Calculus of Indications (Laws of Form)

Spencer-Brown's formal system generating an 'imaginary value' from self-referential re-entry, extended by Varela to a three-valued autonomous state.

Neighborhood — ranked by edge-count

paper

thinker

Francisco Varela
extends
Co-originator of autopoiesis concept and enactivist approaches to cognition and embodied mind.
George Spencer-Brown
introduces
Developed Laws of Form / Calculus of Indications addressing self-reference via imaginary values.

cosine ≥ 0.65 · no typed edge

Entities in the same semantic neighborhood but without a typed relation to this one — candidates for new edges or unrecognized duplicates.

laws of formconcept0.773
Spencer Brown's calculus of distinctions, showing all mathematics arising from contrast; cited to argue contrast is fundamental.
Implication (A → B)concept0.735
Synthesis of Formconcept0.720
Christopher Alexander’s early method that decomposes design problems into a hierarchical tree of requirements and synthesizes form as a balance of forces.
Making information explicit—extracting normal forms from computation.claim0.708
The additive form S = ρd - dr - log k is parsimonious and aligns with log-odds intuitionclaim0.706
Justification for the linear combination
Stages of Inferenceframework0.704
The perspective that LLM inference decomposes into distinct computational stages, which the paper extends to looped models
Law of Effectconcept0.704
Thorndike's principle that satisfied behaviors are strengthened; paper argues stripping its experiential language is incoherent
The I, in some form, exists.claim0.700
Minimal conclusion that at least one of the two versions of the I-hypothesis must be true.