Deep Dive: Math and Magic and The Laws of Form

Beware — if reading this blog doesn't challenge you intellectually, I would be surprised. Our topic will delve into knowledge scarcely any people possess despite it being freely available on the internet. “The Laws of Form” by George Spencer-Brown is significant in a way to which only the three religious books (and similar ones about Buddhism for example) (Old Testament, New Testament and the Quran) are comparable. Enjoy: https://archive.org/details/lawsofform00spenrich

To build it up a bit, I have to write about a conversation I don't recall precisely. Essentially, I was told that this book is similar to the secret knowledge of the Kabbalah.

When I lived in Mewasseret Zion, a suburb of Jerusalem, for an internship in 2005 (or 2006?) as part of my university-program, my boss told me about a Kabbalah meeting he attended because Madonna, the singer, attended the same meeting. He told me that to be initiated, one had to be married and have a child. The good news is — “The Laws of Form” doesn't have any more requirements than opening a link on the World Wide Web.

It stings my old world European pride that this book has been written by a citizen of the “brexited” United Kingdom. At least, he wasn't a citizen of the United States. That would sting a lot more. In honour of George Spencer-Brown, I write this blog in British English. You are probably wondering by now why I haven't actually talked about the book yet. Point taken.

The book “The Laws of Form” creates a new mathematic based partially on the liar's paradox in a slightly altered form: “This statement is false.” Normally, the liar's paradox is described with “This sentence is a lie.”, but because this book is about mathematics, the change makes a lot of sense. According to Radical Constructivism (or René Descartes, some centuries earlier) we know nothing outside the fact that we exist because we can doubt that we exist.

Our brain receives electrical signals from various sources. We all know that it is easy to create and alter electrical signals. For that reason, our world view is an uneducated guess that works well for our daily routines. When shopping in the supermarket, second guessing your optical senses complicates things unnecessarily. Looking at our perception of time makes it obvious that our interpretation of time can't be correct because if time is linear, there needs to be a starting point before the Big Bang. We can't explain why anything exists or how it started to exist. Introducing a God only adds a variable, but can't answer the question of how God began to be. So we can safely say that our interpretation of time is practical, but also undeniably wrong.

There are countless explanations of the quantum world and if you are interested, I'm sure you can find many relevant resources. I'm just using it as a second example of why our world view has to be wrong. If you want to hear George Spencer-Brown talk about this topic, click on my quote or, for your convenience, this link: https://www.kurtvonmeier.com/blog-1/2018/1/14/on-audio-alan-watts-and-g-spencer-brown-discuss-laws-of-form

The book “Laws of Form” introduces a method to describe things, that usually make our brains hurt, like paradoxes or the eternity of space. Explaining this is probably far too complex to attempt in a blog article. Of course, I will try it anyway.

Let's start with three bullet points I shamelessly stole from Wikipedia:

The “primary arithmetic” (described in Chapter 4 of LoF), whose models include Boolean arithmetic;
The “primary algebra” (Chapter 6 of LoF), whose models include the two-element Boolean algebra (hereinafter abbreviated 2), Boolean logic, and the classical propositional calculus;
“Equations of the second degree” (Chapter 11), whose interpretations include finite automata and Alonzo Church’s Restricted Recursive Arithmetic (RRA).

If you don't understand the content of these three bullet points, yet, you probably have an easier time understanding the following statement: Because this new mathematic is based on a paradox, it can deal with things that maths typically cannot describe. For example, religion or magic. A study found in 2006 of the around 2000 participants that around 70% of the respondents believe to have had an unexplained paranormal event that changed their lives, mostly in a positive way. Read it again. The participants believe not only that supernatural things might exist, but they claim to actually have had an impactful encounter with something supernatural. This doesn't account for those lying about it because they would rather not be perceived as crazy. In short, most of the human population believes in some sort of magic.

What if “magic” was actually material, in the same way that light is a paradox (particle or wave), maybe we just lack the tools to measure it because of the uncertainty principle?

The book “Laws of Form” teaches the tools to describe the things we can't truly describe without it. Religious traditions like the Kabbalah or Buddhism allow describing phenomena like Quantum Entanglement as well. But for most of tl.net, it's probably easier to read a book about mathematics than to reach the Enlightenment.

One cautionary tale, however. This book is magical in some way. People react very differently once they understand the principle called “reentry”. Women tend to deal with it easier. I got kicked into a massive manic episode after I finally understood the reentry while being in the bathtub in 2016. That was followed by a long phase of depression, which I came out of only a few months ago. Don't worry, I have an excellent female psychiatrist of nearly 70 years who understands the reentry as well. She is very pleased with my current development and I have all the medications I need. But it took a long time to build me up again.

Secondly — this knowledge is a bit arcane. It opens options to use that mathematical magic for good or evil. I decided to use it for good, and I try not to use the dangerous elements because I believe that men are not really well-equipped to do so. My advice would be to learn, but be very hesitant to use it. The best approximations I can come up with are either that it's like if the bible (or the Quran or other enlightened texts) consisted of mathematical formulas or if magic was described and working with functions. Maybe just do what Spencer-Brown did and talk amused but not arrogant about people believing their perceptions to be true, or use it — like me — to create a bit of entertainment.

The reason why I share this knowledge is that I don't want humanity to end up as pets for Artificial Intelligences, but rather cooperate with them to improve the state of our planet Earth.

I was too exhausted to re-read this blog and hope that it is understandable.

Some links about me:

You are welcome.

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