"The Mass-Production of Ideas via Ideas that Generate Ideas."

In last week’s post, I connected the dots on several convergent themes and showed how Gunkel imagined taking the ideas that constitute our reality and structuring them as hierarchies of lists.

Gunkel even had some thoughts about how these hierarchies and lists could be visually represented, inspired by his concept of ideas as “cellular automata.”

But this was only half of Gunkel’s total vision.

To grasp the second part, we have to go beyond theory and representation.

We have to look at applied practice.

What are we going to do once these lists that approximate our reality have been constructed?

The answer brought Gunkel back to some of his earliest years as a self-taught child prodigy hunting for the structure of knowledge amidst a torrent of books and periodicals…

At some point in late 1979 or 1980, while Gunkel was working on his “Charts for the Mind” series, he also developed a massive proposal to the newly formed MacArthur Foundation suggesting to them what they could do with their money.

John D. MacArthur was a wealthy businessman who left 92 percent of his fortune to found the MacArthur Foundation when he died in January of 1978.

Curiously enough, MacArthur did not specify what to do with the money but simply instructed the executors of his estate to figure things out.

It was therefore well-known and well-publicized that the newly formed Foundation was sitting on a vast fortune and looking for ways to spend it.

As near as I can figure, Gunkel learned the Foundation was considering a “Renaissance” theme to help guide its expenditures. He found the theme to be quite inspiring and he immediately began to study renaissances.

He was probably doing this on his own, although there’s a chance the Foundation had contracted with him or with the Hudson Institute to help brainstorm the possibilities.

At any rate, Gunkel developed a massive 100-point “MacArthur Renaissance Program” proposal complete with numerous artistic, cultural, industrial, and other projects and lists of things that money could be spent on.

The chart can be found on the MIT ideonomy website:

Of particular relevance to ideonomy, Gunkel also came up with the idea of funding “research toward mass-producing ideas” as shown in the following screenshot:

Gunkel’s Renaissance proposal is a totally separate thread that I will have to write about another time.

For example, one of Gunkel’s proposals to the Foundation as documented in this chart was “promotion of all geniuses and genius.”

And guess what the MacArthur Fellowship soon became known as?

“The Genius Grant.”

Funny how that happened, huh?

But this is not the only place the concept of mass-producing ideas appeared.

In fact, as was typical with Gunkel, once he came up with an original idea, he was hard-pressed to let it go. And so Gunkel’s ideas would crop up, again and again, in various contexts.

Here, in yet another almost-never-seen-by-anyone-before archival Gunkel document from June 1980, we can find the same concept represented on a 2-page list of book themes for a proposed collaboration between Gunkel and Anthony Wiener, one of the key principals at Herman Kahn’s Hudson Institute.

I wonder whether Gunkel’s proposal for the MacArthur Foundation had failed, and so he simply pivoted to take many of the same ideas and develop the outline of a book based on them.

The list itself is fascinating and deserves its own post, which I may or may not ever get around to writing.

Amidst a long list of potential book themes, most of them traceable in some form to the MacArthur proposal, we find the following:

Once Gunkel had an idea and coined a name for it, he then used that name consistently in his writing regardless of whether the reader had a chance of understanding it.

So the fact that both of these concepts—”ideas as cellular automata” and “mass-production of ideas”—do not use the term “ideonomy” strongly suggests to me that they predate his coinage of the word.

And yet these two themes were clearly part of the foundational bedrock behind ideonomy.

When Gunkel turned his mind toward the concept of mass-producing ideas and combined it with the notion of “ideas as cellular automata,” a lot of things fell into place for him.

First, he developed the powerful analogy of a “recombinant DNA industry for ideas,” which he described in an important 1981 memo I discussed several weeks ago.

Second, he was able to better understand himself, his own mind, and what he’d been doing internally with knowledge for most of his life.

As a young man, Gunkel had identified hundreds of major themes that kept coming back again and again in everything he read, cognitive moves or modes of thought that underlie knowledge—ideas captured by words like definitions, histories, methodologies, behaviors, and criticisms.

His facility with these concepts had become his secret sauce, the method behind his madness.

Being able to transform ideas through the lens of these cognitive moves was why he could come up with hundreds of ideas for his “Charts for the Mind” series, as demonstrated in the montage below, which highlights eight different such universal cognitive moves that are not just relevant to the topic of history but to virtually any topic: Values, Histories, Causes, Transcendences, Speculations, Ignorances, Models, and Theories.

It was around this time that Gunkel hit on the concept of using idea chemistry, as an extension of Zwicky’s morphological analysis, as the methodology that was most appropriate to effectuate the mass-production of ideas.

This is why his description of “ideas that generate ideas” in the June 1980 book theme memo is so important: it shows that Gunkel had moved beyond simply imagining the capacity to mass-produce ideas and realized this mass-production could be accomplished using broadly applicable ideas that are essential for acquiring and transmitting knowledge.

“There are certain clusters of ideas which are especially important, universal, and fundamental,” Gunkel wrote. “Awareness of them can steer all of thought and render it far more efficient, deep, creative, and meaningful.”

Epistemological words, or words-for-getting-and-transmitting-knowledge, as represented by cognitive moves such as values, histories, causes, transcendences, speculations, ignorances, models, and theories, are almost certainly the ideas Gunkel had in mind when he was referring to these “certain clusters of ideas.”¹

I will say it technically first and then in plain language:

In other words:

Gunkel basically came up with a view, or model, that described what humanity had been doing for many centuries to obtain and transmit knowledge, but in a piecemeal and somewhat random fashion; his view called for the unification and systematic use of these moves via artificial intelligence, and he believed a number of very important intellectual repercussions would follow were his proposal to be adopted.

To give you a sense of what this revelation looked like to Gunkel, I can share a few more original archival documents.

The first one almost nobody has ever seen before, as it represents a rough draft of a list entitled “93 Ways To Treat Anything and Everything.”

In the upper left corner, we can see that the list is labeled “RP” which stood for “Renaissance Project.”

In the upper right there is a date, which is definitely 1980, but the month is ambiguous and the day appears to be the 11th.

I apologize for the poor quality of the image.

When combined with Gunkel’s tiny handwriting, it makes for a very difficult read.

These are photographs, not scans, and they were taken in haste under adverse circumstances that I may eventually discuss; suffice to say, not all of my Gunkel research has been conducted under ideal conditions.

Among the ways Gunkel claims we can “treat anything and everything” (that I can make out in the image) he identifies:

A second, much clearer, document, that shows the mature development of this concept can be found in the MIT Distinctive Collections archive and was donated by Professor Dyer.

This document is not available as part of the ideonomy materials posted online, yet another example of an extremely important document for understanding ideonomy that was never publicly shared.

Titled “320 Approaches to the Study of a Forest Ecosystem” and never finished, Gunkel wrote this after having developed a list of 320 such universal meta-cognitive moves to “treat anything and everything.”

He prefaced his treatment—which was never finished, probably due to the massive amount of work and concentration it would have taken—by writing:

The document then starts by considering a forest ecosystem through the following lenses:

Etc.

These are just the first three pages.

The version in the archives contains 16 pages.

In the future, I will make the entire 16 pages available on the website for my 501(c)(3), GGRP.org.

Gunkel always intended to produce a book by using idea chemistry to match hundreds of such meta-cognitive moves to a single idea, but he never succeeded.

Today, as I will point out again and again, artificial intelligence is well-positioned to do this matching for us—and may even be well-equipped to review the results to determine whether anything interesting has come up.

As for the reference to “Ideonomy’s 320 major concerns,” we will have to wait until next week to unpack this reference as we will come at last to the third element of Gunkel’s massive vision—the largest cognitive tool humanity has ever invented.

(1) It seems foolish to relegate the following incredible premise to a footnote, but the implications are only tangential to today’s article: the concept of cellular automata, which came from Conway’s Game of Life, is generally thought to demonstrate that emergent, enduring structures can develop from simple rules that do not themselves specify the creation of those structures. In Conway’s Game of Life, starting arrangements of cells can develop into infinitely persistent “glider guns” that fire an infinite number of “gliders” across cells in the game. Therefore, in addition to directly suggesting a form, structure, and arrangement for ideas, the “cellular automata” analogy may ultimately suggest that ideas themselves can be seen as emergent, enduring structures that can reproduce other emergent, enduring structures—the analogous “glider guns” and “gliders”—which then transmit across cells, e.g., minds!