A good resource on distinctions (if you are not yet aware of it), is George Spencer-Brown’s Laws of Form. These ideas are being further explored (Bricken, Awbrey), and various resources on boundary logic and differential logic, are now available on the web.
I’m not really sure Laws of Form is a good resource, and I’m not sure it’s good at all. A crazy philosophy acquaintance of mine recommended it, so I read it, and couldn’t make very much of it (although I was disturbed that the author apparently thought he had proved the four-color theorem?). Searching, I got the impression that one could say of the book ‘what was good in it was not original, and what was original was not good’; later I came across a post by a Haskeller/mathematician I respect implementing it in Haskell which concluded much the same thing:
So, Laws of Form succeeds in defining a boolean style algebra and propositional style calculus. It then shows how to build circuits using logic gates. And that, as far as I can see, is the complete content of the book. It’s fun, it works, but it’s not very profound and I don’t think that even in its day it could have been terribly original. (Who first proved NAND and NOT gates are universal? Sheffer? Peirce?) In my view this makes GSB’s mathematics not of the crackpot variety, despite his talk of imaginary logical values....So my final opinion, for all of the two cents that it’s worth, is that GSB is a little on the crackpot side, but that his mathematics in Laws of Form is sound, fun, cute, but, despite the trappings, not terribly profound.
A good resource on distinctions (if you are not yet aware of it), is George Spencer-Brown’s Laws of Form. These ideas are being further explored (Bricken, Awbrey), and various resources on boundary logic and differential logic, are now available on the web.
I’m not really sure Laws of Form is a good resource, and I’m not sure it’s good at all. A crazy philosophy acquaintance of mine recommended it, so I read it, and couldn’t make very much of it (although I was disturbed that the author apparently thought he had proved the four-color theorem?). Searching, I got the impression that one could say of the book ‘what was good in it was not original, and what was original was not good’; later I came across a post by a Haskeller/mathematician I respect implementing it in Haskell which concluded much the same thing: