Here Are the Charts Gunkel Made Right Before His Ideonomy Breakthrough

You know how when you watch a great TV show, the first season is usually pretty cool, but somewhere around season two it starts to get really good as all the setups start paying off?

Well, if you’ve been following my newsletter, we are now approaching that point.

Today I’m going to dump a few Patrick Gunkel documents on you that almost nobody has ever seen before.

You are really going to want to look at these closely.

I know that when I came across these documents myself, my understanding of ideonomy was dramatically changed.

In particular, I understood some of the specific applied principles that Gunkel had identified and the chain of logic that brought him there.

These principles, which Gunkel has referred to as “the laws of ideas,” proved foundational to his understanding of idea spaces and particularly his understanding of ideonomy’s divisions, which I am going to get into over the next few weeks.

But first, let me set the scene for you.

The year is probably 1980, but it could be late 1979 or early 1981.

Gunkel has returned from a months-long escapade in England and is living in Jamaica Plain on the outskirts of Boston. Herman Kahn has not yet died, so Gunkel has some kind of relationship with the Hudson Institute and may have been working as a consultant on their Corporate Environment Program.¹

Gunkel has not yet coined the term “ideonomy.”

However, all of the intellectual threads that gave rise to Gunkel’s science of ideas are settling into place, including the two major threads I am going to describe across this newsletter edition as well as next week’s.

In a moment I will share and discuss the promised documents, but they do require a bit more contextual explanation in order to grasp their importance with respect to how they embodied Gunkel’s intellectual development of ideonomy.

To do that, let’s first look at Gunkel’s chart “Talk With Prodigy,” available on MIT’s ideonomy website.

This chart has the words “Talk With Prodigy” at the center and then displays around those words dozens of potential topics for discussion.

Many of the ideas are Gunkel’s long-standing themes of interest.

And we can even find on the chart references to EPCOT Center, as Gunkel was evidently contracted to provide consultations with Walt Disney Enterprises during the planning phase.²

This chart… is amazing. It’s a work of art. I had it open in high resolution on my computer, and when my young son saw it, his mouth fell open and he went: “Whoa.”

There is a lot that can be unpacked with this chart.

However, I will have to write about this chart a separate time.

Instead, let’s focus on one small cell of the chart, located on a tangent in the northeasterly direction from the center, in which we find the following concept:

What does this mean exactly?

To be honest, the concept of cellular automata is something really smart MIT-type people like talking about, but I think the answer can be context specific.

Generally a cellular automaton is a self-contained entity, perhaps containing cells or parts, that follows rules of behavior or operating instructions.

So basically, Gunkel was suggesting that we could conceptualize ideas as self-contained entities following certain rules within a social context.

This phrase represents one of the original core ideas behind ideonomy.

And I know that because I obtained a small photocopy of this chart in which Gunkel had highlighted in yellow this particular cell, signaling its importance—otherwise I never would have even noticed it!

Gunkel was almost certainly aware of Richard Dawkins’ concept of the meme, which came out in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene.

I don’t know whether he was aware of it while founding ideonomy, but at some point he did learn about Dawkins and referenced him in an ideonomy document compiled in the early 1990s.

Although Gunkel’s formulation of “ideas and human acts as social cellular automata” appears to be highly original, it does somewhat relate to Dawkins’ now-popularized concept of the meme as a self-contained, viral package that competes with other memes for dominance in the human mind.

Now, then, for the promised document dump.

In a previous post, I mentioned that the earliest-known description of ideonomy (September 1981) was linked to Gunkel’s “Charts for the Mind” concept.

This was a grandiose plan for a commercial venture that would provide, as a monthly subscription, visual charts that were supposed to help guide or structure the thoughts of the chart viewer/subscriber.

Below is one example of a potential “product offering” that Gunkel was imagining as part of “Charts for the Mind”—a series of dozens of charts organized around the topic of “the Past.”

To be clear, Gunkel was imagining that each one of the bubble-cells on this chart would be represented, itself, as another chart: “History of Stupidity,” “Tragic History,” “Historical Continuities and Discontinuities,” “History of Life,” and “History of Conflict” were some of the many ideas that Gunkel believed separate charts could be created to represent.

Presumably, these separate charts would be configured exactly the same way, with a chart title (“History of Stupidity,” “History of Conflict,” etc.) and then a whole series of additional items arranged around the title to represent individual concepts (e.g., a chart about the “History of Stupidity” would contain dozens of historically significant stupid things people had done inside each of the bubble-cells).

Now here’s another example—a chart series “for parents” that would provide information about children and child-rearing:

Again, Gunkel is imagining that each of the bubble-cells would be a chart itself, e.g., “A Child’s Library” would contain dozens of bubble-cells representing significant children’s books, “Thought Experiments for Children” would contain dozens of bubble-cells with such experiments, etc.

At first glance, Gunkel’s “charts for the mind” appear to be visual-textual mandalas, meditative intellectual spaces that one can be encouraged to enter and explore.

But there are numerous other properties of these charts that, within the context of ideonomy, render them profound and significant objects of both theory and applied usage.

Think, first, about Gunkel’s “cellular automata” description.

Literally, these “Charts for the Mind” represent ideas as distinct cells.

In fancier terms, these charts represent nodes in a vast ontological structure: a method for organizing knowledge that Gunkel is claiming is cellular or perhaps molecular in character.

The repercussions are cumulative and virtually infinite.

Imagine, if you will, the capacity to zoom/descend “vertically” from:

This alone establishes four levels of meaning; at each level, the potential divergence of ideas is vast and exists within its own hierarchy. Contained within the “latent space” or solution space of this four-level idea construct that begins with “Charts for Parents” we will find millions of potential charts, as each new level gives way to a more specific level, each with its own associations.

Importantly, however, we can also see that Gunkel has started to recognize that ideas within a single hierarchical layer or level are also connected.

In the “Charts for Parents” chart, we can see that Gunkel has drawn red lines that make inter-connections between the planned charts.

To pick one connection virtually at random, for example, Gunkel has connected “Things Children Say” to “How Children View the World.” He recognized, therefore, a logical relationship where speech carries a representation of world view. The overlapping or combinatorial potential of these two ideas creates a deeper meaning than each of these ideas have alone.

The ability to both vertically and horizontally relate/connect ideas, as Gunkel demonstrates in these charts, is an important structural feature of ideas, which means it’s an important structural feature of ideonomy—in other words, a capacity to organize knowledge in hierarchies and levels, just like we see today in some scientific taxonomies.

Now here’s the kicker:

(1) since we know that charts are visual lists, with the chart title equivalent to the list title and each cell equivalent to a list item, and

(2) since lists are equivalent to the parameter/element configuration required for Fritz Zwicky’s morphological analysis,

We are now able to grasp a more complete and interconnected vision for ideonomy: how it was meant to work, the role of Gunkel’s “organons” (lists), how some organons were meant to be structured with respect to each other, how Gunkel may have imagined a visual interface for exploring idea spaces computationally, and why morphological analysis was the perfect methodology for realizing the generative potential for each constructed idea space.

Well, unless you consider the major role they played in helping Gunkel formulate ideonomy… nothing.

Gunkel professionally produced copies for one chart—”How Wrong Might We Be?”—which is full of ridiculous, even insane, thought experiments, and which, according to Betsey Dyer, was posted outside of her office on the college campus at Wheaton College for much of her career (meaning that hundreds of Wheaton biology graduates would recognize it). Other than this, however, “Charts for the Mind” went nowhere—like almost every other Gunkel project.

At any rate, I don’t think what Gunkel was proposing had much commercial potential.

One reason could be that to Gunkel, whose mind was constantly rocketing ahead, these entries were meaningful, as he could imagine plenty of things that would belong. But for other people, whose slow processing speed and limited imagination may not be able to imagine more than a few vague items for each proposed topic, the meaning of these other cells requires more elaboration to be meaningful.

Could each of these topics be transformed into a book, or at least a chapter for a book?

Certainly!

And Gunkel even realized this, because on another chart, which appears to be a “rosetta stone” or meta-chart for “Charts for the Mind,” Gunkel included a clipped note that said “Charts Turnable Into Books… prof. writers.”

Astute readers will also notice that these proposed lists weren’t entirely speculative; some of the charts Gunkel imagined in this series were made, either concurrently or later on: “At This Instant Simultaneously,” "How Wrong Might We Be?”, “Man’s Defects and Limitations,” “Aspects of an Infinite Mind,” “Anomalous Natural Phenomena,” and “Talk with Prodigy” among them.

I would love to see someone resurrect a version of this concept for the modern social media “infographic” age.

It would even be extremely doable at low cost using artificial intelligence.

And I would really hope that anyone who develops the idea credit Patrick Gunkel as the originator of the concept and link to the MIT website and/or Wikipedia pages for Gunkel and ideonomy.

In the next issue of the newsletter, I will close the loop on this pre-history of the Ideonomy Project by looking at the second major intellectual thread that came together in Gunkel’s mind alongside the “cellular automata” concept, to give full form to ideonomy.

(1) Information provided by one of Gunkel’s former Hudson Institute colleagues.

(2) We might assume the prodigy in question is Gunkel himself, but I’m actually not quite sure of that. Throughout the 1970s, Gunkel was an advocate for child prodigies and encountered many of them. This chart could reference some of the conversations he liked having with prodigies, which means that ideas from other prodigies may be included.