Spatial navigation from memory can rely on two different strategies: a mental simulation of a kinesthetic spatial navigation (egocentric route strategy) or visualspatial memory using a mental map (allocentric survey strategy). We hypothesized that a previously performed “oculomotor navigation” on a map could be used by the brain to perform a locomotor memory task. Participants were instructed to (1) learn a path on a map through a sequence of vertical and horizontal eyes movements and (2) walk on the slabs of a “magic carpet” to recall this path. The main results showed that the anisotropy of ocular movements (horizontal ones being more efficient than vertical ones) influenced performances of participants when they changed direction on the central slab of the magic carpet. These data suggest that, to find their way through locomotor space, subjects mentally repeated their past ocular exploration of the map, and this visuo-motor memory was used as a template for the locomotor performance. Relevance: The results clearly show that any spatial navigation from memory is a “first person” cognitive strategy.

Before the pivotal work The Laws of Form, which made him influential among systems theorists, George Spencer-Brown had achieved wide publicity for work on statistics that seemed to explain away accumulated findings for extra-sensory perception. Interestingly, just as in his later work, there was a remarkable convergence here with the earlier writings of C. S. Peirce. Both emphasized the difference between the randomness of generating processes and the empirical distributions used for the production of generalizations. Both understood this as challenging theories of scientific inference. Yet Spencer-Brown’s conclusion – that science and magic were both eaten away by the tides of time through the accumulation of patterns through randomness – was not a necessary one for Peirce, for whom these patterns might have ontological significance, as they wore grooves of habit into the universe. Grappling with the puzzles at the heart of these questions may change how we incorporate the notion of information into our theories.

Key words: Chance, ESP, Law, Magic, Peirce, Probability, Spencer-Brown

Ranulph Glanville was a prolific writer, a magic designer, an avant-garde musician, a cybernetician of the first- and of the second-order, a philosopher in disguise, to name only a few roles. His contributions to second-order cybernetics and to areas like design, philosophy, conversation theory, methodology or games, with the tools and perspectives of his version of second-order cybernetics were collected under the title “The Black B∞x” in three volumes in edition echoraum (Glanville, 2009, 2012, 2014) and were ordered and arranged by Ranulph Glanville himself so that they allow a general and systematic overview on this very large, diverse, and impressive corpus. In this short essay I will undertake a systematic attempt to make this work more easily accessible for others, including myself, and to provide a special location for Ranulph Glanville within the research program of second-order cybernetics in particular and within the research tradition of radical constructivism in general. It will become my central thesis in this article that Ranulph Glanville’s special role and function was to provide a meta-approach to all the available research programs in radical constructivism. This framework was transcendental in nature and focused on the conditions of the possibility for observation, for communication, for language, for knowledge or for learning to emerge at all. Thus, Ranulph Glanville reserved a unique place for himself that, at the same time, turned out to be magic for his explorations and very difficult to grasp for his intellectual environment.

Key words: epistemology, transcendental approaches, objects, second-order cybernetics, conversation theory, design

Abstract: To unify the diverse commentaries, I show that (1) Piaget attempted to synthesize under one unified model thousands of observations and experiments, an experimental epistemé different from the many experimental epistemés that characterize contemporary research; (2) Piaget tackled the issue of time in several works, although he did not pay strong attention to beginnings and endings of actions; (3) He did not endorse magic interaction rhetoric but took into account the role of social factors in development, and in his experiments with infants, used several strategies to control his own influence on the child.