A (Cybernetic) Musing: The Boundaries of Distinction? The Distinction of Boundaries

摘要

By replacing the image of the circle with the image of the Mobius strip, we resolve the presuppositional difficulties that I raised, although, in doing so, we may have lost some of the benefits we gain from the Laws of Form, for in most respects Spencer Brown's distinctions work exactly because a space is cleaved and there is an inside and an outside. Interestingly, however, Spencer Brown described a re-entrant form in chapter 11 of Laws of Form. Lou Kauffman has speculated on what he calls a very subversive form for the distinction: a Klein bottle (Kauffman, 1996). As the reader will know, a Klein bottle is an interpretation, in a three dimensional world, of the two dimensional world's Mobius strip.