Abstract
Engineering Enlightenment for Everyone: The Key to Universal Ontology
Laws of Form 2026 Conference, Cambridge University
Randolph Dible
George Spencer-Brown used to say with no false humility that Laws of Form can be used as a vehicle for Enlightenment, “a celestial omnibus to enlightenment” (A Lion’s Teeth, 126). Since, agreeing with Wittgenstein’s Tractatus 6.43, the wide waking world of the Enlightened is altogether different from the world of the unenlightened, I would like to share what Spencer-Brown meant by regarding so highly his contribution of this vehicle, and then go into what he calls the “ignition key” (2023, 861) of this marvelous functional power of Laws of Form. But what I’m really doing is sharing what I see in Laws of Form, what I mean by affirming this power of Laws of Form. I am using Spencer-Brown’s vehicle as the formal skeleton —the crystalline calculus — of the universal science and ontology that he marks at the core of everything. This great power he unearths is also known as the mathesis universalis at and about the Center of the philosophia perennis. This mathesis universalis or scientia universalis is what the calculus of indications expresses. In the end, I will share a perspective on enlightenment as alignment with Spencer-Brown’s first distinction, which represents the paradigm shift to the universal ontology of the infinite sphere, which is a theory of absolutely everything that I call Allogy. I will do this by recalling my original framework of a cybernetic metaphysical system for framing the true meaning of the first distinction, chart this system’s development through integration with philosophy, and finally return to the metaphors of the vehicle of enlightenment and its ignition key in the context of the whole shebang.
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