Oh, Fortuna

Ever since Claude E. Shannon's Mathematical Theory of Communication, there is an element of stochastics in every theory of communication. Source, channel, noise, and even destination are measured with respect to their entropy. And every message is a product of both relational and conditional entropy. Shannon's theory and George Spencer-Brown's Calculus of Indications share an understanding of the relational and conditional nature of messages or indications. For Shannon, every message is »a message selected from a set of possible messages«. And for Spencer-Brown, every indication is one distinguished from an unmarked state. What kind of distinction is drawn by a Shannon message? And how would Spencer-Brown account for the stochastic nature of a communication process? Is the indeterminacy produced by the re-entry of a distinction into the form of the distinction a key to possible answers to these questions? There is no chance, Spencer-Brown maintained in his book on »Probability and Scientific Inference« (1957). How would Shannon answer to this? And how would Gregroy Bateson deal with this – who is among the very few who, in his book on »Mind and Nature« (1979) worked with Shannon's notion of stochastic processes? This paper tries to pick up some of these questions referring to a sociological understanding of chance, random, luck, and hazard as ways to both indicate and explore spaces of indeterminacy.

Born 1955 in Karlsruhe, Germany, schools in Offenbach and Cologne, studies of sociology and economics at Cologne University and Université Paris-IX (Dauphine), PhD and Habilitation at Bielefeld University, chairs for sociology, culture theory and management at Witten/Herdecke University and Zeppelin University, retired 2025, recent publications: Katjekte. Erweiterte Fassung (Merve, 2024), Digitalisierung (Suhrkamp, 2026).

More info: dirkbaecker.de

Distinction as the Creative Boundary

Spencer Brown invites us to draw a distinction. In doing so the most obvious effect at first glance is to cleave the world in two; in effect to create two things.
But, as many have observed – not least Spencer Brown himself – actually you create three things. The geometrical visualisation of this process leads to three things: the two things which are distinguished, visualised as the inside and the outside, plus the boundary between them.
Here, I explore the thesis that the creative element in the drawing of a distinction is the boundary, understood as the most immediate manifestation, or reification, of the distinction.
The boundary, a thing, is the reification of the drawing of a distinction, which is an action.
The boundary separates the two things distinguished. But the boundary also unites the two things distinguished. The tension between the simultaneous separating and uniting gives the boundary a remarkable creative facility.
These musings will be familiar to students of Laws of Form. This paper consists of a number of examples where boundaries, the products of distinction, prove highly fecund. Examples are drawn from physics, mathematics, logic, biology, perception and metaphysics.

Rick Bradford is a semi-retired engineer and physicist with degrees from Cambridge and UCL. He has published extensively on these subjects. Books include The Unweirding, Five Square Roots and The Classical Electromagnetic Field.

More info: rickbradford.co.uk

The Logic of the Absolute:
Overcoming the Subject–Object Distinction

What is the Absolute? The dichotomy between the real world and the world as we know it implies two distinct standards for objectivity: knowledge from the side of the knowing subject, which must be objective insofar as it grasps the world; and the world itself, which presents itself as fully objective yet remains unknown. The standard of objectivity must ultimately be shared. The Absolute thus appears as the root of objective constitution, preceding the distinction between world and knowledge, a distinction established through perception as the separation between subject and object.
In Laws of Form, Spencer-Brown, much like Hegel in the Science of Logic, seeks to reconstruct logic from a point without presuppositions or distinctions. Hegel refers to this zero point as immediacy, which admits two readings: an unfruitful one, from which no formal knowledge can be obtained; and a fruitful one, which explains the movement from the immediate to the mediated. This talk explores the commonalities between both projects, tracing a path toward understanding the Absolute.

Xavier Aranda Arredondo is a philosopher at the Universidad de Guanajuato (México), where he teaches and researches in the areas of Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Language, and German Idealism, with a particular focus on Hegel. He holds a PhD in Philosophy from the same institution. He is a member of Mexico's National System of Researchers (SNII).
His recent publications include work on the possibility of a contemporary Hegelian philosophy of nature (Ethics in Progress, 2024), a chapter on Hegel and contemporary philosophy of mind (FILORED, 2025), and an article examining Large Language Models through the lens of Sellars, Kant, and Hegel (Characteristica Universalis Journal, 2024). He has presented at international venues including the University of Tokyo and the 22nd International Congress of Philosophy.
His current research addresses the problem of fundamentality and its extensions into metaphysics, epistemology, and contemporary philosophy of mathematics.

More info: https://philpeople.org/profiles/xavier-aranda-arredondo

Drawing the Mark in Physics, Story, and Magick: Six Explorations in Laws of Form

This presentation considers the enterprise of physics in the context of the Primary Algebra: physics is an act of distinction. To do physics is to draw or build a form against a background and wait for it to change. Taking this seriously leads to a definition of the measurability of a form; through simulation, several orders of measurability and their power laws are derived. This lens is then applied to one of quantum mechanics' most intriguing experiments, the CHSH (Bell) inequality, rewritten entirely in algebra of distinction. Arguments are put forward how setting up different forms of equalities leads to distinction-based breaking of Bell’s Inequality. The introduction of imaginary-valued marks are shown to beat the classical 75% win-rate bound, offering hints towards the nature of quantum measurement, non-locality, and the nature of complex-valued distinctions. Temporal variants of Bell’s Inequality are then explored, followed by an analysis of marking spacetime by identifying them with causal diamonds, showing how complex or even quaternionic forms are needed to use spacetime as a substrate for drawing marks. The presentation finally pivots to story structure, the meaning of agency, and the metaphysics of doing physics. An ontological interpretation of the imaginary and quaternionic distinctions is introduced - and to what it means to draw an imaginary mark, closing on the many parallels suggesting that the enterprise of physics may itself be an enterprise of storytelling.

Adam Blazejczak holds a Master’s in Computer Science and a Bachelor’s in Physics (2025), and is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in physics at Ghent University. With seven years of experience as a data scientist and data architect consultant, and three years running BLVCK Studios — specialising in app design and enterprise architecture for small and medium businesses — he brings a rare combination of technical rigour and creative vision to his work. He is the creator of QQuill, a story-structure-based self-inquiry application, and several other tools oriented toward consciousness exploration. His independent research into Laws of Form, BF calculus, and their extensions spans physics, consciousness studies, spirituality, and game design, reflecting a sustained commitment to applying Spencer-Brown’s Calculus of Indications as a universal lens for understanding distinction and form.

More info: https://blvckstudios.com/

The Language of Form:
A Conversation with the Void

What is the void, that one can speak with it? How can it speak, and how can we know it has understood us? Spencer-Brown, blending Laozi and Buddhism with physics and computing, gave an answer through operators. Earlier approaches counted things by their measurable properties. But the Pauli and Dirac operators introduced a different move: attuning to the unknown's restlessness, absorbing local field strength into one's own energy or releasing energy into it. Can this be generalized to moving through the void? Spencer-Brown calls the void the unmarked space. I propose to read Laws of Form as three operators that speak with the void: cross, tunnel, and re-entry. They precede all calculations and sentences, but do not yet reach human conversation. Spencer-Brown added: Only Two Can Play This Game. This suggests two further operators—recognition and community (resonance and condenser). With them, the language of form takes shape.

Walter Tydecks, b. 1952, studied mathematics, political science and philosophy (Dipl.-Math.), Professional activity as a system developer, project manager and IT manager of medium-sized companies with a global orientation, philosophical work with a focus on philosophy and mathematics, recent developments in logic, Aristotle and the classical German philosophy.

More info: www.tydecks.info/

The Genesis of Laws of Form

Graham will discuss the notational and philosophical antecedents of the Calculus of Indications, the discovery of the Calculus, the evolution of Spencer-Brown's thinking, and his connection with Bertrand Russell, culminating in the Calculus’s publication in Laws of Form in 1969. The discussion will include recollections from Graham's thirty-three year friendship with Spencer-Brown, and recollections of Harry Frost and Jeff Miller, both of whom assisted the development of Laws of Form and are acknowledged in the Preface to the first edition.

Graham was George Spencer-Brown’s closest friend and confidant from 1983 to his death in 2016 and is the leading authority on the primary algebra presented in Laws of Form, GSB's pioneering work in the foundations of mathematics. Graham is compiling more than four decades of his research in formal algebras into book form. Graham chairs the Spencer-Brown Society which organizes the Laws of Form series of conferences.

damarys.2026:
A Software Workstation built on George Spencer-Brown's Laws of Form, William Bricken's LOSP language, and modal logic programming

The paper describes a new hardware and software architecture called damarys.2026, an integrated workstation environment using George Spencer-Brown's Laws of Form, William Bricken's LOSP programming language, and the principles found in Hughes and Cresswell's development of Modal Logic. This experimental workstation is designed to address current strategic problems in general-purpose software development, allowing a novel and flexible methodology to evolve; this is reminiscent of earlier 'single-user workstation' designs of yesteryear. damarys.2026 makes use of standardized hardware components as core components of the workstation: the hardware architecture is inspired by the Lisp Machine workstation and Connection Machine architectures of the Early AI Era. Development and implementation of damarys.2026 is described, with an overview of how Laws of Form, LOSP, William Bricken's Iconic Mathematics, and other architectural software concepts have been approached to construct a new logic programming language. The programming language damarys, in turn, defines and implements the operating system for the workstation prototype. Working examples and applications of the damarys.2026 prototype are described, indicating the benefits of the Laws of Form paradigm towards software project development, even at a very complex level of sophistication: we present three use cases with examples of how damarys.2026 may be used at all levels of the software project, from knowledge acquisition to app building and deployment. Finally, we compare and contrast the damarys.2026 design with other approaches to "artificial intelligence", particularly the "generative AI" approaches such as ChatGPT, Grok, and others, pointing out significant advantages to the "neurosymbolic" approach used in damarys.2026 to "ChatGPT-style" systems: advantages include accuracy, repeatability, consistency, security, and explain-ability. The conclusion of the paper details the current status of the damarys.2026 project, lessons learned, and the prospectus for the next year of research and development.

Kerry Koitzsch is a software engineer and author of three published books and many chapter-length publications on a variety of subjects, including computer science and the history of science. He holds a Doctor of Philosophy degree in Sacred Letters from Mellen University for studies and translations of Johann Reuchlin and other Renaissance philosophers. Kerry Koitzsch is a recipient of the Adele Mellen Prize for a Contribution to Scholarship, and is a recipient of the United States Army Achievement Medal.

More info: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Kerry-Koitzsch