MaxMSP and George Spencer-Brown's Laws of Form?

Hello everyone.. This is my first post to the forum.  I'm new to Max and my experience thus far has been one of astonishment.  Truly.  This little program just might change my life..  but I probably don't need to explain that to anyone here.

Anyway, I actually did a forum search for "Spencer Brown" because I was thinking the very same thing as the original poster.  GSB was a student of Russell and Wittgenstein and developed the basis for Laws of Form while designing railway switching systems in the 1960's.  The essence of his work is more or less founded upon the insight that imaginary values are not just limited to numbers.  He asserts that it's possible to make use of imaginary boolean values.  In other words, just as we can talk about the square root of -1 as being neither a positive nor negative integer -  yet still meaningful and useful as i - we should go beyond the convention of true, false and meaningless, and consider the utility of imaginary logic values.

Consider that x^2 + 1 = 0 can be reduced to x = -1/x which a form of recursion where the value we seek continually re-enters that from which we seek it.  In math we learned to break this loop.  In Max, we learn to redirect it or it gets broken for us and gets called "stack overflow".  ha!   Which is precisely why I began to think about GSB while learning how to use Max.   I'm trying to make dynamic UI objects that both control and display values - so it wasn't long before I began getting these stack overflow errors.  I have since learned to prepend the "re-entry" of certain values to prevent this (to a certain extent) but the problem persists.

I like the idea of exploring these concepts in a platform like Max.. though I lack the programming skills do that (for now).  So I thought I'd offer this little piece to (perhaps)  inspire someone here to play with these ideas.

You may find the following useful or at least interesting:

Laws of Form, George Spencer-Brown

Box Algebra, Boundary Mathematics, Logic and Laws of Form, by Louis Kauffman

Laws of Form - An Exploration of Mathematics and Foundations, by Louis Kauffman

William Bricken's "Container Numbers"

The link about Box Algebra is a great primer and a quick read.  Bricken's container number page has some great videos for visualizing related processes - including some framed strips that would make a great basis for matrixctrl dial images.  Kauffman's pdf on LoF is an invaluable companion to Spencer-Brown's book... which, in my opinion is one of the most important books of the 20th century.   Bertrand Russell shared my sentiment, saying simply, "Not since Euclid's Elements have we seen anything like it."

Enjoy,

T