Full comment
I would say that the first-order Cybernetics (as exemplified IMO in Ashby's book) is all about symbolic formalism for "circular loops in causality", and that Second-Order Cybernetics is a species of mysticism (I hasten to add that I don't mean that in a derogatory way. I'm a Mystic myself.) You could imagine a spectrum from logic to cybernetics to philosophy to mysticism. It's all fine, just I believe that it's important to be clear where on the spectrum you're working. If you want to build machines that do things use Cybernetics and feedback/control theory, if you want to grok reality and self eat a mushroom and read "Gödel, Escher, Bach" or Tao Te Ching. In re: "Laws of Form", yeah, he identifies the boundary or distinction between the mystic realm (non-form, non-distinct, non-dual) and symbolic logic, and then builds a lovely binary Boolean logic directly off of that. It's a tour de force . The really interesting thing is that George Spencer-Brown figured out how to deal with circular logical systems by introducing the concept of imaginary Boolean values. It's a formal system for symbolic logic, and you can indeed build a lovely and efficient SAT solver with it using Bricken's Basis. E.g.: link (For reference, here's the LoF/Bricken formalism) Arithmetic (()) = ()() = () Calculus A((B)) = AB A() = () A(AB) = A(B) (That third rule in the calculus, discovered by Bricken, is the kicker!) cf. "The Markable Mark" George Burnett-Stuart link GBS (not GSB, they're two differen
