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 likeThe 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.

Productive Paradoxes in Projects

When I started this blog in 2011, I wanted it to be a place for undistracted reading. The initial theme was not much busier than this one. I didn’t go that far, but you still don’t see categories, tag clouds, and my Twitter feed. Only recently have I added sharing buttons and started putting more images, and because I am keeping it minimal, you might have been reading this blog for some time without knowing about its tagline, as it is simply not visible in the blog. But it’s been there, and when the blog appears in search results, you can see it.

The theme of paradoxes appeared only a few times, for example, in  From Distinction to Value and Back and previously in Language and Meta-Language for EA. I haven’t focused on it in a post so far. It was even more difficult to start talking about it to an audience of project managers. First, claiming that projects are produced and full of paradoxes might appear a bit radical. Second, project managers are solution-oriented people, while in paradoxes, there is nothing to solve. There is a problem there, but its solution is a problem itself, the solution of which is the initial problem. Third, talking about paradoxes is one thing, but convincing others that understanding them is useful is another. Continue reading