Tag Archives: LoF

Roaming through contexts with Roam: Self-reference

It was early November 2020. I escaped for a long weekend to Tenerife, where I played tennis for the last time of what turned out to be a 5-month ban back in Belgium. It was over 20°C and sunny, two more things I was going to miss in the long winter of the second lockdown.

I’d been working since dawn on a big terrace overlooking the ocean.

It was a magical moment to see how the ocean emerged out of nothing, made all the more special by its synchronicity with my thoughts. I was writing a chapter note on George Spencer-Brown (GSB) for Essential Balances, which was to be published a few weeks later, for it was GSB who showed mathematically how everything could come into being out of nothing.

All I teach is the consequences of there being nothing. The perennial mistake of western philosophers has been to suppose, with no justification whatever, that nothing cannot have any consequences. On the contrary: not only it can: it must. And one of the consequences of there being nothing is the inevitable appearance of “all this”.

Now, a few hours later, I was immersed in work when I got interrupted by some birds’ cries. I lifted my eyes from the screen of my laptop and saw a couple of colourful parakeets that had just alighted in the palm tree in front of the terrace. But they did not hold my attention long. What did was not an exotic island bird but a boring city one that landed on the corner cap of the railing and posed in a way making the flat cap look like a pedestal. It was then that I remembered I started writing a series of posts about Roam, and published two of them, the next one to write being about self-reference. I took a photo of the bird, noted in Roam what it looked like to me, and posted this tweet:

Indeed it’s high time for another Roamantic entry. This is the third installment in a series of five. The first part was about what is Roam like. The second was about the powerful concept of distinction, based on George Spencer-Brown’s Laws of Form. And it was the rigorous study of distinction that led George-Spencer brown embrace what was treated as an error by the western1That wasn’t the case in the East. See, for example, the logical system Catuṣkoṭi. philosophers and mathematicians before him − self-reference. Continue reading →

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    That wasn’t the case in the East. See, for example, the logical system Catuṣkoṭi.

Roaming through contexts with Roam: Distinction

This is the second part of the series on Roam. The first part was about what is Roam like. If you’ve read it or if you know already, carry on.

The concept of digital twin became popular thanks to the digital transformation fad. It’s now amplified by both market research companies such as Gartner, and by academics.

Roam is expected to be the digital twin of your brain. Working with Roam is like “building a second brain”, the community echoes, after the training course of Tiago Forte by the same name.

Looking at Roam as a second brain is understandable. It is conditioned by a long history of swapping metaphors between computer science and cognitive science. At first computer science used the brain as a metaphor for the computer. This was reciprocated by cognitive science taking the computer as a metaphor for the brain. But, as Lakoff and Johnsson convincingly demonstrated, metaphors are not innocent figures of speech. And indeed, the-brain-as-a-computer was not just a metaphor. It was, and for many still is, a guiding light and a paradigm in cognitive science. As with computer, the brain was understood as both a location of the mind and as a processor of representations. Both computationalist and connectionist schools in cognitive science and philosophy of mind held this view of cognition and still do1The computationalist even saw the mind not just as a processor of representations but of symbolic ones. This goes in line with the symbolic tradition in mathematics which paved the path of many sciences. For the consequences and alternatives, see http://iconicmath.com/ . Now, to go through all the arguments on why this is not the case is beyond the objectives of this article, but the curious ones are invited to follow them2These arguments are well developed in the following books: The Embodied Mind; Enaction; Mind in Life; Linguistic Bodies . Let’s just say that, if you are using Roam with the expectation that it will be your second brain, you might be disappointed. But here’s the good news:

Roam is even better than that.

Continue reading →

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    The computationalist even saw the mind not just as a processor of representations but of symbolic ones. This goes in line with the symbolic tradition in mathematics which paved the path of many sciences. For the consequences and alternatives, see http://iconicmath.com/ .
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    These arguments are well developed in the following books: The Embodied Mind; Enaction; Mind in Life; Linguistic Bodies

The Art of Form as a Form of Art

In Brussels, at the southeastern end of the Mont des Arts garden, there are stairs leading to Rue de Musée. Climbing up one of the stairways, you see a wall on your right. A few months ago, a form of art started spreading on that wall. I don’t know if it was spontaneous or organized.  And it doesn’t matter. Every organization was at some point spontaneous, and everything spontaneous is worth talking about if it has led to some organization.

When approaching it, all you see is empty frames.

Getting closer, they (actually, you) start to make sense, but the name, given by the artist, accelerates the process. The name and the image enter into a loop, the name confirming the image, and the image confirming the name. Continue reading →