# George Spencer Brown’s “Design With the NOR”  ## Metadata - Author: [[Steffen Roth, Markus Heidingsfelder, Lars Clausen, and Klaus Brønd Laursen]] - Full Title: George Spencer Brown’s “Design With the NOR” - Category: #books ## Highlights - Last but not least, we are grateful to Louis Kauffman for his unceasing commitment to the mathematical appreciation of the work of Spencer Brown as well as for stimulating conversations about the spiritual meaning of his formalism (including the continual awareness of the background or the nothingness out of which all things arise). ([Location 118](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08K8Q6Y17&location=118)) - typescript, the cross corresponds to a transistor unit implementing logical NOR. As the classical representation of logical NOR, and hence the cross, is a truth table, and as one generally associates the cross with (the) distinction, Steffen conceptualizes the NOR as a tool for the distinction between true and false distinctions as well as for the translation between different social concepts of truth. As a result, the cross emerges as the basic building block for the much-needed digital transformation of social theory. ([Location 183](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08K8Q6Y17&location=183)) - To a certain extent, the typescript thus anticipates the conditions of a digitized society in which application programmers of new software no longer have to worry about how the microchips in computers are wired. It is sufficient to know that every logical operation can be carried out and – within certain limits – returns results in a very short time. ([Location 512](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08K8Q6Y17&location=512)) - The NOR logic is put in the context of what has become known as cybernetics, pointing out its importance for automation and control right from the start. All of this paves the way for Spencer Brown’s future laws of form, and it also allows further conclusions to be drawn about the attractiveness of his work in social systems theory, where cybernetic concepts of regulation also play an important role. ([Location 521](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08K8Q6Y17&location=521)) - He could be compared to an artist who observes circuit design from an outside perspective and comments on it in his own, idiosyncratic way, which adds little value for engineering, but inspires universal reflections about logic. ([Location 580](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08K8Q6Y17&location=580)) - The pure “banality of evil,” as Arendt coined it, had manifested itself 20 years earlier in the inferno of the Second World War. Nazism was not the deed of mentally ill masterminds, she argued, but a prevalent structure established by everyday men and women. ([Location 819](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08K8Q6Y17&location=819)) - Systems, Luhmann argues, are subdivided into Machines, Organisms, Social Systems, and Psychic Systems. Only social systems are subdivided into Interactions, Organizations, and Societies. ([Location 1090](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08K8Q6Y17&location=1090)) - “essentially languageless activity of the mind having its origin in the perception of a move of time.” ([Location 1777](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08K8Q6Y17&location=1777)) - M]y job was to turn the relais circuits into transistor circuits. Now for this they used Boolean algebra, which is not at all suitable” (quoted in Heidingsfelder et al., 2019). Or, as he writes in the Design with the NOR: “the forms of algebra suitable for relays have proved unsuitable for NOR units” (1961, Pt. I, p. 1). “So I invented an algebra in which every operator was one transistor. Which is the algebra of Laws of Form” (quoted in Heidingsfelder et al., 2019). ([Location 2109](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08K8Q6Y17&location=2109)) - But it shows something, if you like, “amazing”: Everything that can be expressed with not can be expressed with neither–nor, and even more so, everything that can be expressed with or can also be expressed with neither–nor. Consequently, everything that can be said with not and or can be said with neither–nor. This is the “design with the NOR” that gave Spencer Brown’s report its title. ([Location 2189](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08K8Q6Y17&location=2189)) - Spencer Brown’s symbol, on the other hand, is ambiguous. It can stand for a binary, a tertiary, or generally an n-ary operation. In his words: It iridesces, it is able to change color at any moment, which gives it such magic. To guarantee this magic, he only talks about his symbol, but never about what it exactly stands for. ([Location 2250](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08K8Q6Y17&location=2250)) - Instead of six gates – NOR, NAND, OR, AND, XOR, XNOR – they now only need one each. NOR or NAND gates can be combined to create all other circuits. ([Location 2298](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08K8Q6Y17&location=2298)) - The reason why engineers draw the complete logic diagram is because they want to see the logic process at each of the cascading stages; they are concerned about the timing, delays, voltage levels, losses, and racing conditions that will affect the overall performance of the unit. ([Location 2342](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08K8Q6Y17&location=2342)) - The Buddhist describes enlightenment as the state “in which no discrimination (parikalpana or vikalpa), takes place, and it requires a great mental effort to realize this state of viewing all things in one thought” (Suzuki, 1949, p. 125). ([Location 2648](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08K8Q6Y17&location=2648)) - Anyone who succeeds in escaping the pattern that necessitates such an either-or may rightly call herself enlightened. Fritz B. Simon has calculated another advantage: Who no longer thinks bivalent or logical can no longer go crazy (cf. 1991, p. 158). ([Location 2683](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08K8Q6Y17&location=2683)) - A buddha is one who is enlightened, that is, who knows that what appears is not anything. The Tathāgata is the much rarer appearance of one who, or what, independently discovers and teaches the laws that determine just how nothing comes to appear as something. (1995, p. 14, italics in original, see also Suzuki, 1949, p. 213) ([Location 2725](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08K8Q6Y17&location=2725)) - Nothing in society exists out of itself, all existence owes itself only to the fleeting interplay and the mutual conditionality of all factors. ([Location 2776](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08K8Q6Y17&location=2776)) - Spencer Brown’s engineering mathematics becomes an engineering sociology that allows the sociologist for reconstructing social forms like organizations and management (Baecker, 2006) or terror (Baecker, 2018). Andersen (2003), Andersen and Pors (2017), and Roth (2019) have made similar attempts at formalization. ([Location 2788](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08K8Q6Y17&location=2788)) - behind-the-scenes gazing of a Plato can be avoided (Fuchs & Hoegl, 1979, p. 31). What is behind a distinction? Nothing. “So in the formalism in mathematics that Spencer Brown creates, there is that continual awareness of the background, of the nothing out of which the things arise” (Kauffman, quoted in Heidingsfelder et al., 2019). ([Location 2807](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08K8Q6Y17&location=2807))