To Start At The Beginning...

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In the beginning was the void, without dimension, without time: no-thing. So starts not only every creationist religion or philosophy, but Taoism, Buddhism, Zen, and modern cosmological physics itself. All agree on the subject, as long as one removes the 'God' or 'Gods' bit from the equation. Anyone who reads this daily scribble from this old fool on the hill, will know that I espouse a reductive form of Zen as my 'belief' system, and always have done since I was in my late teens. One would also have noted from a couple of previous posts that I have had a peculiar fascination with G. Spencer-Brown's book, "Laws of Form", since I discovered it some forty-odd years ago [blog posts passim]; since when I have struggled and failed to come to any real understanding of its contents, whatsoever. Until recently, that is. 

A while ago, I found online a paper that sought to elucidate the reasoning and philosophy behind this enigmatic book. As I've said previously, the book was written in E-Prime, a syntactically reductive form of English that frankly hid the substance of the book from me for decades. However the paper I refer to - whose author I don't have to hand this evening, does a splendid job of elucidating what is at its heart the very simplest, and simultaneously the very deepest of philosophical constructs; cutting as it does to the very point of creation itself. The creation of space, and then time, from the void. Think about it: we have no direct knowledge of the world prior to our own birth. When we die, all our knowledge of the world ceases to exist at the same time: we cease, as does our universe in turn.

We pass on traces of our brief lives as we come and go, and human histories are built upon this evanescent platform of temporary, personal, existence. At the heart of Spencer-Brown's work is less a mathematical calculus or arithmetic than the reduction of all human philosophy - and existence - to the very genesis of the Universe itself. I'll come back to the nuts and bolts of the book another time. Suffice it to say that, in common with Zen and modern cosmological physics, the concepts to which they all refer are difficult to get one's head around. However, "Laws of Form" and Zen are radically pure compared to cosmology's increasingly complex 'modelling' of the mechanisms of the universe. As I've mentioned before, Occam's Razor trumps the hand in play every time. More later...

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