So, here we are at the end of June.
And as we approach the halfway point of the year, I will commemorate that milestone with what will be my longest and perhaps most substantive post on ideonomy to date.
If you haven’t read my last two posts on the immediate pre-history of ideonomy, in which I discuss Patrick Gunkel’s cellular automata vision coming together with his concept of mass-producing ideas, I’m suggesting that you do so first. Otherwise my post may not make quite as much sense.
On MIT’s ideonomy website, you can find a prominently featured page where Gunkel identifies the “binomens” of ideonomy.
The word binomen is a Latin word that means “two-part name.”
It’s currently used in various scientific fields.
For example, in biology, the binomen is used to specify a species. Homo sapiens is the binomen for human beings.
In the context of ideonomy, however, a binomen is a two-part name for both an applied cognitive move as well as a theoretical field of study in “the idea sciences.”
Gunkel did not like the idea of separating theory from practice. This is perhaps why his concept of the binomen was intended to combine both the applied cognitive move as well as the proposed field of study.
Therefore, the binomen ABILITIES and ANYSTOLOGY represented both a generative formulation for idea chemistry—”What are the ABILITIES [of X]?”—and a field of study focused on the development of numerous lists pertaining to characteristics and attributes of abilities, ways of measuring abilities, and many other standardized approaches Gunkel imagined.
You see, Gunkel’s vision for ideonomy as a science of ideas was so massive that he believed it would ultimately show the Scientific Revolution to have been only in its infancy.
By limiting the concept of science to purely physical phenomena via fields like astronomy, chemistry, physics, and biology, Gunkel believed humanity had missed many of the most interesting discoveries.
Gunkel believed these discoveries still waited in conceptual space, and ideonomy was intended as a structured approach to investigate this space.
Unfortunately, however, not much about this is made clear from ideonomy’s website or the materials posted on it.
Many casual visitors may even end up overlooking the binomens, drawn as they might be to the color-coded manuscripts themselves and Gunkel’s multidimensional scaling plots.1
But my research shows Gunkel worked very hard to develop this list of 236 words and phrases.
Not only were ideomony’s divisions baked into the structure of Gunkel’s manuscript, in which he gave himself the near-impossible assignment to write hundreds of chapters describing the use of each division, but numerous highlighted print-outs on the MIT website show that Gunkel went through many iterations and versions of this list, starting with 320 “areas of concern” and whittling those down to the final 236.
In one case, Gunkel ranked his divisions by how “esoteric” or “exoteric” they were, which could be another way of measuring their difficulty.
In another case, Gunkel took the divisions and tried to subsume them (i.e., collapse them) into a hierarchical structure to see which ones would “fit” under the others, i.e., which ones were the most universal, all-encompassing moves under which other moves were simply more specific versions.
Gunkel even suggested in an email that he believed these divisions ought to be the main focus of the ideonomy website, and that newcomers should be presented with a representation of ideonomy as reflected in a visual chart like a globe showing how the divisions related to each other.
Anyway, my point is that even though Gunkel’s list of divisions is just one of many links on the MIT website, you can’t really understand ideonomy without understanding the centrality of these divisions and how Gunkel intended to use them as part of his science of ideas.
The Gunkel Method
Up to this point, I’ve taken two specific liberties with Gunkel’s science of ideas in an effort to aid with the uptake and transmission, and I have disclosed what those were:
I’ve recommended a change in how ideonomy is pronounced (IDEA-onomy vs. ID-ee-onomy), going against Gunkel’s initial pronunciation.
I’ve recommended elevating the term “idea chemistry” over “idea combinatorics” or “ideacombinatorics” to refer to the central empirical method in Gunkel’s science of ideas.
If there were one additional tweak I would make, however, to help understand and use Gunkel’s science of ideas, that would be to formalize Gunkel’s intention for these divisions by developing a term of use that signifies their purpose.
Rather than standing as a static list on MIT’s website without any context, therefore, I would advocate for transforming these divisions into a living cognitive tool that I am going to be referring to as “the Gunkel Method."
What is critical to recognize here is that Gunkel isn’t doing anything strange by inventing a cognitive tool.
He’s just doing what other people have done before—and he’s taken it to the extreme.
Gunkel is cognitive toolmaxxing.
His only error, in my mind, was failing to provide a name, a package, for what he had created.
Because what Gunkel recognized is that humanity has already developed numerous such cognitive tools and even has made some basic acknowledgement, though without any particular theory, of the fundamental principle of idea chemistry as the method for using all such tools—namely, the systematic matching of one idea against a set of other ideas to see what comes up:
Aristotle’s Four Causes. A very early and now-debunked version of rigorous scientific inquiry, Aristotle wrote that we can explain something by looking at four causes: the material cause (what it is made of); the formal cause (the shape or pattern it follows); the efficient cause (what brought it into being); and the final cause (what it is for).
The SWOT model for business analysis. Many people have taken some kind of training on this. It involves looking at your business process or business idea and matching the idea against four concepts: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. The intent is to systematically generate four categories of ideas to strengthen your business position.
The Twelve Points of the Scout Law. This is a list of twelve qualities a Boy Scout is supposed to have. I can still recite them from memory: trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent. The intention here is to bounce each idea off the self and ask: do I embody this virtue? What about this one?
These were not Gunkel’s examples, by the way. They’re mine. And I’m sure you can think of your own example of a cognitive tool, typically used as a sort of mental checklist or acronym to serve as criteria for the generation of additional ideas. Pop culture and history is littered with them. And guess what? These cognitive tools are all essentially lists (“organons”).
Yet compared to what Gunkel was proposing with his 236 moves, which I’ve termed the Gunkel Method, these other cognitive tools seem like a magnifying glass compared to a transmission electron microscope, which is the most powerful microscope ever invented—so powerful it can see into a single atom.
Why is Gunkel’s tool so overwhelming large, so incredibly vast, compared to what seems like the rest of humanity’s pinprick efforts?
This is a really fascinating question, and there may be a few overlapping answers including the following:
A Big Tool for a Big Job. Gunkel truly had an expansive mind. He wasn’t trying to develop anything that was easy to remember as an acronym, commercially viable, or catchy. He was trying to illuminate the expansive nature of the world of ideas head-on. Ever since he was a little kid, Gunkel wanted to be able to have “all possible ideas.” This was his way of approaching that goal.
AI was Always Going to be a Partner. Gunkel invented a science that required artificial intelligence to fully execute, which eliminates the need for inventing a method human brains can easily store or transmit. Gunkel was focused on a science that could actually work to reveal the complexity of ideas—a procedure that reflects the full range of cognitive moves and epistemological needs, in other words—and felt that artificial intelligence was the only true final form for such a science.
Closer to Infinity. There was also, I believe, although it was subverted, a certain religiosity or transcendent drive behind the expansiveness of the Gunkel Method. One of Gunkel’s crude and early charts was called “Aspects of an Infinite Mind." This would be, Gunkel believed, a mind that was “infinitely skillful,” “epistemologically omniscient,” “illusionless,” “infinitely inspired,” and would have “access to infinitely higher levels of reality,” among many other traits. The Gunkel Method was a gesture toward that infinite mind, offering as it does a systematic method to generate an effectively infinite number of new ideas based on the idea-objects present and rules that govern the combination of those objects.
There are a great many fascinating parallels and other corollaries here that I do not have time to get into.
Suffice to say, other thinkers who have come up with combinatoric methods like the 13th century polymath Ramon Llull and one of Gunkel’s inspirations, Sir Francis Bacon, also took similar approaches with their work.
And yet none of these others ever approached the massive size and scope of the Gunkel Method, much less comprehended that an artificial mind would allow for the operation of such a tool in order to parse the many-faceted world of ideas.
A Few Critical Things to Understand about the Gunkel Method
First, I have used an analogy of a toolbox to explain what Gunkel invented. The tool and toolbox analogy is a sound one.
We might also use an instrument and instrument-box analogy, as that seems more scientific.
The point is that each one of these moves is like a laser fired at a different angle toward something called an “idea.” The laser itself is an “idea” of course. But there is no contradiction here, as in the material world we use physical things to examine other physical things all the time. Some of the most rudimentary forms of experiments involve the body itself as a physical agent—dropping, breaking, hitting, throwing, etc. With the Gunkel Method, we are simply using cognition or, perhaps more precisely, computation, in place of a physical process, with the mind rather than the body as the instrument of performance.
I’ve pondered the Gunkel Method and its divisions for a long time.
And among fascinating aspects and corollaries of the Gunkel Method and its divisions, what I think is critical to understand at a fundamental level are the following:
Purpose. The Gunkel Method had several layered purposes, which I will describe further below. Superficially, Gunkel envisioned the divisions as a master or meta-cognitive list that could be systematically matched against any other idea in order to generate more ideas. I described this in my prior post. Perhaps the most direct evidence to support this concept can be found in the MIT Distinctive Collections archive, where Gunkel states this directly in his unfinished document, “320 Approaches to the Study of a Forest Ecosystem.” But there was also a deeper purpose for the Gunkel Method, as it was intended to serve as the starting point for a collaborative scientific effort to begin mapping the universe of ideas and ideation.
Number of Divisions. Gunkel also did not feel a particular attachment to the final number of divisions—e.g., 236 as opposed to 320. I am unable to find the exact quote at the moment, but he did write that 236 divisions was neither so small as to yield poor results nor so large as to be unmanageable. This may not seem scientific, but again, not every laboratory needs to use every instrument in order to do science. Nor was every possible instrument invented and used at the time each scientific discipline was founded; as time passed, more were invented and used as needs required. What is important to begin thinking about here is level of resolution. So while the Gunkel Method may not illuminate “all possible ideas,” it will illuminate a large portion of them; this should be good enough for starters.
Origins. Gunkel was not basing the divisions on anything other than his own mind. This really frustrated me at first. I wanted to know where he had “gotten” the divisions from, like whether they emerged from his study of a thesaurus or some other knowledge structure, or whether they had been symmetrically unfolded from some basic principle. But it does not appear the divisions came from anywhere specific; Gunkel’s approach was purely instinctive and inductive, i.e., he did not start at the top with some basic set of principles and do any unfolding. These divisions were part of the secret sauce of his mind, trained since he was very young, to recognize the underlying structures of knowledge and the cognitive moves that kept coming back again and again.
Objective Claims. Gunkel was not saying these divisions represented “objective” or universal concepts—not yet, anyway. He was suggesting that in the future, it might be possible to identify convergent themes and overlaps, and in seeing such patterns determine to what extent certain ideas may indeed represent fundamental emanations of the universe, a universal order or arrangement tied to our experience of reality and enduring as emergent cellular-automata like structures. At the present time, however, Gunkel just needed to give people a place to get started.
Academic Fields. It seems clear that Gunkel imagined each one of his divisions becoming a specialized area of research, a lateral field of study that would attempt to universalize the concepts under its purview in order to better understand and interface with the traditional sciences. That is why he worked hard to assign each division its own proper Greek nomenclature. What is so remarkable is that when the divisions are studied in this light, and we consider the fact that these divisions were developed in 1984, Gunkel ends up seeming like a true prophet. Many of the fields he identified as important have since come into being, or are starting to come into being, albeit without the Greek nomenclature Gunkel developed.
Community Process. Gunkel was not saying these divisions were fixed concepts. He wanted them to be vetted by a scientific community and peer review. He saw a community making decisions together about what divisions to emphasize, which were not needed, which to diverge and merge, and which could be added. Just as academic research redefines the scope of its fields (ideally, anyway) as new cross-disciplinary ideas become necessary and research progresses, Gunkel saw these divisions converging, diverging, and intermingling over time.
A Final Note about the Gunkel Method
One fascinating analogy that has emerged in my study of ideonomy is the recognition that Gunkel did not see the science he developed as following a linear progression.
Rather than a straight shot up a ladder, he seems to have envisioned an ascent up a magnificent spiral staircase, where each turn brought you back to the same position on a horizontal axis while simultaneously locating you “higher” along the vertical.
In keeping with this analogy, I believe the divisions of ideonomy can be seen both as a source of individual insight and generative idea production while simultaneously holding the key to a more universal, inclusive, and scientific understanding of ideas.
What we need to acknowledge at this time, however, is that there is no one correct way to use the Gunkel Method—not only because the science of ideas does not exist, but because the creation and matching-together of lists is an activity that requires no special knowledge or education to conduct.
We therefore need to distinguish between what might be called “corporate” or “personal ideonomy” and ideonomy as a scientific effort.
A close reading of Gunkel’s ideonomy materials illustrates that Gunkel envisioned a collaborative, community effort to found the science of ideonomy.
This community effort would have been focused on developing dozens of lists related to each division.
Gunkel seems to have imagined this to be something like the Human Genome Project or the Apollo Moonshot—a massive scientific endeavor that called for, initially (by my calculations, anyway), the creation of over 14,000 separate lists.
Gunkel was never able to convince another person to participate in the effort, however, and so any practice of ideonomy since that time has remained strictly personal.
The community scientific effort Gunkel envisioned will be discussed in Part 4 of my overview of Gunkel’s science of ideas; that is when we will continue up the spiral staircase and ascend to the next floor.
In the mean time, I have not left you with anything useless related to ideonomy.
As suggested by last week’s post, the Gunkel Method can help a writer produce ideas for a book (or scientists with insights about their work, etc.) without any special contribution being made to the science of ideas itself.
(1) Gunkel writes in several places that there are 235 divisions. However, the MIT website actually contains 236. A careful crosswalk reveals that Gunkel added another binomen—LIFES and BIOLOGY—at some point during the development of the website. The cognitive move suggested here is to study the way in which ideas from the field of biology might apply to particular ideas being investigated.