Is Someone Trying to Restart Patrick Gunkel's Ideonomy Project?

A few months ago, I noticed a website had sprung up at ideonomyproject.org that seemed like it was planning to restart Gunkel’s plan for the Ideonomy Project.

With an AI-generated graphic and a brief description of ideonomy focused on list-making, the site seemed like placeholder.

The home page of this new website states, in part:

The domain name had been registered in 2024 according to a whois lookup.

So it seems somebody had been wanting to go live with a site like this for some time, and around the February to March 2026 timeframe, they did so.

Now… I have a sense of who might be working on this, but since nobody has ever reached out to me to share their plan, I’m not going to speculate.

Instead, I’ll just have to watch the site to see if any more content appears.

I think it’s quite promising and synergistic that both this site and the main MIT site refresh have both appeared in the months since I began publishing my newsletter in January.

While we wait to see what else might happen, I think it’s important to review what Gunkel’s grand vision for the Ideonomy Project actually was.

However, whether this new effort will end up having any relationship to Gunkel’s original plan remains to be seen…

For clues about what Gunkel was driving at with his Ideonomy Project, I think it’s worthwhile to return to what I’ve identified as a very important document called “Definitions and Metaphors for Ideonomy” (Blue Volume).

In this document, Gunkel lists out all the ways he can think of to describe or sketch the outline of ideonomy.

He did this, in part, because he struggled unsticking and untangling ideas from each other. Nor was he willing, or able, to tie specific aspects of ideonomy back to existing projects and thinkers in anything other than a very general way.

Gunkel was a man who struggled with the idea of a scope statement, who disagreed that sciences should have theoretical and applied divisions, who enjoyed publicly embarrassing eminent professors with Socratic zingers that he knew they couldn’t answer.

Especially challenging for Gunkel, he’d essentially discovered an entirely new schema or frame for thinking that nobody had ever comprehended, which meant he lacked the language to describe the massive new intellectual structure he was visualizing.

Many other thinkers had orbited the outside of ideonomy or dipped into it and carved out their own arcs, but ideonomy’s total intellectual space in aggregate was entirely unique and unprecedented.

Among the various definitions and metaphors for ideonomy, Gunkel wrote that it was:

As for the goals of the project, Gunkel wrote that:

Taken together, then, these are some of the main points that help define the objective for the Ideonomy Project:

Throughout his writing, Gunkel was pretty clear on how he imagined the Ideonomy Project playing out based on the theoretical underpinning and investigatory structure he developed.

Overall, Gunkel imagined bootstrapping ideonomy inductively—by working from tens of thousands of existing examples of ideas already extant in the world.

The inductive approach is very important because it’s fundamentally scientific: Gunkel had identified “ideas” as the fundamental data to be investigated by his science—convergent with Francis Bacon’s original vision for science as described in Novum Organum—and he (Gunkel) was proposing a method for doing this investigation using lists, which he called organons.

Gunkel identified 60 “universal organons” (i.e., universally applicable lists) which he felt should be made for each one of ideonomy’s 236 thematic divisions.²

These universal organons, which he also called “transdivisional organons,” were basically templates for lists that would be matched by Ideonomy Project participants against every other division. This is how Gunkel saw ideonomy bootstrapping itself into existence.

Specifically, in Gunkel’s progress report in ideonomy’s Orange Volume, he wrote:

So for example, if you were the first “sphalmologist” assigned to build organons for the division ERRORS (sphalmology), you would begin by making a list called “Examples of Errors.”

You would then move on to creating a list called “Types of Errors.”

Using the results of this second list, you could go back and improve the first list.

Gunkel specifically used the word “pullulate” to describe the process of organon-creation. This is a really important word. It comes from biology, and it refers to the process by which cells give birth to more cells. Gunkel saw his organons as living things, which connects with his “cellular automata” analogy as well as his cell-like chart designs. He probably saw ideas as fundamentally cellular and by using the word “pullulate” he was trying to suggest the bootstrapping process by which life expands and propagates.

Unfortunately, the basic math does not work in favor of this initial task of organon-creation. If you assume 60 organons per division, and there are 236 divisions, that means you are looking at 14,160 organons just for starters.

Gunkel never said the initial organons created by the world’s first ideonomists was supposed to be definitive.

In fact, he pointed out that every time an item was added to one list it would have the potential to affect the composition of one or more other lists.

He imagined these lists existing on the Ideonomy Poroject’s computer network so that ideonomists could always access the most current version of any given list.

And in what seems like a pre-Internet version of crowdsourcing, Gunkel imagined that groups of volunteers could create these lists themselves without any special training.

Once these 14,000+ lists had been created, Gunkel believed, the continual intersection and addition of list items could begin, with new ideas and new words being invented as each list item was cross-matched and combined to assemble ideas in ever-greater and more complicated structures.

All the elements of Gunkel’s grand vision that I’ve written about until now—the theory of ideas, idea chemistry, and what I’ve called the Gunkel Method—are well supported and explainable elements of ideonomy that could be developed and pursued on their own terms. In the case of the latter two, I believe Gunkel developed revolutionary approaches to generative creativity that have never been formally recognized.

But now, with the Ideonomy Project, we are starting to arrive at an uncomfortable place that transcends what an individual might achieve creatively (i.e., what I’ve called “corporate” or “private ideonomy”) and consider ideonomy from the perspective of capital-s Science.

Although all the elements I’ve described feed into the Ideonomy Project and its scientific ambitions, how did Gunkel imagine ideonomy specifically meeting any number of the many criteria that are commonly associated with science?

By that I mean:

There are many definitions and approaches to secure the status of "science,” and my intention is not to pin down every single one.

Rather, I just listed a few questions that point to what people typically associate with science.

Gunkel’s Ideonomy Project was meant to transform a collection of techniques and methods into a major discipline of research that would meet these and other criteria.

This is where Gunkel’s climb up a grand intellectual staircase arrived at a second metaphorical floor, a new level that was communal and shared rather than personal and separate—but was the floor solid enough to stand on?

Figuratively speaking, Patrick Gunkel was not living in the 1980s when he founded ideonomy. He was living sometime in the future.

Ever since the mid-1960s, when Gunkel learned about the Singularity and what artificial intelligence would someday be able to do, he seems to have literally begun living, in some sense, as though this future had already arrived.

Gunkel’s beliefs were deductive and instinctive.

In the 1970s, Gunkel determined that the universe was far more complicated than modern scientists allowed, but rather than focusing on how to build the evidence supporting his beliefs, he developed a vast philosophy he called “the Efflorescent World View” and then treated his philosophy as the reality. As a result, he constantly got into arguments with eminent scientists and others who were not persuaded by Gunkel’s assertions.

To give you an idea of how Gunkel presented himself, here’s a brief excerpt from an August 1979 letter Gunkel sent to to Dr. Herbert Bernstein, a physicist in Amherst, MA, to discuss a potential collaboration (full letter provided below):

“I have a profoundly religious and almost chiliastic view of science which permeates everything I do,” Gunkel wrote. “Since I feel that nature is of infinite hierarchical complexity, a plenistic continuum, l automatically project a view of the future which many would find fantastic and excessive.”³

The absolute confidence Gunkel had in the correctness of his perspective based on his intuitive feeling about the universe is one of the biggest barriers he faced to getting his work taken seriously. Much of his underlying rationale takes a position on reality that is quite different—though not necessarily inconsistent—from the perspective of mainstream scientists.

Some years later, as almost an extension or corollary of the Efflorescent World View, Gunkel deductively determined that universal laws govern the operation of ideas, but rather than trying to demonstrate those laws, he skipped over this crucial work and instead founded a science based on his assumptions. As a result, he failed to persuade the vast majority of professionals who heard him talk about “the science of the laws of ideas.”

Because Gunkel never established any ground work that such a science could or should exist, it was doubly difficult to accept that any natural laws were associated with it.

This does not mean, in my opinion, that Gunkel’s vision was flawed—it means that he didn’t go about making his case appropriately.

A popular way for brilliant mathematicians and geometers to conclude their proofs during the Renaissance and early modern period involved writing, in Latin, reliqua lectori relinquim ("the rest we leave to the reader"). This seems to be essentially what Gunkel was trying to do with upwards of 90 percent of ideonomy; the only problem is that no reader, and in particular no student, stepped up to do the work Gunkel was inviting.

To bring things all together here with reference to my 8-element framework for ideonomy, Gunkel imagined:

But while combining list items from these resultant 14,000+ organons could certainly reveal a number of very fascinating concepts and ideas, the two biggest goals of the Ideonomy Project still remain, in my mind, logically problematic:

This, for me, is where ideonomy begins to crack.

There is a missing link here, an assertion that would still need to be experimentally tried before a universally applicable science could be declared.

The best way to think about the problems with the Ideonomy Project, in my opinion, is to imagine Gunkel coming up to bat in a baseball game.

The first strike is a pitch right down the middle. Gunkel hesitates but doesn’t swing. “Strike one!” the umpire calls.

What happened?

Gunkel avoided trying to discover, formulate, or present a theory regarding “the laws of ideas”—not even as a conjecture or hypothesis. This is probably in large part why Gunkel’s claims that ideonomy was a science struck many listeners as an overreach. His description of the science was throughly prospective.

Various theories about ideas and their laws can be extracted from Gunkel’s intellectually interesting writing, but Gunkel himself proposed no formal system that defined what an idea was, nor did he submit any of his ideas for peer review by connecting them to prior historical writings treating this exact subject.

Instead, Gunkel wrote things like this: “By analogy to electronic circuits, it should be possible to fashion circuits out of ideas and their mutual relationships, functions, properties, etc.”

He provided definitions, metaphors, and analogies in other words… but none of this was close to a formal theory that could be contextualized and reviewed by academic peers.

Some of Gunkel’s work during his Richard Lounsbery grant period did involve looking at semantics, grammar, sentence structure, etc., as a way of disentangling the fundamentals of ideas. But Gunkel dodged the intellectual effort rather than meeting it head-on.

Some thinkers and philosophers have gone to great effort to try to understand what makes an idea—for example, the work of Charles Sanders Peirce, the polymath philosopher, mathematician, and scientist. There is also a robust history here dating back to the French ideologues and even before, with philosophers like John Locke extensively weighing in.

Using Peirce’s semiotics model, you can essentially create a molecular structure of the different components of an idea.

But Gunkel did not look at this, nor did he try to present any similar or complementary system.

So that was strike one.

For the second pitch, Gunkel still didn’t swing. The pitch went a bit wide, but it was still within the strike zone.

What does this second strike represent?

It’s the lack of any logical path to obtain the “universal taxonomy” Gunkel said could be obtained via his bootstrapping method.

This doesn’t mean you can’t do it.

Instead, it makes the Ideonomy Project into something more like an act of faith rather than an act of logic.

Gunkel’s approach for the creation of over 14,000 initial organons seems like a very difficult, mentally grinding, and unhappy task. But it’s not impossible, nor does it represent a situation that is totally unprecedented in the history of science.

In fact, the situation has its origin in the history of science itself.

By analogy, one other way to understand the Ideonomy Project is to look at what Francis Bacon tried and failed to do in the early 1600s.

As I wrote recently, Bacon also had a collaborative project in mind as a way of kickstarting science.

Bacon was convinced that the first step to understanding the laws of nature was to create “natural histories” of all known phenomena, a sort of extensive data-collection effort, so that early scientists would have all the facts to work with. He imagined arranging all the facts about nature into lists which he called “tables of discovery.”

But Bacon could never convince a single person to embark on this journey with him.

His answer was to collect the data and begin to write the natural histories himself, which is why his foundational book, Novum Organum, was never finished.

In fact, it took a little over 30 years after Bacon’s death for a group of naturalists and philosophers in London to take Bacon seriously and found the Royal Society. It was these men who accepted Bacon’s ideas on faith and created their own natural histories for each natural phenomena they wanted to investigate who forged the way ahead.

Bacon and Gunkel were very different men, but the parallels between their intellectual ambitions and life-works are terribly eerie. Gunkel wasn’t asking for extensive lists of natural facts but for extensive lists of ideas and their properties.

In retrospect, people in Bacon’s time weren’t just ignorant about nature—they were ignorant of their own ignorance. Bacon’s proposal was extremely logical but it was also aimed at an extraordinarily complex reality that was going to require the work of tens of thousands of very bright people to untangle, piece by tiny piece, over many centuries. And I believe you could say exactly the same thing about Gunkel’s project.

If you’d been a learned person in 1620 who read Novum Organum, would you have understood right away how Bacon’s project was intended to work and seen the potential for success?

Or would you have said something like, “I don’t understand how collecting every possible example of where ‘heat’ exists, then asking where it doesn’t exist, where it might exist, etc., is going to allow me to ascend to the moon in a basket flown by swans. This is crazy, Francis! Absolutely mad…”

Could the appearance of this Ideonomy Project website suggest that humanity is “ahead of schedule” in terms of adopting Gunkel’s transformative vision and the next stage of science—even though Gunkel is no longer alive to see it?

Now that this new Ideonomy Project website has launched and the original MIT site has undergone a refresh, does that mean one or more people are looking at following Gunkel’s original plan for ideonomy?

There have been several recent projects “inspired” by ideonomy.

For example, Edward Kennedy of Latent Will Technology Corp. recently developed a Claude skill based on ideonomy as a generative process. I haven’t tested out this skill, but it does seem promising that someone was interested enough in ideonomy to build a related tool.

Meanwhile, there are two other recent Github ideonomy projects—Xyra Sinclair’s science of ideas as “inference time machinery” and Github user Morpheis’ project, which seems to be a generative brainstormer inspired by the cognitive moves of Gunkel’s divisions.

While Gunkel would have been curious about and even excited by such efforts, ultimately he would have felt that they were falling short of the actual vision he had for the foundation of a science as opposed to “mere” creativity.

Gunkel literally believed that he’d offered the world a bootstrapped, self-sustaining, self-reinforcing process for knowledge-creation that could take advantage of artificial intelligence.

The foundation of an Ideonomy Project and the creation of an initial set of organons as described above was the first step.

I’ve expressed some reservations about all this because I can’t quite envision how this process would lead to the broader goals Gunkel envisioned for ideonomy, but I’m prepared to accept the work as a leap of faith and acknowledge that, given a choice between “Gunkel was deluded” and “Gunkel saw something nobody else could see,” I’m very comfortable settling on the latter.

In fact, I’m fairly confident that a first draft of Gunkel’s Ideonomy Project, including all 14,160 organons, could theoretically be constructed today using Claude or ChatGPT, although I have no idea how to estimate the number of turns it would take or the overall token cost.

1) We can add to this a quotation from page 205 of Gunkel’s “bright green” ideonomy volume, which I cited in a previous article: “The objective of ideonomy is to gradually identify all species, genera, and taxons of order, to classify them into a pyramid of levels, and to interrelate them as a continuum at once infinitely complex and infinitely simple and specific; or negatively expressed, it is to avoid any illusorily truncated treatment of these things.”

2) Gunkel also wrote that he eventually expanded this group to 100 transdivisional or universal organons, but the best documentation he provided was for an initial list of 60.

3) Letter from Edward Fredkin’s collection in the MIT Distinctive Collections archive. There is no known additional correspondence between Gunkel and Bernstein, however the letter itself illuminates Gunkel’s Hudson Institute work at an important moment. Specifically, this letter quite nicely ties together items #1 and #2 from “There’s Much More to Know about Gunkel’s Work for the Hudson Institute,” including Gunkel’s perspective on his Hudson Institute colleague’s attempt to distance themselves from Gunkel’s work.