Finding out last minute at the end of last week, I attended the Laws of Form Conference at the Old Library, Liverpool University, 19 Abercromby Square L69 7ZN, UK. It was 17 minutes away by rail, so I made the short walk from Lime Street Station, as pre-existing commitments allowed.
The Society, devoted to the ideas and work of George Spencer-Brown is quite new 2023. I was greeted with a welcome that actively encourages the widest range of ideas as relates to LoF, the AGM also revealed future plans.
I've been on the LoF mail list for many years and every so often I've replied to themes that also touch thinking on Hodges' model. Now trying to look at Hodges' model more formally, learning of the conference I had to attend.
At the close today the vote of thanks expressed for the support of University of Liverpool and West DenHaag was shared here.
After the introduction, the first session by Andrew Crompton, of The Alternative Natural Philosophy Association, How to Make a Horse Vanish included insights into the scope of George Spencer-Brown's thought, combining philosophy, design, and architecture with great visuals. All the sessions were interesting, helpful and stimulating, including several that were technical detailing applications of Laws of Form:
".. Spencer-Brown has pointed out that he discovered an arithmetic that underlies Boolean algebra. This arithmetic is the Spencer-Brown Calculus of Indications generated by the mark <> (here written in typographical form) subject to the relations of calling, <><>=<>, and crossing, <<>> = , where, in crossing, the two marks are erased in the plane of writing. .."
KEYNOTE Louis H Kauffman, Arithmetic in 'Laws of Form' - also Weds 7th Aug.
Even though I could not understand the approach, listening to purposes, application and and the terminology is useful.
I was online Thursday, and only followed the first two sessions. I have been exasperated with the various -isms, a response possibly shared with Jonathan Mize, Mind, Your Business: Reimagining business, art and science:
"The world is aching for a fresh approach to how we interact with one another. A popular prescription for our ailment is some type of new “ism,” some meticulously engineered set of dictums that propose to “fix society” once and for all. In this paper, I offer no “isms,” no grand new paradigms and no set of rules that humanity “must follow,” lest they slip into oblivion. What I offer is something very simple—a re-seeing of our approach to our everyday lives, a lifting of the vision from the “ills” and the “evils” of the world to the potential for our collective creation and experience. ..." Thurs 8th Aug.
Secondly, Diego Lucio Rapoport Campodonico, presented The Geometry and Topology of the Primal Distinction: Phenomenology and cosmo-sociomorphisms. If the public's understanding of science can be represented as a morphism, then it was extended here so I will explore.
There was a slide in the session of Florian Grote, Playing the Game of Counting to Two: On the question of requisite re-entries in communication including artificial intelligence (Friday 9th August), that I could immediately relate to Hodges' model:
"In the poem which provided the title for the book Only Two Can Play This Game, James Keys (1971) aka George Spencer-Brown provides the reader with a thorough reflection on the unlikely inevitability of a communicative – a social – world."
I can't cover all the examples of interest, but over the years systems, systems theory invariably crop up. Through the UKSS and Open University I have come across people with ties to the Schumacher Inst.. This thread continued 10th Aug, with Laws of Context with Philip Franses.
Hans Rudolf Straub's
The Form and the Bit as Basic Building Blocks of Information: A comparison stood out as a source of reading conjoining LoF and informatics.
Marcus J. Carney's talk (also Sat 10th) L
etting Go. The Form of Mourning reminded me of what does a single discipline mean when it uses the term 'applied'? Nursing a cold I didn't want to use the mic, but I think Marcus's work could support theory given the attention on trauma-informed care and therapy at present. There were obvious immediate connections in the abstract, borne out (well delivered!) in his presentation.
"Threnos in antiquity was understood as the activity of mourning. S. Freud dichotomised mourning with melancholia, entangling both in libido. A. and M. Mitscherlich took this up in the 1960s for the German people post Holocaust as their “inability to mourn”. J. Ruesen tried “Trauer” in this context again in the 1990s as “mourning humaneness”, bloating its abstraction. While M. Rothberg introduced the notion of “implicated subject” to the field/s of historical violence and injustices to modify R. Hilberg’s perpetrator-victim-bystander triad in 2019, the German “Historikerstreit 2.0” was raging, but not about Rothberg’s “implication”, yet about his 2009 concept of “multidirectional memory”, wherewith he demonstrated how the Holocaust had enabled the articulation of other histories of victimisation at the same time that it had been declared "unique" among human-perpetrated horrors, while uncovering the more surprising fact that public memory of the Holocaust emerged in part thanks to postwar events that seemingly had little to do with it."
As noted in a previous post, there's also the approach of
Parallel Histories. You wonder from where dialogue can follow: Israel and Palestine ... but it must. On Wednesday the recent rioting impinged on proceedings with directions to close earlier and dining plans impacted.
After too many years I must explore George Spencer-Brown's Laws of Form and try to apply it to Hodges' model as an additional and alternative theoretical resource.
The GSB Society have a forthcoming journal which I will post about here as details follow.
The next conference is in 2026 and will be based in Cambridge - a great prospective source of ideas.
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