Laws of form
by George Spencer-Brown · first published 1969
53% recommend47% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Short, dense work building logic from a single distinction, drawing a boundary. Praised as an elegant foundation for boolean logic and a route into cybernetics, systems thinking and formal logic. For curious readers.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
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• "Laws of Form" by George Spencer-Brown, a little book that describes how to bootstrap the Universe from nothing. Louis Kauffman [1] has a lot of papers/writeups on it, from knot theory to quantum physics. If you ever…
on “Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?” ↗Would you also consider then: _The Laws of Form_ by George Spencer Brown, Anything about logic by Gotthard Günther :) (He's a rare bird.) _Autopoiesis and Cognition: the Realization of the Living_ by Maturana and Varela Anything by Niklass Luhmann…
on “Alan Kay's reading list” ↗If you liked that you'll like this: http://www.markability.net/ It's a walk-through of George Spencer-Brown's Laws of Form. It turns out all logic can be modeled by simple containment, and there's a complete basis (discovered by Bricken): A() = () ((A))B = AB A(AB) = A(B) One interesting thing about LoF notation…
on “Logic, Explainability and the Future of Understanding” ↗…shortsighted and works against intrinsic motivations to learn. That being said I learned about cybernetics in a sociology class. Getting to know Shannon, Wiener, Von Foerster, George Spencer Brown ("Laws of Form" highly recommended reading) and Luhmann was the most interesting stuff I ever got to learn.
on “A Mathematical Theory of Communication (1948) [pdf]” ↗…Statistical madlibs for text generation, but useful for understanding people. There is a deeper and simpler logic of nonphysical consciousness that is perhaps best outlined in George Spencer Brown’s Laws of Form. LoF can do boolean logic but goes beyond it as well, towards the resolution of paradox with the logic of distinction. It is also an interesting philosophy when it comes to Systems Theory of Luhmann.…
on “Have we lost our minds?” ↗Another fascinating and strange book on logic — The Laws of Form — is worth tracking down. Even more strange, the only other book published by the author, under a pseudonym.
on “The Strangest Book on the Theory of Computation (2009)” ↗Yeah the Laws of Form notation is very elegant and provides a really profound conceptual foundation. Always loved the book and the people who've tried to take it even further (some surprisingly good discussion on the LoF yahoo…
on “Logic, Explainability and the Future of Understanding” ↗…"general education". I tried to pick books that would be assessable and useful for them. A lot of the books you mention were listed in the Whole Earth Catalog, and were favorites at PARC. Especially "Laws of Form". And some of the other "Cybernetics" circle books (Bateson et al was part of the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics, etc.) Both Maturana and Varela were around in those times as well. Minsky was a huge…
on “Alan Kay's reading list” ↗An alternative to abstraction is to use iconic forms and boundary math (containerization and void-based reasoning). See Laws of Form and William Bricken's books recently. Using a unary operator instead of binary (Boolean) does indeed seem simpler, in keeping with Nature. Introduction: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....
on “How has mathematics gotten so abstract?” ↗…If you want to build machines that do things use Cybernetics and feedback/control theory, if you want to grok reality and self eat a mushroom and read "Gödel, Escher, Bach" or Tao Te Ching. In re: "Laws of Form", yeah, he identifies the boundary or distinction between the mystic realm (non-form, non-distinct, non-dual) and symbolic logic, and then builds a lovely binary Boolean logic directly off of that. It's…
on “We must seek a widely-applicable science of systems” ↗See also "The Markable Mark": http://www.markability.net/ It's an introduction to logic using George Spencer-Brown's Laws of Form notation.
on “Gamifying propositional logic: QED, an interactive textbook” ↗…the foundation of the whole of symbolic thought, and it is intrinsically a geometric act. http://www.markability.net > ... what is to be found in these pages is a reworking of material from the book Laws of Form. > Think of these pages, if you like, as a study in origination; where I am thinking of 'origin' not in the historical sense but as something more like the timeless grounding of one idea on or in another.…
on “Ask HN: What startup/technology is on your 'to watch' list?” ↗…compute the same results as each other. Wolfram goes on about this some. I sometimes wonder about the possible form of the "Platonic Ideal" is that each of these systems represent. George Spencer-Brown's Laws of Form seems to me to be the ultimate concrete example, but that's not a universally held opinion. :)
on “The Repeated Deaths of OOP (2015)” ↗Oh wow, a reference to Laws of Form (George Spencer-Brown), takes me back!
on “To Dissect a Mockingbird: A Graphical Notation for the Lambda Calculus (1996)” ↗…pretending meanwhile to be diligently engaged in the frantic diversions and to conform with the deadening personal opinions which are continually being thrust upon them.” –George Spencer Brown in The Laws of Form, 1969
on “Rich Hickey: Reducers - A Library And Model For Collection Processing” ↗