August 7 – 10, University of Liverpool
See the Spencer-Brown Society Webpage directly for LoF24 details.
It’s always so hard to say goodbye! With LoF19, LoF22, and now LoF24 at University of Liverpool, we’ve all grown quite fond of the place, and of each other. We plan on meeting next time in 2026 at University of Cambridge.
LOΓ24: A Weblog of Experiences
As the host and moderator, as one of the organizers, and as one of the presenters at LoF24, I will share some of my own notes, pictures, and highlights here. This is a blog about Laws of Form 2024 Conference, or, as it gets playfully abbreviated in my notes “LOΓ24.”
My presentation this time round was a report and reflection on last year’s spin-off conference, Thinking the Float Tank, titled “Phenomenology in the Flotation Tank: Renewing John C. Lilly’s Phenomenology Experimental Research Center (PERC) with Thinking the Float Tank.” Abstract is available here, and video recording is coming soon from West Den Haag.
After our final group excursion aboard the Magical Mystery Tour, we descended into Liverpool’s famous Cavern Club, then emerged from the cave to see these seagulls above our heads. Walter Tydecks and his wife Christine left at that point for what was going to be a beautiful sunset at Albert Docks, while our group went for dinner. These birds exist in that beautiful aevum world of sunsets at the docks. The sight of them, and their call, brought me back to my childhood at the beach. This inspired my poetical pagework, beginning with this classic LoF-inspired epigrammatical couplet:
Ever-Even OD’d onE
circa 2010
Every One is Odd
Ever-Even, God.
LOΓ24 magical formulations, Greek philosophy and syncretic mysticism goes into these guiding sigils. George Spencer-Brown’s Laws of Form, Peter Manchester’s The Syntax of Time, and the mysticism of Hedwig Conrad-Martius inspires these symbols and their effects. All these things came alive–for me!–at LOΓ24.
While at the Pen Factory dinner I started talking about my special joy, which is the coalescence of Spencer-Brown’s formal-ontological-paradigm of the first distinction in the unmarked state, with Conrad-Martius’ isomorphic material-ontological-paradigm of the urdynamic or urbewegung in the apeirische raum-zeit einheit, and of how the unique common penultimate parameter of these paradigms is revealed to be the infinite center of the original paradigm of the infinite sphere, the Sphere of the All, I channelled the Spirit, and the phones started coming out to see what all the fuss was about.
I will be presenting on this at Laws of Form 2026, at University of Cambridge.
Poetry, Music, etc!
Some of us created poetry based on the conference, and we intend to publish it either in an upcoming issue of Distinction: Journal of Form, or possibly in a book in our Marked States series. Stay tuned, and feel free to contact me if you’d like to publish your poetry!
Hosting the Spirit: The Organizers
Graham Ellsbury, Leon Conrad, and Florian Grote (below), me, and Divyamaan Sahoo (above) organized LOF24. We are executive members of The Spencer-Brown Society, and putting this together is our great joy. We bear witness to the great power of profound simplicity found in George Spencer-Brown’s 1969 book Laws of Form, and the Tathagatal perspective it affords. We share this vision with the participants, find it evident in their themes and presentations, and we share it with the wider interdisciplinary world largely thanks to the efforts of West Den Haag.
As all (are), I (am) split (between) above and below, and need to occasionally pop off to the back of the library while hosting, so I can physically feel the spirit of Laws of Form and facilitate its re-entry into the program. I do not hallucinate. I am led by the whole host of teleological forces of spirit at this legendary event in the history of cybernetics and systems, as much as by personalities.
Moderating Enthusiasm
So distended, split and balanced, I moderate the extremities in what I call extreme moderation. This means minding the performance of the program of presentations during the Q&A whilst also synthesizing themes and ensuring that the profound simplicity of the paradigmatic relation between the unmarked state and first distinction is not lost in the monadic monologon of any single voice. Eidetic variation is the imaginary value of the complex plane, imagination is the astral plane within which these intelligences stand, and this becomes the strange principle—so simple anyone can follow!—that the “I” must become the “i.” It’s expression is “i factorial:”
i!
I spoke with Lou Kauffman about the notational conventions of seeing “i factorial” as both this profound truth, this profound simplicity, and about its being represented by the analytical series and synthetical radiation:
i
as
i! = i, -i, i, -i, i, -i, i, -i, i, -i, i, -i, i, -i, i, -i, i, -i, i, -i, i, -i, i, -i…
simply
As it is in my pagework above:
i! would make a terrific forehead tattoo.
Lou set about interpreting the gamma function for i, invoking Euler’s identity in the form:
And it turned out that Graham had this already on his socks:
But we tried to make this pure mathematics conference more in the spirit of Spencer-Brown’s Only Two Can Play This Game (1972), where he writes under his pseudonym James Keys, “In Laws of Form I attempted to state as far as I could the masculine side of things, just as in the present book I try, again as far as my limited talents allow, to say something of the feminine side” (110). This autobiographical book of romantic love and poetry contains the interpretation of Laws of Form’s calculus for perennial spirituality and the human side of the pure mathematician. After the spirit of this text, LoF2024 was dedicated to poetics and love.
Photos by West Den Haag (Chloë Van Diepen and Thijs Jager)
Anywhere Out of The World
“Randy, you’re into Theosophy and Anthroposophy, right?” asked Andrew Crompton, on Day 1. “There’s a group of young people in Manchester, and the idea is that they’re operating outside of the Academy—I truly believe they are the future!—and it would be terrific if you’d come by and give them a talk! …You’d need to wear all black and no shoes.” This was a quite unexpected joy! I hate wearing shoes, and I brought black.
Anywhere Out of the World, in the very cool quarter known as North Manchester, had recently hosted talks on Goethe’s Farbenlehre by one of our participants, Philip Franses, and his colored prisms were still there on the desk when I arrived. This was a most receptive audience for what I had to share!
LOVE: LOF (pronounced ‘Love’), LOΓ, LOV
One of our three keynote speakers, Irene Breuer, focused on love. Her talk was titled “Erôs and Philia: Their ethical role.” Her talk was so loved it got special mention in the blog post of one of our participants, Kathleen Neher. Irene was also a keynote at last year’s Laws of Form spin-off conference, my own conference, Thinking the Float Tank (pictured in the last of these photos below):
Edwardian Elegance: The Adelphi
Vanilla Beer, who presented at LoF50 in 2019 and led our excursion through the adjacent Stafford Beer Archive, initially suggested to me to stay at the Adelphi Hotel, and I’ve adhered to this advice. A few of us enjoyed the vast palatial lounge, modeled on the Titanic, where we discussed our grandest ideas for the future of the Laws of Form conference. With the encouragement of my friends, and since I was feeling the fancy vibe of the place, I also performed my recent ballet dance that Karen Antos of American Ballet Studio taught me, the Raymonda Waltz.
I’m going to miss the Adelphi, Liverpool itself, and our irreplaceable time there, but such is the nature of time and of life! I’m also going to miss the English breakfasts I had there, but I’ll spare you the pictures of my amazing food.
Excursion! The Magical Mystery Tour
So of course we were singing along to every song on the bus, all the way down into the cave of the Cavern Club, and getting all the feels. When we emerged things were brighter and quieter. Walter and Christine left for the sunset, the rest of us met for dinner, and after that we had our time at the Adelphi before going out dancing! I thought that would be the end of the story, but I extended my stay a little to join the West team for breakfast and a museum exhibit in the morning, and then decided to join Till Gathmann to nearby Formby Beach.
Laws of Formby Beach
randolphdible.com 