AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.

Ah a ref to Laws of Form! I actually remember that passage, it struck me when I read it some 40 years ago, and I blogged about it 10 years ago Omniorthogonal: Great and Universal Ignorance

Wagner's encounter with Schopenhauer (and hence Buddhism) – "all things go their different ways / you can alter nothing"

Gödel, Escher, Bach and related mathematical strange-loopiness (Ray Smullyan's writings on Taoism eg). I believe Laws of Form has been mentioned (yes, in Weird Studies/Tarot/The Fool )

I suggested Laws of Form as Bergsonian mathematics and Claude (of course) thought that was brilliant. I in turn thought this passage it generated was really good, something I could wish I had written myself:

2nd guy: map and territory. Any dichotomy is really a triad (A, B, A+B) not sure what that has to do with anything. Cantorian mathematics. JFM very confused about set theory, although maybe not at the important level. Mention of Laws of Form.

This is fine as "stoned rap" sorts of conversation, I'm not sure it would pass in my version of academia. But why not?

Laws of Form

30 Oct 2021 - 16 Oct 2025

A cultish math book, introduced to me by the Whole Earth Catalog and Francisco Varela. From a purely math standpoint, it appears to introduce some novel and perhaps useful notation and invent something sort of like imaginary Boolean values. From a deeper metaphysical standpoint, it offers a way to talk about distinctions in general and our representation and participation in them.

How to get great book blurbs pic.twitter.com/tkhKFHnSG4
— Evgeny Morozov (evgenymorozov.bsky.social) (@evgenymorozov) July 26, 2021

The number of different windows is endless. The unbridled conceit of the western nexus is to say that only certain windows are 'sound', and that the others are wrong, misleading , hallucinatory , etc. So be warned. If you look through a window that is disallowed for any of these reasons, be very careful whom you tell, and how you tell it. If in doubt, keep quiet. Above all, don't blurt it out to people who haven't been there and wouldn't go there, however much you might,like them to accompany you. It will only upset them, and they will feel that they have to attack you, to invalidate you in some way. – from Only Two Can Play This Game, p98

Both Gordon Pask and Stafford Beer were proud of their part in creating The Laws of Form. Both ended up fervently wishing to have nothing to do with the man.