( Note: this is a sequel to @knotwork/musings-arising-from-g-spencer-browns-laws-of-form ).
IS MEANS SO CAN... DO?
Geometry: Three dimensions implies / requires at least four points, like Bucky's fundamental tetrahedron, which involves or implies six vectors / edges.
In "Synergetics", the edge vectors seem like forces, like tension members in keeping their end-points connected but like compression members to the extent that at their smallest they presumably boil down to the distinction between two points, that which causes or enables them to not both be the exact same point, an exclusion-principle even perhaps.
A "Planck distance" type of idea seems likely to come up at that distinction, the distinction that distinguishes one point from its "neighboring" point, or maybe defines or delineates the "neighborhood" of a point.
The Form in Laws of Form embodies an exclusion principle in its "the form inside the form is the formless" rule; "a point inside a point is no point" so to speak.
Admittedly that does not sound very compression-member-ish, more like an emptiness eating up (vanishing) points that try to converge. Maybe more like gravity if by eating points of a line one shortens the line and the length of the line is a distance-like distinction.
This idea though of a point not being a container of other points seems to point the way to thinking the form in Laws of Form is not actually a point in form but rather at least three points, not because three points can define an area and Laws of Form is mostly about forms on two dimensional areas but because the form can and does have not just an inside and an outside but also itself, its act or process or indication or function or effect of changing or at least differentiating inside from outside.
Of course the way the form is usually depicted in Laws of Form is sort of an upside-down L, which one could of course construe as three end-points connected by two lines in a particular configuration.
As analogies often do, I fear this attempt at them has become overextended. :)
Taking inspiration from the multi-meaning-ness (punishness) if only in English of the label CAN by taking it as a container, possibly the form in Laws of Form corresponds not to IS MEANS or SO but, rather, to CAN. IS MEANS and SO, the Supernals in the Tree of Life view, would thus appear Supernal in a sense to Laws of Form if indeed they precede Laws of Form's "first distinction"; part of the void, the emptiness, out of which Laws of Form's "first distinction" is conjured into be-ing (IS).
The first distinction would in such a view be an instance of the fourth distinction put to use as a symbol or label representing a first distinction, rather than being supernally first; a label formed of multiple points that is used to represent a single point in order to help us reason about points and forms and distinctions and maybe even help us grasp what distinction it might be that distinguishes supernal from not-supernal.
In Western occultism that would presumably be the Abyss between the ideal and the actual; in three-D-land the distinction between Flatland and three-D-land, and so on?
Especially when written in black and white, Laws of Form is possibly Supernal itself though at least until it looks at venturing into a third geometric (space-like) or temporal (time-like) dimension.
The thing is, the form in Laws of Form is a container (a CAN?), even if ultimately it can only contain itself or nothing - and let us put aside for the nonce questions of what distinctions might exist between things like none, naught, nought and nothing except maybe to note that since we just conjured four labels into being there we could muse on trying on for size shape taste and so on the first four distinctions with those, looking at expressions like IS NONE, MEANS NAUGHT, SO NOUGHT and CAN NOTHING, wondering whether those expressions themselves might be nice or even fun to be lead-ups to the empty can, the empty form, CAN NOTHING, the NOTHING CAN, the form or label the Laws of Form uses to denote the distinction that its own counting counts as being the first distinction.
I would almost leave off at that point were it not that what brought me to the keyboard to post is not all that context above but, rather, a simple question of whether a CAN as a tetrahedron, a container, that requires at least four points, could have something to do with how or why three quarks are contained rather determinedly into their containment. Could a tetrahedron of four closest-packed points consistently appear as three points simply because one can only actually see, from any particular line-of-sight as far as I am aware (*), three of the four points at once?
A simple "roots game like" four-colour-theorem demonstration explicated elsewhere (NetMarketingForum many years ago for example) shows us that coloured correctly - which possibly corresponds to counting distinctions correctly - only four distinctions (colours) are ever necessary on a plane surface but if one of the distinctions is containment-itself (CAN, at least as/when used as a label indicating "the form"?) maybe the physicists "seeing" three colours (or flavours?) of something in there are simply not labelling that which they are looking into to see them as a colour (flavour)? (They seem maybe to have the container itself be a blur of "gluons".)
Maybe "s/colour/distinction/" and "s/flavour/distinction" sed-operations on what is said above could be helpful?
Physics apparently does see an actual size to protons and neutrons, doesn't it? And maybe even to the particles within them? Or is it merely the uncertainty as to exactly where the points are that gives the impression they are "larger" than mere points?
I know there is a whole big bunch of material on waves versus particles, but what about waves versus points?
-MarkM- aka knotwork, as in for example https://MakeMoney.Knotwork.com/
(*) I am thinking tetrahedron appearing as if having faces as it were rather than four neighboring spheres where you can see the fourth sphere through the gap in the centre of a "face" of such an implementation. With closest-packed dimensionless points it seems reasonable to suppose physicists aren't going to be able to peek through a "gap" in the centre of a "face" of the tetrahedron... :)
Note: Sequel post is @knotwork/gravitational-wave-mechanics-and-circuitry-is-means-so-can-do