, the most beautiful science of all in mathematics---I happen to like it myself, so I praise it---or one of the most beautiful, is the science of the individuality of numbers. A number theorist knows each number in its individuality. He knows about the relationships it forms, and so on, as an individual, as a constant. An algebraist is not interested in the individuality of numbers, he is interested in the generality of numbers. He is more interested in the sociology of numbers that applies, whatever individual numbers come there; he has produced a rule where these people go there and there and there, and so on, and he's not interested in individuals at all. A very interesting point here is the illustration of Gödel's theorem in the difference between, in number theory, an algebraic factoralization of a number and an accidental factoralization. As you know, we know from Gödel's Theorem that in the common arithmetic, that's the arithmetic of the integers, the algebraic representations, the rules of the algebraic manipulation of numbers, do not give you the whole story. It doesn't give you the complete story of what goes on in arithmetic. And so we have this factorial relationship---any number that is in that form, we know will factorize into that form. But there are what are called in Number Theory "accidental factoralizations," which happen over and above and irrespective of any algebraic factoralizations that you can find. And this is a very beautiful illustration of Gödel's Theorem. Nobody has ever used it. I think this is because, in general, mathematicians don't-understand Gödel's Theorem or even know what it says. I have lectured to an audience of university mathematics teachers Of maybe rifts. "Can anybody tell me Gödel's Theorem?" Not one. Not one knows what it is. It is one of the extraordinary breaks which mathematics took about the turn Of the century. Where a logic broke off from mathematics, and the two, you know, despised one another; like in gliding and power flying, they weren't speaking the same count. Hence we have this tremendous break, this schizophrenia, in mathematics, where common illustrations of one thing in another field just aren't seen as such. Accidental factoralization is a most beautiful illustration of Gödel's Theorem, if a somewhat technical one, in number theory.\fnote{The illustration below that the algebraic system is incomplete, since its rules do not generate all of its possible states.} -Now having seen, therefore, the difference between algebra and arithmetic---simply that arithmetic is concerned with constants and algebra is concerned with variables---we have---well, as Whitehead points out in the \bt{Treatise on Universal Algebra, Vol. 1}, he points out that Boolean algebra is the only for non-numerical algebra known. Shortly after that, there was a book written by Dickson, who is also a number theorist of some considerable fame, who wrote a very wonderful book called \bt{The History of the Theory Of Numbers}, now published by Dover;\fnote{In the United States, by the Chelsea Publishing Co., New York. A reprint Of Carnegie Destitute Publication #256 (28). By Leonard Eugene Dickson.} and anybody who is interested I think should get it because it contains all that would be of interest, except a very few later things. And he starts right at the beginning with amicable numbers, and shows that the early mathematicians, if they wanted to be friends with somebody, would find a pair Of amicable numbers, and they would then swap numbers and they would eat the number of their friend, to keep the friendship. All this is in the \bt{History of the Theory of Numbers}, by Dickson, which is a wonderful book. He also wrote a book called \bt{Algebras and their Arithmetics,} which---I don't think he actually said it, but it was obvious that every algebra has an arithmetic. +Now having seen, therefore, the difference between algebra and arithmetic---simply that arithmetic is concerned with constants and algebra is concerned with variables---we have---well, as Whitehead points out in the \booktitle{Treatise on Universal Algebra, Vol. 1}, he points out that Boolean algebra is the only for non-numerical algebra known. Shortly after that, there was a book written by Dickson, who is also a number theorist of some considerable fame, who wrote a very wonderful book called \booktitle{The History of the Theory Of Numbers}, now published by Dover;\fnote{In the United States, by the Chelsea Publishing Co., New York. A reprint Of Carnegie Destitute Publication \#256 (28). By Leonard Eugene Dickson.} and anybody who is interested I think should get it because it contains all that would be of interest, except a very few later things. And he starts right at the beginning with amicable numbers, and shows that the early mathematicians, if they wanted to be friends with somebody, would find a pair Of amicable numbers, and they would then swap numbers and they would eat the number of their friend, to keep the friendship. All this is in the \booktitle{History of the Theory of Numbers}, by Dickson, which is a wonderful book. He also wrote a book called \booktitle{Algebras and their Arithmetics,} which---I don't think he actually said it, but it was obvious that every algebra has an arithmetic. At the same time, mathematical popularized such as W. W. Sawyer were writing popular expositions Of various forms of mathematics, including Boolean algebra. And Sawyer heads his chapter on Boolean algebra, "The algebra without an arithmetic." This can't be. This can't be. If it is an algebra, it must have an arithmetic. And if any mathematician could write this---I am not blaming Sawyer; Sawyer was only standardizing what is common mathematics taught in universities today. He is standardizing the common confusion and block. The fact that mathematics teachers in universities today do not understand the difference between an algebra and an arithmetic, which is simple. -\sec How to Find \bt{Laws of Form} +\sec How to Find \booktitle{Laws of Form} So, to find the arithmetic of the algebra of logic, as it is called, is to find the constant of which the algebra is an exposition of the variables---no more, no less. Not, just to find the constants, because that would be, in terms of arithmetic of numbers, only to find the number. But to find out how they combine, and how they relate---and that is the arithmetic. So in finding---I think for the first time, I don't think it was found before, I haven't found it---the arithmetic to the algebra Of logic---or better, since logic is not necessary to the algebra, in finding the arithmetic to Boolean algebra, all I did was to seek and find a) the constants, and b) how they perform. -And the first four chapters of \bt{Laws of Form} are just about this arithmetic, And the nine theorems, with which the two connective theorems later form what would be called in any other algebra \e{postulates}, are called here \e{theorems}, because they are proven. They are not postulates---you do not have to postulate. These are the basis upon which we can build the algebra. The initial equations\ld\ are the rules of the arithmetic---or rather, they are all the equations necessary for the arithmetic. +And the first four chapters of \booktitle{Laws of Form} are just about this arithmetic, And the nine theorems, with which the two connective theorems later form what would be called in any other algebra \e{postulates}, are called here \e{theorems}, because they are proven. They are not postulates---you do not have to postulate. These are the basis upon which we can build the algebra. The initial equations\ld\ are the rules of the arithmetic---or rather, they are all the equations necessary for the arithmetic. \dinkus @@ -562,7 +601,7 @@ And the first four chapters of \bt{Laws of Form} are just about this arithmetic, \transcript{\spkr{KARL PRIBRAM} Is this related to the difference between demonstration and proof? -\spkr{SPENCER BROWN} Ah, the difference between demonstration and proof is that a demonstration is always done by the rules. A computer can do a demonstration. We can demonstrate this, $(((()())))=$: condense---we get---that goes out and we get that and that goes out, you see and it goes to nothing. And here, $(((())))=$, we just condense twice and it is nothing---not condense, cancel twice and it is nothing. So you demonstrate that-there, that's demonstrated...that's OK, you see. And we can demonstrate algebraic forms. This is a demonstration of arithmetic and a demonstration of algebra as well.} +\spkr{SPENCER BROWN} Ah, the difference between demonstration and proof is that a demonstration is always done by the rules. A computer can do a demonstration. We can demonstrate this, $(((()())))=$: condense---we get---that goes out and we get that and that goes out, you see and it goes to nothing. And here, $(((())))=$, we just condense twice and it is nothing---not condense, cancel twice and it is nothing. So you demonstrate that-there, that's demonstrated\ld that's OK, you see. And we can demonstrate algebraic forms. This is a demonstration of arithmetic and a demonstration of algebra as well.} Now proof is quite different. Proof can never be demonstrated. I will give an example of proof---one which is familiar, I am always giving it as an example; and those who have been given this example will forgive me if I give it again now, because it is a very beautiful theorem, a very beautiful proof by Euclid To show the difference between a proof and a demonstration, I go to the illustration---rather than to the Boolean form, I go to the common school form, the arithmetic of numbers, which is so familiar to us all, and therefore, I thinks better for illustration. @@ -600,7 +639,7 @@ On the hypothesis that this is the largest, this number is now all the primes mu \spkr{MAN} Thirty-one, Thirty-one! Not 33. Thirty-one is prime. -\spkr{SPENCER BROWN} Right, we get 31.\fnote{Multiplying the first three primes, $2\times 3\times 5$, and adding 1.} But if you go out far enough, you will find that you get one that isn't prime. But they will be divisible by a prime bigger than the largest prime you have used. Bet's see if we can find one. Uhe-ya, here, wait a minute, 211 is prime, isn't it? I'm just thinking of the prime factorial plus one; at seven, it's two, one, one. That's prime factorial plus one. 211 is prime, as far as I know. We want a table of primes here. Not divisible by 13, is 4\ld\ we multiply the next one, 11, 2, 1, 1, 2, 1, 2, 3, 2, 1. Sorry, 11, 2, 1, O. 2, 1, O, 2, 1, 3, 1, O. and so it comes out 2311. Is that prime? Probably not. I am very bad at figures. Divisible by 13\ld\ 4\ld\ not divisible by 13\ld} +\spkr{SPENCER BROWN} Right, we get 31.\fnote{Multiplying the first three primes, $2\times 3\times 5$, and adding 1.} But if you go out far enough, you will find that you get one that isn't prime. But they will be divisible by a prime bigger than the largest prime you have used. Bet's see if we can find one. Uhe-ya, here, wait a minute, 211 is prime, isn't it? I'm just thinking of the prime factorial plus one; at seven, it's two, one, one. That's prime factorial plus one. 211 is prime, as far as I know. We want a table of primes here. Not divisible by 13, is 4\ld\ we multiply the next one, 11, 2, 1, 1, 2, 1, 2, 3, 2, 1. Sorry, 11, 2, 1, 0. 2, 1, 0, 2, 1, 3, 1, 0. and so it comes out 2311. Is that prime? Probably not. I am very bad at figures. Divisible by 13\ld\ 4\ld\ not divisible by 13\ld} Anyway, I do assure you that if you go on long enough, getting the final factorial, adding one, you will find one that is not prime; but that doesn't matter, because it will be divisible by a prime that is bigger than the biggest prime you have used to produce it. If it were always prime, you would have immediately a means--you would have a formula for producing primes, and this we haven't got. There is no formula for producing primes except going about it the hard way and seeing as they don't divide by anything. @@ -626,7 +665,7 @@ The computer cannot do it because it is not computation. Computation is counting \spkr{LILLY} The biocomputer invented the whole thing. -\spkr{SPENCER BROWN} I know, as an engineer, the computer boys have vastly oversold their products by saying that they can do anything that the human mind can do, and this is not so. They cannot do the most elementary things that the human mind can do. And I blame, I blame Russell/ Whitehead for totally mixing up proof and demonstration. If you go through \bt{Principia}, there is not a single theorem, not one theorem.---I think I am right about that, Dr. Von Foerster---because what they call theorems are consequences.} +\spkr{SPENCER BROWN} I know, as an engineer, the computer boys have vastly oversold their products by saying that they can do anything that the human mind can do, and this is not so. They cannot do the most elementary things that the human mind can do. And I blame, I blame Russell\slash Whitehead for totally mixing up proof and demonstration. If you go through \booktitle{Principia}, there is not a single theorem, not one theorem.---I think I am right about that, Dr. Von Foerster---because what they call theorems are consequences.} Also, they had a precedent in that Euclid himself already rightly called this a theorem, calls it algebraic. His geometric consequences, he called theorems, they are not. So the confusion developed right at the beginning with Euclid, who called his geometric consequences, they can be computed, he called them theorems. Wrongly. So Euclid was the first offender. And from him, it just shows how we copied. We have copied his error through hundreds of years. @@ -660,7 +699,7 @@ It's just not possible to do everything all at once. You can't make the rice gro \spkr{LILLY} Yes, this one of the spaces. -\spkr{SPENCER BROWN} The part of the observer? "We now see that the first distinction, the observer, and the mark, are not only interchangeable, but, in the form, identical."\fnote{pp. 76, \bt{Laws of Form.} \& also Blake couplet quoted on pp. 126, \bt{Only Two Can Play This Game}, "If you have made a circle to go into/Go into it yourself and see how you would do."} I don't see how you didn't get it already.} +\spkr{SPENCER BROWN} The part of the observer? "We now see that the first distinction, the observer, and the mark, are not only interchangeable, but, in the form, identical."\fnote{pp. 76, \booktitle{Laws of Form.} \& also Blake couplet quoted on pp.\ 126, \booktitle{Only Two Can Play This Game}, "If you have made a circle to go into\slash Go into it yourself and see how you would do."} I don't see how you didn't get it already.} The convention is that we learn to grow up blithe game that we are taught to play is that there is a person called "me" in a body called "my body," who trots about and makes noises and looks out through eyes upon an alien, objective thing we call "the world," or, if we want to be a bit grander, called "the universe," which the thing called "me" in "my body" can go out and explore and make notes about and find this, that, and the other thing, find a tortoise, and make notes about a tortoise, and drawings, etc. The convention is that this tortoise is somehow not me, but is some object independent of me, which I in my body have found. @@ -670,7 +709,7 @@ Now, supposing that this is only a hypothesis. Supposing that---if there were a Come to this another way. Take it philosophically. take it philosophically and scientifically. Scientifically, on the basis of, there is an objective existence which we can see with our eyes and feel with our fingers and hear with our ears, and taste with our tongues, smell with our nose, etc., and then we take it to ants. Now ants can see ultraviolet light, which we can't see, and therefore the sky looks quite different to it. Take it to extremes. If there are beings with senses, none of which compares with ours, how could they possibly see a world which compares with ours? In other words, even if one considered it scientifically, the universe as seen appears according to the form of the senses to which it appears. Change the senses, the appearance of the universe changes. Ask a philosophical question and you get a philosophical answer. What therefore is the objective universe that is independent of these senses? There can be no such universe, because it varies according to how it is seen, the sensory apparatus. Take this a little further, and we see that we have made a distinction which don't exist. We have distinguished the universe from the sensory apparatus. But since the universe changes according to changes in the sensory apparatus, we have not distinguished the universe from the sensory apparatus. Therefore, the universe and the sensory apparatus are one. Row, then, does it appear that it is so solid and objective looking? -Now, the answer to this profound question takes a lot of thought, but I will try to give it all to you in a very short time. Because it takes a whole series of remarkable\fnote{Re-markable, markable again ("a whole series").} tricks before it can be made to appear like this. But since, if there ain't no such thing, then any trick within the \bt{Laws of Form} is possible, this happens to be one of the possible tricks. If there is no such universe, if there is only appearances then appearance can appear any way it can. You have only to imagine it, and it is so. +Now, the answer to this profound question takes a lot of thought, but I will try to give it all to you in a very short time. Because it takes a whole series of remarkable\fnote{Re-markable, markable again ("a whole series").} tricks before it can be made to appear like this. But since, if there ain't no such thing, then any trick within the \booktitle{Laws of Form} is possible, this happens to be one of the possible tricks. If there is no such universe, if there is only appearances then appearance can appear any way it can. You have only to imagine it, and it is so. \transcript{\spkr{BATESON} Can you go into the proof? @@ -700,7 +739,7 @@ Now, the answer to this profound question takes a lot of thought, but I will try \transcript{\spkr{JEAN TAUPIN} Any reality is real, the moment you perceive it as real? -\spkr{SPENCER BROWN} Well, "reality" means "royalty." The words have the same root.\fnote{ \bt{American Heritage Dictionary} gives REALI from Indo-European root \e{rei-}, "possession, thing" (Latin \e{res}, thing.); ROYAL from IE \e{regi-} "to move in a straight line" (Latin \e{rex}, king), REAL a Spanish coin; \e{rectus}, right, straight RF\&YM; RECTOR RECTUM; L. \e{regular} straight piece of wood, rule REGULATE, RULE; Middle Dutch \e{rec-} framework RACE; Sanskrit \e{raiati}, he rules RAJAH.} Whatever is real is royalty. And what is royalty but what is universal---the form of the families of England. +\spkr{SPENCER BROWN} Well, "reality" means "royalty." The words have the same root.\fnote{ \booktitle{American Heritage Dictionary} gives REALI from Indo-European root \e{rei-}, "possession, thing" (Latin \e{res}, thing.); ROYAL from IE \e{regi-} "to move in a straight line" (Latin \e{rex}, king), REAL a Spanish coin; \e{rectus}, right, straight RF\&YM; RECTOR RECTUM; L. \e{regular} straight piece of wood, rule REGULATE, RULE; Middle Dutch \e{rec-} framework RACE; Sanskrit \e{raiati}, he rules RAJAH.} Whatever is real is royalty. And what is royalty but what is universal---the form of the families of England. \spkr{VON MEIER} The measure, the \e{rex}, the \e{regulus}. @@ -716,7 +755,7 @@ Now, the answer to this profound question takes a lot of thought, but I will try \spkr{SPENCER BROWN} How do I do it? Just contemplate. One also tries all sorts of ways to get familiar with the ground. Why it may take you two years to find a proof which could be exposed in five, fifty seconds, is that you get familiar with the ground. You try in many ways that won't work, and then you try and try and try and then you realize that trying---One day you stop that. And then, almost certainly, you will find---or seeing it, seeing anything to be so} -I had been working on the second-degree equations for five years at least. I was thoroughly familiar with how they worked, and so on---hadn't seen what they were, theoretically. I was wondering whether to put them in Chapter 11, or some other beautiful manifestation of the form, whereby you break up the distinction and it turns into a Fibonacci series. Well, I won't go into that now because it is another thing altogether. In \bt{Laws of Form} there is only about one twentieth of the discoveries that were actually made during the research. There is enough for 20 books, mathematically, and I had to decide what I could put out, and what I could put into. But the actual research in London is 20 times of what is in the book. And I wasn't quite sure whether to put it in at this point---because the book had to be finished. I wasn't quite sure whether to put in, with this chapter, this beautiful breaking up of the truth where you get the rainbow, which turns into the Fibonacci series. You break up white light and you get the colors. You break up truth and you get the Fibonacci. +I had been working on the second-degree equations for five years at least. I was thoroughly familiar with how they worked, and so on---hadn't seen what they were, theoretically. I was wondering whether to put them in Chapter 11, or some other beautiful manifestation of the form, whereby you break up the distinction and it turns into a Fibonacci series. Well, I won't go into that now because it is another thing altogether. In \booktitle{Laws of Form} there is only about one twentieth of the discoveries that were actually made during the research. There is enough for 20 books, mathematically, and I had to decide what I could put out, and what I could put into. But the actual research in London is 20 times of what is in the book. And I wasn't quite sure whether to put it in at this point---because the book had to be finished. I wasn't quite sure whether to put in, with this chapter, this beautiful breaking up of the truth where you get the rainbow, which turns into the Fibonacci series. You break up white light and you get the colors. You break up truth and you get the Fibonacci. \transcript{\spkr{VON MEIER} The logarithmic growth spiral?\fnote{The Fibonacci series goes 0, 1, 1, 2, 5, 5, 8, 13, 21, etc.}\ednote{That is, $f(n+1)=f(n)+f(n-1)$.} @@ -808,7 +847,7 @@ What is called "objective" in science is where we actually use our individual di \spkr{KELLEY} But the result is no more general than from the common algebra of numbers? -\spkr{SPENCER BROWN} No. For example, in this algebra you do have completeness. I have proved it. And consistence. I have proved both. In \bt{Laws of Form}, you find proven consistency,\fnote{Theorems 3, 4.} and, in Theorem 17, proof of completeness. +\spkr{SPENCER BROWN} No. For example, in this algebra you do have completeness. I have proved it. And consistence. I have proved both. In \booktitle{Laws of Form}, you find proven consistency,\fnote{Theorems 3, 4.} and, in Theorem 17, proof of completeness. \spkr{KELLEY} OK, now, does Gödel's Theorem only apply to the algebra based on real numbers? That is, it's beyond the integral, it's a field, right? The field of real numbers, where you've got multiplication, addition, and associativity. @@ -834,5 +873,429 @@ The ordinary algebra of number, not introducing the complete system---for exampl \endnote{(End of Session Two.)} +\chap Transcript Session Three: Tuesday Morning, March 20, 1973 + +\transcript{\spkr{SPENCER BROWN} I was asked if I would deal with certain technical points yesterday. I said that I would, but I feel that it would not be in order for me to do so because it does seem talking to a very few people---just one or two---who are interested in specific, narrow questions of research; and I do feel that this is more in order if, in fact, the audience was oSethe same kind of peoples and then we could talk about whatever technicality may be in order and required.} + +Also, in respect to certain technicalities, I do like to prepare myself for them. I once went before an audience during a course of 20 lectures, and I had to prove a theorem which I thought I knew so well I didn't need notes; but I started on the proof and I couldn't remember it, and so I asked for help from the audience and they were helpless. And I spent the whole lecture trying to find the proof, and they were trying to help me, and in the end it was wasted. That was the only time I have ever done that, and as soon as I got book home, of course? I remembered the proof. + +I don't think any of the technical points are as technical as that, but I do like to be prepared and I do like to give a technical exposition to a wholly technical audience; because, if there are others who are not specifically interested in the technical question or haven't sufficient training to understand it, I think it would be a little unfair to them to have to listen to something which doesn't mean very much as far as they are concerned--even though they may be very obvious points to someone with mathematical training. + +There was a mathematical lecturer, a professor at Cambridge in my college, Trinity, who was giving a lecture\ld and he was just coming to the end, he was just rounding off and saying "It is obvious that---" "But sir---I don't see that it is obvious." So he had a look at the blackboard formulae and did a few calculations, and the time for the lecture was finished and everyone got up and went away. And this student who had asked the question still staged on. And he tried something else, and then said, "Excuse me just one moment, I must go back to my room and look up some books. And so he went back to his room, And then five hours later he walked back into the lecture room and there was the student, still waiting. And he got up triumphantly onto the platform and said "Yes, it is obvious." that is what \e{is} obvious in mathematics---the more obvious it is, the longer it takes to find it. + +\sec No 'Not' Sense + +\transcript{\spkr{BATESON} To take off from yesterday's turtle, somewhat--- + +\spkr{SPENCER BROWN} The turtle, the tortoise---oh, yes. + +\spkr{BATESON} My interest, if there is anybody who will go along with it---if it's a nuisance to them, would they say so---is in, amongst other things, animal communications. And what goes on between animals is evidently characterized by, amongst other things, the absence of "not"---the absence of a simple negative. While they can forbid each other---say "don't"---they can in general not deny a message which they themselves have emitted. They cannot negate.} + +Now, the messages which they emit tend to go in the form of intentional groups, or something which is part action, and part stands as a name for the whole, in some sense. So their showing of a fang is a mentioning of battle. Not necessarily the beginning of a battle; possibly a challenge, possibly a mentioning with a question mark---I mean, "Are we here to fight each other?" + +It's sort of in the hope, that I am here, that your \bt{Laws of Form} calculus might be the sense on which to map this sort of sound. We have a two-legged language which is very unsuitable for mapping what goes on between animals. Indeed, it is unsuitable for mapping what goes on between people. + +\transcript{\spkr{SPENCER BROWN} Before I answer that, I should have to explain that Prof. Bateson has written most lucidly on this theme, particularly in a little metalog, in the form of a duolog, isn't it, between a father and his daughter. + +\spkr{BATESON} It's merely a dialog, yes. + +\spkr{SPENCER BROWN} ---about instinct and about the language of animals compared with the language of us. This is, I believe, now published, and the title is \bt{Steps to an Ecology of Mind.}} + +There is this delightful little duolog in that book. When I first read it, some years ago in London, I found it contained very profound observations on communication and---excluding, really, in terms of animals like whales and dolphins which do seem to have a form of communication, which, if you could divine it---I hope I am right, John---is at least as efficient as ours and probably something like it and maybe better. I think that this causes something---possibly the same problems that they have. Although they may have something superior to \bt{Laws of Form}, in fact, having got something that is more important, or more fundamental, than not. \bt{Laws of} Form comes effectively from the licensing of the not operator in logic. What is of interest in Gregory Bateson's account of the animals is that they don't so much communicate as commune with us and with each other. And I would like to make this distinction. + +\sec Communication and Communion + +Amongst the other distinctions that are not commonly made, or, if they are made, are not made consistently, is the distinction between communication and communion. Communication happens according to physical existence, in some physically detachable sense, and the characteristic of communication is that what goes on goes on at the same level. One can take at the level of physical existence, nervous events ordered by sound waves. For example, wireless waves, or what have you, all detectable in physical existence, followed by a perceptor of information, etc. etc. etc. + +Now, it is my thesis that communication is superficial to communion, and without communion, there is no communication, really, at all. That is to say, if there were no communion, which I will now define as a fitting on another level between the communicants--if there is no communions as indeed there sometimes is not, then what is communicated, when it reaches the other end, it not understood. + +\dinkus + +The more perfect the fit on the communion level, the less needs to be communicated, the more that can be crossed from one being to another in fewer actual communicated acts. In \bt{Laws of Form}, this is expressed in these two laws---or at least there are pictures of it in the two laws early on, in the canon of contraction of reference,\fnote{pp. 8, \bt{Laws of Form}: "In general, let injunctions be contracted to any degree to which they are followed." The other canon referred to may be \bt{The Hypothesis of Simplification} (pp. 9): "Suppose the value of an arrangement to be the value of a simple expression, to which, by taking steps, it can be changed."} whereby, as people get to know each other better---a gang of kids go about and one word or even half a word is used to express a whole community between them. Whereas when people do not know each other, this has to be expressed in a whole book. But between people who do know one another, however, there is no need for a book, it can all go in half a syllable. + +Now when one is communicating, for example, with one's cat, that doesn't have the sort of language we have, or if it does, we don't know it, then it is done in this kind of way. It is done because you know each other. And when my cat says "Meouw," I sometimes say, "What do you mean, `meouw!'" But this is a game, because if I consider it, there is never a time when my cat says "Meouw" that I don't know exactly what he means. Why I sometimes say, "What do you mean, `meouw'?" is because I can't be bothered to get up and give it the fish or open the door or pet it. If I am honest with myself, there is never any doubt whatever. Although it says "Meouw" it makes it quite plain to me, by the context in which it says it, exactly what it means. And if I pretend that I don't understand, it knows perfectly well that I am being awkward. + +\dinkus + +So, to put it on the positive side, if one doesn't make this pretending game and say "Really, the cat ought to be talking like we are," but goes on the level to how it can respond, the communication between a man and the animal can be so complete as to be almost unbelievable. The understanding can be very much greater than between two human beings. + +Now, with this question of how is it---I am going a little beyond what Prof. Bateson says in his duolog, where he raises this point. The question of how people get into fights, when, in fact, this is a mistake, they got into one by mistake, through one or the other---people or animals taking what---you see, for example, if I tease my cat and it begins to think "this is enough," then it comes round and gives me a little nip. Now this is not nearly as hard as it can do it. The nip is the same, when it is a warning nip, as when it is a completely playing nip. knd where I have seen things go wrong, then---to get on the subject of where things go wrong---you may have an entirely neurotic animal who does not distinguish between the gradations of nip. Because when an animal has been made neurotic, what it's lost is its capacity to distinguish. And what has happened in its place, it's been devastated in some way; and it either is completely anaesthetized to what is going on, or if it perceives it, it perceives it fully. It perceives a nip of a certain strength as complete war. + +\transcript{\spkr{BATESON} It's not a problem of your initial thing and the token of it? + +\spkr{SPENCER BROWN} Well, I am going to that.} + +\dinkus + +I am trying to treat it, first of all, getting into the open, as you are doing with metalogic---getting into the form of extremely simplified and get extremely sensitive communication of animals. The cat has not a great many modulations of its voice and still fewer twistings of its tongue to make what comes out different. + +\transcript{\spkr{WOMAN} It has the widest range of sounds of any animal. + +\spkr{SPENCER BROWN} It has a wide range, yes, but it doesn't have words like we do. For a lot of things, it says the same thing, but in a different context, looking a different way, or what have you, which can mean in one case "play with me," in another case "feed me," in another case "open the door for me," and so on. Now it does not have any problem with other cats unless they are neurotic, unless they have been in some sense devastated, in which case it may get into a fight mistakenly. And it has more difficulty with humans, because humans tend to be more neurotic. But it doesn't have the problem with a human being who understands the gradations the cat does, and is sensitive to them.} + +Now, having gone that far, let us consider something which Gregory Bateson posits, and I tend to agree with him: The one thing that a human being has in his language, which other animals, if they have a similar language, don't yet have is a word or an expression having the effect of \e{not.} Now just as human flesh can accommodate cuts and bruises better than burns---it doesn't seem to know that so well---so the human mind can accommodate to positive sentences much better than to the same sentence with "not" stuck on there somewhere. "Not" appears to be a recent acquiry in language. In fact, if this is so, it would be that we-were least adapted to it, most unreliable with it, and we do agree that we---Indeed, it is well known in business when one has to get something done, that you have to be very careful to put what you want doing in positive terms. Don't put it---like I'm putting it. + +My professor of anatomy, J. D. Boyd, didn't appear to understand this. Because he was a very good lecturer---he had if anything one fault. When he was describing some part of the human anatomy, he would make a list always of the common mistakes that students made as to where a nerve went, of whatever it may be, you see. It doesn't go there, he would always write, and it doesn't go there, and this doesn't happen and that doesn't happen like that. And then he would--this would come out in his lectures and he would say "I cannot understand this," he would say, "I told my students exactly the mistakes they should avoid, and these are the very mistakes they always make." + +\transcript{\spkr{LILLY} They were following directions. + +\spkr{SPENCER BROWN} They were following directions. And whether the directions have "not" tanked on somewhere or not, is something which they forget. And indeed, this is so obvious that there are ways of maligning people-for example, a picture of somebody in the paper and the caption underneath---"Denies Cuddling Policewoman."} + +Or one could even go further to the well-known joke of the king who wanted to be able to turn lead into gold; and who---He put an advertisement in the local paper for a magician who could do this. And the conditions were that if the recipe failed, the magician would have his head cut off. Well, lots of magicians came for the pleasure of having their heads cut off---there is one born every minute. And finally a very good magician came and---Well, he would get oil and bring it to a boil, and put in a toad's liver, as an experiment; then you put your lead in and count to 15 and then you add a pinch of salt. You do all these things, you see--this, that, and the other, and so on. + +Having finished the recipe---the king was writing it down---he was just about to be taken off to where he would have his head cut off if the thing doesn't work. And just as he is about to be taken off, he says "One moment, your Majesty, one moment. There are just two more instructions that are necessary to this recipe. One is that it must be done by your Majesty himself---you may not delegate. And one more thing, your Majesty, one more thing, you must not think of a hippopotamus while you are doing this." + +He kept his head. We are least adapted to "not." "Not" is the worst order to give anybody, the most confusing order, and the most unlikely to be carried out properly. I do think that, apart from possible animals who have a language as evolved as ours, I do think that it does make for a very different wag of seeing the world; or, to put it more accurately, it does make for a very different world. The world waxes or wanes as a whole. The world of the happy is totally different from the world of the unhappy.\fnote{See Note 2, pp. 133, \bt{Only Two Can Flay This Game}.} + +\sec Manifesting the Form + +So one can either say, "there are various ways of seeing the world," or one could say, "There are various worlds," which means the same thing. How could there be a difference between these two. As soon as we have \e{not}, we have a kind of world that no animal without \e{not} ever sees. And since, in \bt{Laws of Form}, the laws of form can be described as coming from granting a license to \e{not}, it is, therefore, this universe of the \e{not}-speaking animal that this particular form is about. The form itself manifests in as many ways as there are ways of distinction. As in the \bt{Tao Te Ching}, we start with the first proposition, "The way, as told in this book, is not the eternal way, which may not be told." The eternal way may not be told\fnote{The root of \e{tell} is Indo-European \e{del-}, to count, Recount, (compute).} because it is not susceptible to telling. It is too real for that. It manifests in as many different ways or different expressions as there are differences in the beings to which it manifests. So that---I speak of "The form," that is never the form that is spoken. The form which is spoken is the form as it is manifest to us, as the particular beings we are, with our particular \e{not} culture, our particular not language, and our particular conventions of life. + +And when one looks at a cow in a field and somebody says "What's it doing?" well, I say, "Well, I thank it is contemplating reality." And they say "Don't be ridiculous, how can a cow contemplate reality? "Why not?" I say. "What else does it have to do all day? What else has it to do?" The thing is contemplating reality, what else could it be doing? But the form as it is apparent to a cow---although it is the same form, it is the Way without a Name---how it manifests to a cow is not how it manifests to me. How it is expressed to a cow is not how it is expressed to me. + +\transcript{\spkr{BATESON} Could one have identified self, without a not? + +\spkr{SPENCER BROWN} Well\ld\ that's where you return to the tortoise---because of the game we play, where we have defined there is a "me" inside---"my body" and the "world outside," and we don't even wink when we are doing it. We take it dead seriously. And what we have, you see, to make all this so dead serious, is we take so dead seriously the \e{not} boundary. And to us the form of the fiction is a boundary with \e{not}---\e{not} one side or \e{not} the other.} + +Now to recapitulate, how of course can there be any space, where would there be for it to be? How of course can there be any time, when would it exist? The world being the appearance of what would appear if it could, if the impossible were able to come about. Now if the impossible comes about, or appears to come about, in as many different wags as it can, according to the form. And in this particular existence, we have the privilege, if you put it that way the privilege of actually viewing from the apparent outside, other points of view, like tortoises, which are other wags in which the impossible would manifest if it could. + +\transcript{\spkr{MAN} Do you distinguish between "appearance" and "is"? + +\spkr{SPENCER BROWN} Not at the moment. I would do it if it was needed. + +\spkr{MAN} The reason I ask is that to me the primitive is not but is, and the distinction between animal communication---and I got this from Gregory, standing on his shoulders as it were, looking either down or up, depending on how you interpret my interpretation---it seems to me that the is, the Dizziness of communication is what is particularly human. An animal just--- + +\spkr{VON MEIER} No, it's only peculiar to a language. Russian has no copula. Chinese doesn't use the verb "to be"---doesn't articulate being with a special verb in the language. It sets things bedside one another, which is a sense of the Greek word "paradigm." + +\spkr{WATTS} Chinese indicates "is" with "that." + +\spkr{VON MEIER} To translate English? + +\spkr{MAN} To me, I can distinguish between just pointing, saying "Lois," and saying "that is Lois, she is Lois." + +\spkr{WATTS} There's a statement in Buddhist literature, "Void is form." Now the "is" word is not our "is" word. It's "Void that form."} + +\sec Being and Existence + +\transcript{\spkr{SPENCER BROWN} Well, one must distinguish between being and-existence, being being deeper than existence. existence is less important than being. However, even being is not the most important. As to existence, well, there is a whole world that be, which don't even exist, and the world that don't exist is far more real than the world that do.\fnote{"\ld to experience the world clearly, we must abandon existence to truth, truth to indication, indication to form, and form to void." pp. 101, \bt{Laws of Form}. See also discussion of five eternal levels, below, p.102.}} + +We have an astronomer who talks on the television, and he answers questions---he gives a monthly program and then he also reads his letters. And the letters are usually, "Well, what happens in the center of the sun?" Or "Is the Andromeda nebula a spiral? What colors come out of it?" and so on and so forth. And he was answering the questions in one program and the final question was from a lady who asked on a postcard, asked a short question: "What I would like to know is none of these specific questions-what I would like to know is, why the universe exists at all? And he put on his most Satanic expression, and just before the fade out he replied, \e{`Does it?'}" + +\sec Intent of a Signal: What Is Not Allowed Is Forbidden + +\transcript{\spkr{WATTS} Would you reflect briefly on the word "not" in the context "Whatever is not expressly permitted is forbidden"? + +\spkr{SPENCER BROWN} You mean, "What is not allowed is forbidden"?\fnote{First canon, Convention of Intention; pp. 3, \bt{Laws of Form}.} + +\spkr{WATTS} Yes. + +\spkr{SPENCER BROWN} Well\ld this is the form of all documents that have to be precise. And mathematical and legal documents are the same in this respect. The point is that you cannot be precise in the expression of anything at all unless you make this rule. Bow otherwise could one, you see---Because one would never know, if you didn't expressly allow it, what was allowed. If you let any "allows" slip through the gate, now you cannot be precise.} + +The reason we don't realize in ordinary speech or ordinary communications that this is the law of precision is that we have so many unspoken conventions, which in the same society are the same for the same people. That is why, when somebody is playing a game and they suddenly realize that something new that nobody has ever done before in this game is in fact permitted by the rules, and they do it, there is a cry of "unfair," "uaking advantage of the rules" and so on. And then sometimes the rules are changed. Since it is required that it is absolutely precise what may or may not be done, there must be this rule that what can be done is what is specifically allowed. + +\transcript{\spkr{BARNEY} Can you turn it around and say "whatever isn't forbidden is allowed?" That was the rule in the Garden of Eden. + +\spkr{SPENCER BROWN} Yes, you can do that. What is not forbidden is allowed. Because whenever you have one law, in the next level of existence you have a reflection of it. And, in that sense, you're not talking of mathematics. In mathematics, which has to speak precisely, this is the first canon. I don't actually know that it has been expressed before in any mathematical document. + +\spkr{WATTS} It has been expressed politically. + +\spkr{SPENCER BROWN} I am talking mathematically, yes, it may have been expressed politically. It is the most commonly broken law when people come up with false proofs; a mathematician will immediately recognize that they have done something which they haven't in their rules actually allowed. And this is how anything can be proved. It's known and it is immediately recognized that the canon is broken in mathematics, but as far as I know, it has not been expressed before as a mathematical canon. + +\spkr{VON MEIER} Identity elements in a group? + +\spkr{SPENCER BROWN} No. + +\spkr{VON MEIER} In number series, zero? + +\spkr{SPENCER BROWN} No, no, this has nothing to do with the elements. This is a canon of how you begin to make your laws. And the first canon is that while you are making the system of the laws of instruction, unless you allow something, then you forbid it. + +\spkr{LILLY} In other words, no covert contracts. + +\spkr{SPENCER BROWN} Yes, no covert contracts. It's all overt, this is the game in mathematics. The whole thing is overt. That is why, whatever we do, we must allow. + +\spkr{WOMAN} Does this cover right or wrong? + +\spkr{SPENCER BROWN} No, this is mathematical. We are not anywhere near right or wrong, you see. The mathematician who is used to the fact that we have, in fact---well, it began with the covert convention, that became overt, that we are only allowed, in defining operator, to define it as operating on two variables. That's what gets us into such trouble, you know. The Sheffer stroke, for example, it is not allowed on more than two and it is not allowed on less than two. So "not A," with a Sheffer stroke, must be done "A stroke A" In fact, if you will read the first few chapters of \bt{Laws of Form}, we specifically allow the operation on more than one variable. Since we have allowed it, we may do it. And it is not relevant to refer to the forbidding of it in other calculi.} + +This is the difficulty of reading mathematics, one has to be able to read just what it says, because there is nothing in it that one may assume, apart from the knowledge of the language used and how to count\ld these are the only things taken as common. + +\endnote{(End of Session Three.)} + +Transcript Session Four: Tuesday Afternoon Morning, March 19, 1973 + +\sec Last Requests + +\transcript{\spkr{SPENCER BROWN} Well, on this last occasion I have received many requests to speak about different things, so perhaps I should deal with the requests in order. The first request is for some guidance on how I use the principles in the book Laws of Form in everyday life. And, since one of the principles which is exemplified in \bt{Laws of Form} is that you don't tell how it is that you use the principles in \bt{Laws of Form} in everyday life, I cannot comply with this request.} + +I have had another request to talk about the relationship, or distinction, call it what you will, between \e{male} and \e{female.} I guess you are asking the wrong director of the company that I represent. It is my fellow-director who is always going off on courses about how to get along with the opposite sex; while I have to stay home and actually do the work. So I get so little time---I have so little experience of either sex that I don't feel that I am qualified to say anything, apart from the fact that, even if I could say something, the subject is so big that it would seem a pity to start it on what must be the good-bye occasion. I can only say, that the more I have to deal with the opposite sex, the less I think I know about either myself or themselves, or vice versa. + +In other words, I think both of these subjects are, to some extent, personal and private talks, and other games, rather than for a relatively public lecture, for which I don't feel I have the experience to talk in any way which I feel would be authoritative. + +I do feel there's little left now for me to fiag except to thank you all very much for listening and for being such an extremely good audience as to prompt me with what to say for, some, how long is it, two, four, seven---maybe nine, ten, twelve hours, since I have been here. I feel I ought to be making a speech. But, all good things come to an end, and I could I suppose answer maybe two questions, if they don't fall within the limits of what is unanswerable. If anybody has any last requests. + +\transcript{\spkr{LILLY} I have one.} + +\sec Five Eternal Levels \& the Generation of Time + +Footnote One in \bt{Only Two Can Play This Game.} You say\fnote{Page 116.} "To cut a long story short, it turns out that there are five orders, or `levels' of eternity." Would you diagram those for me? + +\transcript{\spkr{SPENCER BROWN} Diagram them? + +\spkr{LILLY} Put five lines and a label at the end of each line. Starting with zero. I find that the following discussion gets a little unclear, because sometimes you are going in and sometimes you are coming out, And I am not clear where you are when you are doing this. + +\spkr{SPENCER BROWN} Well, it looks like an electron \aside{[Fig. 2].}\ednote{Missing?} Indeed, in some circles it is an electron. Level ought. Level one. Level two. Level three. Level four. There is a diagram of the five orders to eternity, the five levels. They are brought about---there is no about until they are brought so---by it being, it seeing, it being seeing being, it seeing being seeing being, it being seeing being seeing being, it seeing being seeing being seeing being, it being seeing being seeing being seeing being, and it finally seeing---it being seeing being seeing being seeing being---and if it tries to see that, it finds it can't without going half blind and coming out into time. + +\spkr{LILLY} So time appears where? + +\spkr{SPENCER BROWN} Next one. The first time. + +\spkr{LILLY} The first time appears outside the four levels. + +\spkr{SPENCER BROWN} That's the next look it takes, but it finds it can't see that without going half-blind. After all, as I say there, after all, time is a one-way blindness, the blind side being called the future. + +\spkr{LILLY} Where's "flippety"? + +\spkr{SPENCER BROWN} Well, it corresponds in \bt{Laws of Form} to the void, the form, the axioms which see the form. You have to get this number right, you see; because it is the number that Dionysius counts on his orders of angels, but he doesn't always arrive at the same answer.} + +\dinkus + +Then you get the arithmetic, which is seeing what becomes of the axioms. And then you be it to do it, and in being and doing it, you find that, being and doing, you see the generalities of it, and that is the algebra. And while you are seeing you notice you have got equations, something equals something else, and then suddenly you decide---aha, supposing what it equals goes back into what it comes from? Now You have generated time and matter all at once; There can be no matter without time. Time and matter come simultaneously. But this is the first matter in which the orders are counted, and it's called the "crystalline heaven," but it is not, really. Technically speaking, it's not really a heaven. And as it keeps recompounding, and re-inserting, it gets the appearance of being more and more solid, until it really, you know, is pretty durable. + +\transcript{\spkr{LILLY} It can kill you. + +\spkr{SPENCER BROWN} Well, that may be. + +\spkr{VON MEIER} It will sustain our life. + +\spkr{SPENCER BROWN} At the grave, you begin to wonder, Just who is there to be born, to be duped, to be killed? Just where is there for it to be, and just when is there for it to happen? Or, as some sage said, when he was dying and somebody was crying, and he said "Why are you crying?" and he said "Because you are leaving us. Just where did you think I could go to?"} + +\sec Consciousness + +\transcript{\spkr{LILLY} Where does consciousness first appear in that setup? + +\spkr{SPENCER BROWN} Well, it's there all---what we consider to be consciousness, in the sense of---you see, it's not called "consciousness" until suddenly you have names to begin with\ld\ but there is no meaning---it is co-extensive with existence; because what could it possibly be, anything be, let alone exist, without its being a form of consciousness of its existence. There is no problem of consciousness, none whatever. Its meaning is coextensive with whatever there is. + +\spkr{WATTS} "There was a young man who said, though it seems that I know that I know, what I would like to see is the `I' that knows me." When I know that I know that I know\ld\ I think that's what you've diagrammed.} + +\sec Waves and Particles + +\transcript{\spkr{SPENCER BROWN} In the construction of matter, all that happens is that we create the temporal and the material together by imagining that the outside feeds back into the inside. We then have a succession like this of marked and unmarked states generated by this.\fnote{See p. 60, \bt{Laws of Form} (Fig. 1 and Oscillator Function).} As long as the tunnel is there, this goes on, and when the tunnel disappears, this is of a particular length, a wave train. But, if this \aside{Fig. 2} were to go past, similarly, this would also appear as a wave train, and yet, as it is, it is---it could be an electron. If there is only one electron left---you know, all the rest were done away with---it would be quite sufficient to recreate everything. So long as there were one bit of space left, it would be quite sufficient. All would grow out of it. If there were nothing left at all, it would be quite sufficient.} + +\sec \dq{If It Is. It Isn't.} + +\transcript{\spkr{BRENDAN O'REGAN} One wonders how there can be mathematical theorems which exist about space which does not exist. + +\spkr{SPENCER BROWN} Who said space did not exist? + +\spkr{O'REGAN} You did yesterday. I was just following you through. + +\spkr{SPENCER BROWN} Oh no, no, I said, you see---in the common usage of existence, space only exists. On the other hand, if we go deeper, go to another level, and say "What does existence consist of?" then we can produce these semiparadoxical statements that say "Well, it is what would appear if it could." This leaves it open as to whether it has or hasn't. It doesn't go one side or the other of the bound. It leaves you still intake\ednote{what should this be} form, at the point of indifference.} + +It is so difficult, in the Western teaching, not to plug for one team or the other---to think that one must make a choice between either and or. In reality, it is neither one thing nor the other. There is no need of this choice. It neither is whatever we say it is, nor is it nothing. It neither exists nor does not exist. Because, remember, we have created it out of what is, in the Russellean paradox---the forbidden contradiction. It has been created out of "If it is, it isn't---if it isn't, it is." + +And this is why, to get back to the reality, we have to undo this. We do see it precisely because it neither is nor isn't whatever we see it as. Because if it is, it isn't, and if it isn't, it is, and that is why we see it as a material. + +\transcript{\spkr{O'REGAN} This point that Earl Pribram was making about that with our abilities to perceive from the sensorial point of view---one might argue that we can only perceive difference, and, in a certain sense, if you say that we can only see it because it is or because it isn't, is the process of it becoming and not becoming that we perceive? + +\spkr{SPENCER BROWN} Yes. hence, once you get to this stage, where you are once in time, now everything is a vibration of it. Vibrations---as we know, the mathematics of vibrations is always the equations with the imaginary value---if it is: it isn't, if it isn't: it is. Whichever it is, it isn't. + +\spkr{VON MEIER} It seems like the inverted image when we see with our eyes, corresponding to our tactile knowing that it is not upside down; so it's an internal systems check. + +\spkr{SPENCER BROWN} I am not sure that is on the same level. + +\spkr{VON MEIER} We have two aspects of reality to deal with---our tactile sense of gravity, knowing something, a pyramid, to be like that; but, nevertheless, seeing it and then having to translate it in our brains. We have to go through that redundancy step.} + +\sec Understanding and Standing Under + +\transcript{\spkr{SPENCER BROWN} What has to be learned in any understanding is that one can stay at the same level---one of these levels---or the others as we get on, but there is no understanding by making---say, here is the level of physical existence, with all the light waves and solid objects, and so on. They are not really very solid. You know, when you get down to trying to see them, they disappear. It is the illusion of solidity.} + +If as much of the science game, in certain aspects of it, goes and says, "right; well, we explain that in terms of this," everything at the same level, there is no understanding. Because "understanding" means literally what it says. You go into another level and stand under. And this is what we are forbidden to do.\fnote{In science.} It takes a long time of relearning, to go from level to level. When you are talking in one level, what is described is quite different from when you go to another level; and, having translated down to another level, we don't have language that will enable Us to do this. And that's why when we talk with understanding, it sounds to people at the same level all the time, it sounds like nonsense. They say: "you are contradicting yourself." Of course you are contradicting yourself, because what is at this level is Man\ednote{fix...?} image. It is all reversed. + +\sec Contradictions + +\transcript{\spkr{MAN} Do you shoot back and forth? + +\spkr{SPENCER BROWN} Yes. That is why all the mystic utterances contradict themselves. Wittgenstein pointed out that a measure of a tautology, a statement which is true by the very nature of its form---"If $A$, then $B$ and $A$, therefore $B$," that's a tautology---a form of words which has the same truth value as being true whatever you substitute for the variables---Wittgenstein pointed out in Tractatus that all tautologies say the same thing, i. e. nothing. They say not a thing. What he missed out was that---He missed out the image of this---he missed out the other end of this continuum, the other end being the contradiction, which says everything. You can't say all about it without contradicting yourself.} + +We have so many social values that spill over into our university training, even in so-called objective subjects like logic. Somehow, contradictions are good---sorry, somehow tautologies are good and contradictions are bad. Now this is childish, childish pratings, and you can see how it has arisen. It comes from the nursery, as do most of these things. The nurse says, "naughty Johnny you have told an untruth." "Good Johnny here is a sweet---you have told me the truth." Since tautologies are true, and contradictions are untrue, technically speaking, we have carried this over---contradictions are naughty and tautologies are nice, good things. So one of the reasons for the whole cultural forbidding of mysticism is that it deals in statements that say everything and, therefore, must be contradictory, therefore must be logically false, and, therefore, are naughty. + +\transcription{\spkr{WATTS} A contradiction is a no-no. We've become used to that expression in the United States. + +\spkr{SPENCER BROWN} Well, I don't know what that means.} + +I am going to come back to one of the beautiful things of Roth, you see. As I called it in \bt{Only Two}, the spectacular introduction to Dionysius the Areopagite. It really is spectacular. I do recommend it. It is much better than Dionysius. It is much better than the book. He originally has this marvelous thing which we were talking about earlier---"and all this went on in perfect harmony until the time came, for time to begin." Utterly contradictory, but, you know, it's the only way to talk of this, because we have to talk in language which---language, you see, is built for a level. That's why when you learn a language, you know, you are confronted with such fatuities as "The pen of my aunt is in the posterior, whereas my---";\ednote{huh?} you know that sort of thing. It's all on this level because this is what makes it respectable. Language is not something designed for shifting gears up and down the levels. + +\sec Injunctive Language + +\transcript{\spkr{LILLY} You talk about the injunctive use of language, however. + +\spkr{SPENCER BROWN} Yes. This is the only way we can do it\fnote{Latin \e{pungere}, to prick, gives PUNCTURE and PUN; the pun pokes a hole through the boundary.} because it has to be done in mathematics, and also has to be done in the tutelage of any discipline. The descriptive use of language just describes, you know. We say "describe a circle," and here we have described it, you see. The injunctive use of language now enables us to cross---cross the line.} + +Injunctive language has to be used in any field in which the discipline itself is to move from level to level; and this is why the whole of mathematics, which is simply about this---apart from the precision and description, which is an art in itself, taken at one level, and this is why the language of mathematics is so beautiful---but apart from that it is nothing but orders: do this---stand there---consider that---observe this---move here---call that over there---mix these two. + +\transcript{\spkr{LILLY} Once you have absorbed the cookbook for changing levels, do you need it any more? + +\spkr{SPENCER BROWN} Once you have observed the what? + +\spkr{LILLY} Absorbed. Once you have taken all the injunctions, the list, your set of instructions, and absorbed it, and now it's part of your thinking machinery, yourself, do you deed it any more? + +\spkr{SPENCER BROWN} Only---well, it's like saying, "do you need it if you want to play a piece on the piano?" "Do you need it if you want to read a bit of mathematics?" You need the experience of being able to read injunctions. You see, most people cannot read injunctions. One of the things one has to learn is to read injunctions. + +\spkr{LILLY} ---And use them. + +\spkr{SPENCER BROWN} And follow them, yes. + +\spkr{LILLY} A cookbook can only be used by a cook. + +\spkr{SPENCER BROWN} Well, a cook has the experience. If it is used by a non-cook--`-a non-cook has to take more care. It can be. Just as mathematics can be used, you know, by somebody who has never seen it before. But the care has to be very great. In a cookbook, you know, the recipe only lasts a few pages, whereas in mathematics, a complete argument may last 150 pages, maybe, and that means that every step previous, in order to be able to follow what's going on, has to be remembered. Otherwise you lose track of what you are doing. And part of the discipline is learning to remember. + +\spkr{WATTS} The point might also be made that a great deal of mystical literature is injunctive and is misunderstood by philosophers as being descriptive. + +\spkr{SPENCER BROWN} Oh, yes. I would guess so. + +\spkr{WATTS} Take Patanjali.} + +\sec Opinions and Knowledge + +\transcript{\spkr{SPENCER BROWN} Yes, people without the injunctive discipline in mathematics, apart from cookery and things that aren't generally admitted into the academic curriculum---mathematics is the only subject of any importance in the academic curriculum which uses injunctive language. And it is not chance that it is the only subject which doesn't deal in opinion. Because, in the use of injunction, it is not a matter of opinion what the result is going to be, you know.} + +And it's when we get very---these people who have been very sloppily educated; and they have, as we did back in England recently, a program on the television and they were all social scientists, and they said "Well, we have a measure of madness, and it is to know something." If you know it, you are mad, you see. If you only think it, well, that's sane. The great ignorance these people displayed, you see, is the ignorance of the queen of the sciences, as mathematics is often called. For example, let's take this book I was mentioning before, which is such a beautiful book in three volumes---Dickson's \bt{History of the Theory of Numbers}. Oh, I don't know---there is 1500 to 2000 pages\fnote{1601 in 3 vols; 486, 802, 313.} absolutely crammed full---not a single opinion---it's all knowledge---it is all what is so. The gross ignorance expressed by these people, you see. This dealing in opinion can only be done by the ignoring of the disciplines of knowledge. Because, if it is an opinion, then it must be wrong-because if it were not so, if it were not wrong, then it would be knowledge, and it wouldn't be an opinion. So when---you know, when somebody comes and says "I think so"---well, that's an opinion. If you knew it, you wouldn't think it. + +As for the other trick which is played, which is---"you know, you don't know anything, you see, you don't know a thing, you know." You say, "oh yes, I know what I had for breakfast." "Oh no, you may have forgotten, you may have made a mistake." The proposition that such people produce is that anything---Russell, himself, was one of these. You know, he said "I don't even know that two and two make four. You see, I may have been mistaken---" It is put more cogently than I could put it, my heart isn't in it. He was laboring a point because it was necessary for his subsequent statement that he should establish this, you see. So the theory---"you don't know---you know nothing at all---it's all a matter of opinion"---and, well, the question I always ask such people is "how do you know this? How do you know that nobody knows anything? How do you know it is only a matter of opinion?" + +\transcript{\spkr{WATTS} Isn't that the same kind of a question, when you say to a relativist---"You mean that everything is absolutely relative?" + +\spkr{SPENCER BROWN} Well, it is the same kind of throwing back his own system at him to show that he cannot support himself. There is the bland statement which really comes out in the form, "I know that nobody can know anything." + +\spkr{MAN} That's the paradox. + +\spkr{SPENCER BROWN} Well, all you have got to do is say "how do you know?" + +\spkr{MAN} I can't tell you. + +\spkr{SPENCER BROWN} No. + +\spkr{O'REGAN} Some of your analysis of contradiction, and whole notion of crossing over from marked to the unmarked would almost suggest that contradiction, in a sense, is the form of form. It is what we can see when one arrives at that stage. Maybe the book could be the "Laws of Contradictions" just as much as the \bt{Laws of Form.} + +\spkr{SPENCER BROWN} Well, I am always careful about putting something greater into a smaller pot. Yous see, whenever we are speaking of contradiction, it is at such a more superficial level, because we are now already in language, and so on. Whereas in \bt{Laws of Form} the form is operative at every level. Whereas contradiction is only operative in something like our speaking. That's why, you know, although it's illustrative, it wouldn't do as a substitute. + +\spkr{LILLY} In the act of creation, using a self-referential tunnel feedback, can you move from inward to outward on your five levels, or your orders here, or is this just restricted to the first distinction? + +\spkr{SPENCER BROWN} I am not quite sure---you mean, "can you distinguish the five eternal orders?" + +\spkr{LILLY} Right. One from the other, moving from one level to the other, using the self-referential feedback, in each case, so that you get an oscillation between the two levels. + +\spkr{SPENCER BROWN} There's no feedback in heaven. + +\spkr{LILLY} OK. At what point do you create feedback?} + +\sec Feedback at the Fifth Crossing + +\transcript{\spkr{SPENCER BROWN} When you go into the first temporal existence. + +\spkr{LILLY} So you have got to be on six? + +\spkr{SPENCER BROWN} Five. + +\spkr{MAN} Going up. + +\spkr{SPENCER BROWN} It's the fifth crossing. + +\spkr{LILLY} So the paradox does not appear until the fifth crossing. + +\spkr{SPENCER BROWN} That's right. No, there is no time before that, and that is why they are eternal, the others. You think that it is going to. You don't know that it is going to happen, you see. Yous are coming out, you know---it's OK, it's still eternal, you know, you can still see the whole. And you get one too---you know, you get a little overconfident. Well, why stop here? Let's try going out a bit-farther. Now where are we? + +\spkr{LILLY} You spoke of the fifth order equation as being runaway. + +\spkr{SPENCER BROWN} That's in numerical mathematics, yes. + +\spkr{LILLY} Now, where do they apply here? + +\spkr{SPENCER BROWN} Oh, they are not in here---this is just an analogy. + +\spkr{LILLY}: This is outside them. + +\spkr{SPENCER BROWN} Yes, the fifth order---you know, there is evidence all over the universe of a special state where you come to the fifth degree or the fifth whatever it may be, and bang, it changes.\fnote{Humpty Dumpty had his great fall, from which he could not be put together again, on the fifth crossing. \bt{Through the Looking-Glass} is instructive in following the discussion of the levels of the cosmos. Alice starts on the zero square, and takes her first step through the mirror (Monkey dives through waterfall) landing on Q2---the second square, cardinal number one, in the marked state behind the glass.} It was all self-contained before that. This is a technical point mathematically in the question of solving equations for the varying degrees. You can solve degree one, this is ordinary numerical algebra. We can solve degree two. There is a formula, an algebraic formula, which most of us learn in school, for doing that. And by an extension of that we can solve degree four, also by an algebraic formula. I missed out three---we can do that, you see, and then the further extension of four. And everybody thought for quite a long time, I don't know just exactly when it was, not so long ago, that if only we could find this, we could find the formula for degree five equations---find the roots, and so on. In fact, we can't, because, without going into detail, something has been---something overtakes something else. Instead of your being able to reduce it to the equations of a lesser degree, you suddenly find that your reduction uses degrees that are higher degrees than you have already started with. + +\spkr{LILLY} It's an expanding system. + +\spkr{SPENCER BROWN} It runs away, and there is no winning formula for finding the roots--you just have to find them ad hoc. + +\spkr{LILLY} So it becomes a partial feedback system. + +\spkr{VON MEIER} Divination. + +\spkr{SPENCER BROWN} Yes, it runs away, it runs away. Before, you could get back by rule. After that, there are no rules for getting back. You may hit upon a rule, but there is no rule for finding it\ld\ It becomes more, you know, lots of rules of thumb. Like in the present existence---run away with itself a long way. And, you know, there are no formulae for getting back. There are a lot of ad-hoc rules. + +\spkr{WATTS} We should pause to change the tape, James. + +\spkr{SPENCER BROWN} Well, is it finished? Nice meeting you. We have been spinning it out, but in the end there is really nothing to say. + +\spkr{LILLY} Well, thank you very much for coming all this way to talk to us, and we hope that you will come back. + +\spkr{WATTS} If you'll come back for a more leisurely session. + +\spkr{SPENCER BROWN} Well, I hope it can be yes. + +\spkr{MAN} The beginning of the end. + +\spkr{LILLY} We've gone from zero to---} + +\endnote{(End of Session Four.)} +\endnote{(End of tape.)} + +\chap Book Proposal: The OMasters + + By Cliff Barney and Kurt von Meier + +The OMasters is an imaginary adventure framing real events: the sudden appearance of a teacher or teaching that tokens the radical reformulation of a prevailing world view. The fantasy story is about a group of children from the present generation with an extraordinary capacity for embracing paradoxes--logical and psychological--who enter higher orders of complexity motivated primarily by aesthetic delight. + +The OMasters, sublime though innocent generalists, contemplate sophisticated processes while we are still computing products. A precocious and powerful inner circle of the group, known as The Lords of Form, move about the world in disguise developing intellectual foundations for NOVACULT from imaginary holograms generated by interference patterns between pure mathematics and Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhism, whale songs and Hopi Kachina dances. As refined by the Lords of Form, the "Flippety" principle of Distinguish/Embrace is put into practice by The OMasters, producing technological advances such as the Optical Process Bio-Interface Computer, the Adamantine Bit, and a new critical apparatus for literature and the arts. + +Principal historical hero for The OMasters is G. Spencer Brown, a "mythematician," also sportsman, inventor, poet and former philosophy don. He appears at a conference of psychocosmic scientists, scholars and artists (attended clandestinely by one of the Lords of Form), where he offers a discourse on "laws of form"--a highly conceptualized vision of the Void--explaining what these laws are and how they are generated. A paradigm of how we may imagine them to appear is already published: an ultra-condensed textbook called Laws of Form (Julian Press, New York, 1972). It is a calculus of indications in which the use of imaginary values provides a new theoretical basis for electronic switching, Boolean algebra and all binary systems, and so too for more complex orders of number and measure. + +As read by The OMasters, Laws of Form is a major poem on the order of the Divine Comedy, in that each contains a vision of what has been called "Eternity." Both poets describe what remains constant in a universe of change: Dante's epic recounts the journey inward, toward a mystical union with God, while Brown's system indicates the Void at the center, and as in Buddhist sutras works outward through the use of injunctive language, generating archetypal patterns from the basic act of distinction. "Angels" in the Commedia become "consequences" in the calculus, which relationship Brown makes explicit. The two texts are reports on a vision not merely private but common to all sentient beings, and capable of being understood in the same way by all humanity. + +The "Eternal" realm has been described by all major religions, documented in the West by Jung, among others, and experienced through inspiration, meditation, and psychedelics. The Laws of Form show how it is that all these visions are technically and formally the same. The OMasters use Brown's teaching to define a basic ground for thoir associative metaconsciousness version of the Glass Bead Game. + +With the Lords of Form as vanguard, The OMasters acquire and analyse a transcript of Brown's excurses on the text. As though it were a golden fleece, they spin from the transcript their thread of associations, which are woven into a Sufi story/science fantasy illustrating the discourse and commenting on it. Brown's avatar appears as an intergalactic voyager who assists in deciphering the diamond-hard message, providing the keys for step-down transformations from the abstract calculus to everyday life situations, and for step-up transformations to interspecies and outer space communication. + +The frame story unfolds as three interlacing accounts of The 0Masters in action, featuring Primo the Fool, Woody Nicholson, and Shakuhachi Unzen, in respectively a space opera, a celebration of the myth of America, and an East-West fantasy farce. Historical, technical and utterly fictive events are arranged as mirrors [n a fun house to catch the play of real and imaginary values. Through the warp of science and scholarship we shuttle the thread of fantastic delight. + +Primo has all the correct maps--Laws of Form, the I Ching, a Tarot deck, Robert's Rules of Order--but he doesn't know how to read them. They lie on the Crystal Navigation Table of the Gravity/Gracewarpship. Adamantinus, whose captain has vanished, leaving the controls on a course set for the Black Hole in Cygnus. From the confused advice and theoretical formulations offered by the desperado experts of his cosmic crew, he selects a true course through the warp, guided by contemplating the Yellow Pearl, an incarnation of the Queen of Heaven herself. + +As Woodrow Nicholson, our hero appears at the head of his party in '76, by which time we have a whole string of backup Vice Presidents. Woody is the 22d, kept roving (for security) in the last of tho Winnebagoes on a circuit of national parks and supermarket parking lots. However, he is impelled to pick up the standard when his precedents are all wiped out in a wicked game of "21" by Ahab McGaff, proprietor of the Double Cross ( ~ ) Saloon in 'Vegas, and international purveyor of contraband whalemeat. Supported by the Sufia, Woody openly challenges Ahab, who is also the secret head of MaFie, the spiritual materialist monopoly. Following the tradition of the Eisteddfodd in Wales, Woody schedules a special competition to replace elections: the Grand Noshinals, to be held on the Fourth of July --with the winning recipe from the eat-offs to determine the identity of the Vajrayogini, our first woman president. Ahab tries simultaneously to fix the Eisteddfodd and, through his show business connections, to produce it for global television. + +Shakuhachi Unzen is dishwasher and garbageman at the Teahouse of Necessity, where late each night he serves an installment of the Feast of 4001 Fools. Despite his clownish circumstances, Shakuhachi operates in the ancient tradition of Ninja, martial arts masters of invisibility. In compiling a cookbook of spontaneous concoctions, he discovers a magic recipe which induces the illusion of instant enlightenment--but he must await the appropriate recipient before the real transmission can be completed. + +Our book is in the tradition of Alice's Adventures--an imaginary, someways serious consideration of logic and paradox. There really was a conference, organized by John C. Lilly, M. D., and the late Alan Watts, and attended by the present authors, at Esalen Institute, Big Sur, Calif.; G. Spencer Brown did appear there and discuss his calculus and the Laws of Form generally. Complementing actual events, the stories provide a vehicle for our own commentary on the Laws of Form, and frame contributions from Brown and other participants in the conference. We also provide a bibliography of the reference net with which we hunt the white whale of imagination, Moby Blick. Such a paradigmatic approach to information systems offers refreshing possibilities for scholarship: a positive, cheerful blueprint for reconstruction after the seemingly imminent collapse of the Tower of Babel, when Finnegan Falsegain. + +A receptive audience for this book may be found among the literary/spiritual/body movement/consciousness adepts who have made Carlos Castaneda's adventures with Don Juan best-sellers. The text should have a campus market, and a place in university libraries as a map of the territory explored in depth by disciplines with tree-logic structures. There is potential for a mass audience; science-fiction fans will enjoy the book, and likely as well readers of the New Yorker, Scientific American, and the slick and hip media (Today, of course, one would add Wired). Out of the three Sufi stories we can derive a television series and perhaps an animated cartoon. Presumably we could spin off Shakuhachi T-shirts, nickel Woody buttons, models of the Adamantinus, and other promotional gimmix. + +Recalling Gurdjieff's recommendations for reading Tales of Beelzebub three times through, we all but guarantee Complete Enlightenment when our book is read as directed: once as a child, again when mature, and finally when mellow with age. + +Working Outline +I. Frame +Recognizing Laws of Form as a vision of the Eternal regions, the Lords of Form dispatch Philip Taoed, secret agent 109, to Esalen to make contact with G. Spencer Brown. This chapter is Taoed's report, confirming Brown's role as intergalactic messenger and culture-bringer. It contains a dossier on Brown, and introduces the other participants in the conference. Discussion of the nature of the fifth crossing, from Eternity into the imaginary (temporal) state. +II. Processing +Transcript of Brown's remarks, obtained by Taoed, analyzed by the Lords of Form. They want to get his number, which is coded into the discussion of primes in Session 2 of the text. Technical experts from Sufi Central provide data on injunctive and descriptive language, myth and folklore, the Synod of Whitby, and the nature of Brown's cosmology. Particular attention paid to the "covenant of the cradle." Notes by Taoed on obscure sections of the transcript. This document, profound, precise and most eloquent in its argument, a discussion of the formal relationships of science and culture, makes up a significant portion of the chapter. +III. Models +To balance his own report, and illuminate its biases, Taoed provides an appendix detailing what happened at Esalen after Brown left: mini-synod over the issue of how to chant the sutras of Laws of Form; the calculus put to music by the Brown Cross Chorale (sheet music provided); Carl Pribram lectures on cognitive processing and brain structure, with introduction of the adamantine isomorph, a grammar for information processing; Heinz von Foerster constructs reality, and John Lilly simulates it. +Interlude +Listening to the Brown tapes, the OMasters focus on the Yellow Pearl, onion-formed around a diamond seed and containing in its layered patterns the Fourier transform of the three Sufi stories of Primo the Fool, Woody Nicholson, and Shakuhachi Unzen. Scanning the Pearl with telepathic transmissions at microwave frequencies, the OMasters perform the ecstatic group meditation that generates the dream, in the form of an animated hologram (as outlined by Pribram in the preceding chapter). +IV. Primo +Alone on the bridge, Primo must discover how to control the Adamantinus and divert it from its course for the Black Hole in Cygnus. He is coupled to the ship through the bio-interface computer, which he programs through changes in his metabolism and brainwave patterns induced by diet, chanting, and meditation. Over the videocom, he is instructed in the use of the maps on the Crystal Navigation Table by Melvin Fine, the Hasidic mandarin and expert on the I Ching; gestalted by the Phantom Shrink; taught formal rituals by the gurus of Apura, a branch of MaFie; led into the paths of vegetarianism by Richheart Nobleson, stoned-out playboy desert painter; and occasionally heckled by the captain himself in the guise of the omniscient Jose Que. + +All efforts to control the ship fail, however, until Primo is distracted by the sudden appearance of the very pregnant Red Queen of Heaven. Following instructions from Joyce James, graduate Wellesley medievalist, he acts as midwife for the delivery of the infant Yellow Pearl. In the act of catching the baby, he staggers backward into the control panel, short-circuiting the board and jolting the Adamantinus off its course, through the gravity/gracewarp into the America of Woody Nicholson's struggle with Ahab McGaff. +V. Woody Nicholson +In this episode, Primo assumes the role of Matt Wells, agent for Scotland Fields, who progresses through the archetypes of the Tarot deck in his search tor the Yellow Pearl. She appears this time as the 12-year-old T'ai Chi star of the Peking Opera, whose disappearance during a tour of the United States has created an international incident. The government itself is in turmoil, the president and the first 21 vices having been wiped out by Ahab at the Double Cross Saloon. Woody Nicholson directs affairs of state from his superbly outfitted Winnebago, shuttling from national park to strip mall parking lot to avoid the agents of MaFie, Ahab's spiritual materialist monopoly. + +Though this chapter has a number of subplots, auch as Matt's mission and the race between MaFie and the Sufia to discover the secret of interspecies communication with whales and dolphins (and thus to receive messages froa the galactic center), the climax is the Grand Noshinals, the Eisteddfodd arranged by Woody to restore poetry and music to the electoral process. The winning recipe [s submitted by the Yellow Pearl herself; it is for the Ling Chi, the ancient Chinese elixir of life, in the form of an amanita muscaria hors d'oeuvre topped by a special black mayonnaise. To prevent the Yellow Pearl from becoming the first woman president, Ahab seeks an injunction against her on the grounds that she is not an American citizen. Scholarly research into her ancestry reveals the history of the Teahouse of Necessity and the role of Shakuhachi Unzen as the unrecognized master chef. +VI. Shakuhachi Unzen +The Teahouse of Necessity where Shakuhachi works as dishwasher and garbageman is set in a bamboo grove planted by the Oriental immigrants to California during gold rush days. Late each night after the cook gets off, Shakuhachi selects dregs for mixing into a sometimes magical concoction that is offered to distinguished visitors, carefully documenting the recipes and reactions. Philip Taoed, in a time-warp disguise as the 4001st Fool, the wandering King of Troy, is ushered by Unzen to the Yellow Pearl in an earlier American incarnation, who anoints Taoed with the Shakti Lymphatic Massage. Pressing his button, the Yellow Pearl causes Taoed to reveal the true motive of his cosmic travels before the llama A1 Paca, resident spiritual materialist secretly on a warp of hls own. + +Al Paca deviously programs the Gravity/Gracewarp capture of the Teahouse and its occupants, but is eluded by Shakuhachi, who hides in the well, where he meets various ghosts claiming to be Abbott and Costello, Rowand and Martin, Martin and Lewis, Lewis and Clark, etc. Unzen is forced to wander, as he completes a tour of the New World, retracing the Hopi migrations, retaining in his memory the magic recipe without which Al Paca and the others cannot return. + +Matt Wells and Shakuhachi cross paths at Four Corners just as Primo backs into enlightenment. After a wild goose chase through Monument Valley, they join up with Woody and the Sufia for a titanic encounter with Ahab McGaff, Mafie and the Llama Al Paca. This resolution of the three stories is carefully attended by the OMasters, who award honors for style in a critical bibliography, and elevate the Yellow Pearl as Queen of Indices. \bye
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