Re: Zeroth Order Ontology

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ZOO.  Note 3

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How I got into this.

Somewhere in the middle of my high school freshman algebra course,
in 1963-64, I remember observing something to the effect that there
was "some kind of algebra or logic to the operations on parentheses
that is more basic than the algebra of operations on the letters and
numbers".  The summer I left for college, in 1967, I wrote down a list
of a dozen or so "things to think about", and this problem figured high
on that list.

I first started thinking about computers, graphs, and logic
all in the same breath sometime toward the end of that year,
when I tried to put the Fortran that I was learning in CPS --
that was the code for "Com-Puter Science" at Michigan State
in those days -- to work on a problem from my chemistry class,
namely, computing the covalent bonding graphs of the molecules
that could be formed from given atomic ingredients -- taking in
things like C, Cl, H, K, N, Na, O, P, S, and so on, and printing
out things like H:O:H and so on.  It gave me migraines.  And the
good of the effort was mostly just the exercise, as it takes all
the quantum mechanics of molecular orbital theory to time-share
the electrons the way that they really have to be.  I gave up
on computers for a while and went back to math, oddly enough,
a good place to hide from computers in that paleolithic era.

The less traveled corner of the math library where I frequently hid out
had a few shelves of logical and philosophical works, so I idly browsed
through the works of Boole, De Morgan, Dodgson, Frege, Leibniz, Peirce,
Schroeder, Venn, and that whole crew, along with the compendia and the
histories of Bochenski and the Kneales.  Somewhere in 1968-69 I ordered
my copy of Spencer-Brown's 'Laws of Form' from the Whole Earth Catalog,
and had read enough Peirce to recognize that it was nothing but a very
elegant extension of Peirce's Entitative Graphs.

That is where the fun began.

Jon Awbrey

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