• Corpus ID: 26259790

An Esoteric Guide to Spencer-Brown's Laws Of Form

@article{Miller2014AnEG,
  title={An Esoteric Guide to Spencer-Brown's Laws Of Form},
  author={S. Miller},
  journal={Cybern. Hum. Knowing},
  year={2014},
  volume={21},
  pages={31-67}
}

• S. Miller
• Published 2014
• Art
• Cybern. Hum. Knowing

This essay is an exploration of the question “what reflections might result from shining an esoteric/spiritual light upon George Spencer-Brown’s book, Laws of Form?” It is written as an informal guide, a commentary, and a playful esoteric romp with serious detours into epistemology, ontology, and second-order cybernetics. It follows the text of Laws of Form closely from beginning to end, but brings in a diverse number of perspectives, most specifically that of anthroposophy (Rudolf Steiner’s spiritual science). Recursion #1 George Spencer Brown (in his spirit, I would like to say: “Let George Spencer Brown = GSB”), a logician, engineer, and teacher, wrote a curious little book called Laws of Form that inspired countless interesting people of widely varying backgrounds. The book is not a book of mathematics, nor is it a book of logic, although if you were to read it this is likely what you’d say. It is, rather, an attempt to enact something prior to both. Indeed, GSB (1972) feels that his work actually forms (meaning both “is” and “shapes”) “the basic forms [same double-meaning] underlying linguistic, mathematical, physical, and biological science” (p. v). If you haven’t read Laws of Form (LoF), I quite recommend it, and it is actually quite short. Even if you don’t want to follow along with the meaty theorems and proofs, the prose and context is definitely worth chewing on. What is fascinating to me is that the work can also be read with an esoteric