Containment (series)
Containment, besides being the very architecture of our material world, is a fundamental organizing principle of life, language, and thought.
This series reveals the power of containment in an attempt to bring attention to some qualities concealed by the dominant symbolic representations in math, science and technology.
This first essay explores all kinds of containers, from the biological cell to the physical and metaphorical containers we create. It concludes with a review of containment in philosophy and logic, a theme to be expanded in future posts.
Perfect Continence
We learn about numbers in school. Nobody tells us what numbers are, except that they represent quantity or position. Instead, we are asked to memorize symbols and combinations of symbols for each number.
The second one is about mathematical and philosophical foundations, based on a single relationship, that of containment. This is the Calculus of Indications of George Spencer-Brown, presented in his book Laws of Form (1969). Over half a century since the publication, his work is mostly unknown or misunderstood and underappreciated. William Bricken explains:
His text is notorious. The academic analysis, enthusiasm, controversy and rejection of Spencer Brown’s work is widely based on a severe misunderstanding that Laws of Form describes conventional logic, which it does not. The text becomes much more controversial when it is taken for what it actually is: a postsymbolic foundation for rigorous thinking.
This essay is another attempt to present this foundation, trying out some new ways of explaining and adding some new perspectives.