Hi Tom,
There is a great deal to this Forgotten Theory.
The beginnings of this theory's logic was dealt with by Bertrand Russell who
stopped because of his breakdown. Then G Spencer Brown took up the logic in
his book Laws of Form. While the experimentation of the theory was performed
by Baranski.
G Spencer Brown is another in this theory's tradition who is not widely
known:
from http://www.enolagaia.com/GSB.html
Haim Shaul wrote in the Observer::
"Spencer-Brown's Laws of Form is a rather obscure book with perhaps an
unusual viewpoint. Stafford Beer reviewed it in Nature when it was first
published in the early 70s or late 60s. It has attracted the attention of
people who have absorbed all the typical flotsam and jetsam of several
disciplines and still find something left to be desired. What he does in
this little book is so strange it has been left more or less in oblivion by
academic humanity. The book is rather dense in the sense of intensely cogent
and apparently a bit "mystical." He cites in the original hard cover a line
from the Chinese text called Tao Te Ching in Chinese ... which is just the
sort of thing which will turn many a head in another direction. If you like
only what is familiar to you you may not like this little book. You must be
willing to follow him out into his rather intense world to develop an
appreciation of his efforts which could be called decent."
"... L.L. Whyte refers to this book with some frequency in his later
writings. John Lilly, the dolphin fellow, also picked up on it. ...
Spencer-Brown also wrote a book on Probability and Scientific Inference and
contributed too to the literature of scientific parapsychology -- re
statistical interpretation of parapsychological data as I recall."
Regards
Roger
----- Original Message -----
From: "Tom Milner-Gulland" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, May 15, 2006 12:39 PM
Subject: Re: L.L. Whyte
> It looks generally interesting but to be accepted as philosophy I feel
> Whyte would need to put more into justifying his views from a logical and
> empirical point of view instead of laying them down as a kind of dogma.
> Cheers,
> Tom
>
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