The Sleeper Awakens

Ladies and gentlemen, readers of the world’s only Patrick Gunkel newsletter, there has been an exciting development, an earthquake, in the extremely narrow world of Gunkel scholarship.

Very recently, the MIT ideonomy website has undergone a complete refresh after almost 20 years of downtime. 

The website now looks like this:

Whereas for 20 years it has looked like this:

The original site was archived, and an entirely new site has sprung up overnight in its place.

Incredibly, a link to my 501(c)(3), the Gunkel Global Renaissance Project, is now featured on the homepage along with several other links and resources related to Gunkel and ideonomy.

To be clear, I didn’t know anything about this refresh and I have not been asking for it.

A site with a more modern feel may indeed bring more interest and awareness to Gunkel and ideonomy, but speaking as someone who has been visiting the original MIT site since 2012, it’s certainly a change that’s going to require some adjustment.

The new site may reward people who are looking for a quick information download as opposed to those who wanted to find a self-guided tour, a treasure hunt, as others including myself have surely enjoyed in the past.

Which may be OK.

One of the biggest prerequisites for understanding ideonomy has been needing the patience and courage to explore the dozens of links, graphics, manuscripts, etc., on the MIT website with very little context.

If I hadn’t known about Patrick Gunkel in person, and if he hadn’t haunted my hometown of Falmouth, Massachusetts, I may never have found the patience to dig deeper.

The headline of today’s newsletter article is a thematic reference to Frank Herbert’s iconic novel Dune.

The “sleeper” is a reference to Paul Atredies, the kwisatz haderach, the ultimate super-being who has been genetically engineered over thousands of years of controlled breeding to rule the universe, and who needs only to awaken to his true destiny.

The phrase also reminds me of the old science fiction trope of someone who goes to sleep and wakes up in the future.

Although work on the ideonomy website stopped in 2006 and Patrick Gunkel passed away in 2017, the rekindling of the website is, in a sense, like the moment the hero of these time-traveling tropes wakes up again.

Patrick Gunkel was far ahead of his time, and the MIT website described a science that was also ahead of its time.

For years, ideonomy—as a science of ideas reliant on artificial intelligence—has been sleeping, waiting for the world to finally catch up.

It’s absolutely clear to me that large language models (LLMs) can be used to super-charge and accelerate ideonomy’s vision, shortening the length-to-maturity of Gunkel’s central project from centuries to decades or even just a couple of years.

I assume this link is clear to others as well.

Though I won’t go so far as to claim that ideonomy is the equivalent of a super-being, I do believe that a science of ideas is, like Paul Atreides, thousands of years in the making, and that Patrick Gunkel was able to ravel together dozens of disparate intellectual threads into a coherent vision, with artificial intelligence at the center, in a way no other thinker had ever done.

When I realized the MIT website was rebooted, I emailed the long-time webmaster, Om Gnawali, congratulating him and thanking him for dropping a link to my own website.

He confirmed that he was behind the refresh, and although he has not provided any more information at the time of this newsletter publication, you can be sure that I will provide any other updates or information from Gnawali when I become aware of it.

While we wait for more information about the site and Gnawali’s plans, this is a great time to consider why the website exists in the first place.

The following narrative is drawn from my research as well as from several primary source documents I’ve read. 

Gunkel’s ideonomy grant from the Richard Lounsbery Foundation came through in early 1984 at a time when he was extremely desperate for financial support.

Gunkel originally wanted to do two books on ideonomy—a theoretical book and an applied book—but as he churned things over in his Cambridge, MA, apartment, his inability to scope out his work meant that he was ultimately unable to imagine anything other than a single massive book.

By the early 1990s, Gunkel was living in Austin, Texas. The Lounsbery grant had ended. Originally a five-year grant, it had already been extended and expanded in several ways, but the Foundation could not continue to fund Gunkel without any product materializing.

The removal of Lousnbery funding was devastating for Gunkel.

He contemplated suicide.

Ultimately, he ended up moving to St. Louis, Missouri, for a woman he met on a computer dating site. He believed they were engaged to be married, but this was not the case. Soon afterwards, the exact same set of circumstances led Gunkel to move to Tornoto, Canada, where he was again romantically disappointed. 

Meanwhile, Gunkel’s friends were trying to help him bring ideonomy to the world.

They recognized that Gunkel’s assembled ideonomy manuscript—a copy of which contains a more narrow selection of documents than those found on MIT’s website—was basically unpublishable and required serious editorial attention.

They found an editor who was willing to get the manuscript into shape for publication, but his friends would not pay the editor without evidence that Gunkel was able to collaborate. Gunkel never provided this evidence. He either wanted the money no strings attached, or he didn’t want any help at all. This central sticking point was never resolved, and the attempt collapsed.

Then, at some point in the mid-1990s, Whitman Richards, one of Gunkel’s great champions at MIT, funded Omprakesh Gnawali, at that time an MIT undergraduate student, to support Gunkel from an archival and accessibility standpoint.

In addition to scanning in a large number of Gunkel’s writings to preserve them digitally, Gnawali took advantage of emerging internet technology to build a website for ideonomy hosted on MIT’s servers.

The plan was to bring ideonomy directly to the public.

And for the next seven or eight years they did, with Gnawali repeatedly adding to and expanding the website while Gunkel acted as his own apostle.

Informed readers may take an issue with my statement, above, that LLMs could accelerate the "length-to-maturity" of Gunkel's project.

Ideonomy is, after all, a science that—like all other sciences—does not have a natural end point where scientists say, "OK, we're done." Let me explain this before concluding.

Although ideonomy, as a science of ideas, was intended as a generative investigation of the universe of ideas without any particular end point, Gunkel did imagine an “Ideonomy Project” to develop and implement a universally valid system for generating, understanding, communicating about, and manipulating ideas.

Therefore, while the science of ideonomy has no endpoint, the Ideonomy Project would have a threshold at which this new language becomes usable and begins to propagate on its own. When I speak of accelerating "length-to-maturity," it’s this threshold to which I’m referring.

A good analogy here could be the discovery of the base-ten counting system that we all use today. The base-ten system was invented in India, spread through the Middle East, and eventually made its way to England. Because of how ingrained this system has become, it's difficult to imagine ever using a different system. But the reality is that for much of human history, people did not count the way we count now.

There’s no particular reason that we need to use a base-ten system as opposed to a base-twelve system or some other base system—binary, which arguably is the most efficient, is a base-two system—except for the fact that we have ten fingers.

Once the base-ten system was discovered and standardized, it became very useful and allowed for some fantastic discoveries as well as for communications between professionals. The system was also logical enough that future mathematicians could derive numerous corollaries, proofs, theorems, and other derivatives to extend and improve on the initial system.

Gunkel wanted to develop the equivalent system for discussing qualitative matters.

He wanted to create a generative language of ideas that had scientific rigor, but he also recognized this would be a fantastically difficult problem that would require expertise in logic, linguistics, artificial intelligence, philosophy, and other disciplines.

Gunkel's Ideonomy Project may have some relationship, some parallel, to prior attempts to create a universal language. But I have not done enough research yet to know where Gunkel's vision and these other Tower-of-Babel like efforts diverge.

My initial instinct is to point out that many of these efforts (e.g., the Esperanto-style auxiliary languages) imagined human beings as the ones doing the communicating, and so any such universal language would be subject to the constraints of the human mind. The combinatorial tradition Gunkel claimed as his lineage—Leibniz's characteristica universalis, and behind it Ramon Llull—was different, aiming at a calculus of reasoning rather than mere conversation.

Gunkel radicalized all previous approaches by dropping the assumption that the notation had to remain legible to humans at all.

He was perfectly fine with a language of ideas that could only be used by machines.

And yet the language of binary, though indeed used by machines, is probably not compatible with what Gunkel imagined. There are likely more dimensions that would need to be defined in a universal language of ideas beyond just presence/absence, yes/no, and true/false.

So with the Ideonomy Project, Gunkel imagined inventing a language that had the properties of a universal language and grammar, but was likely so complicated that it would require machines to fully execute; at the same time, binary was not likely sufficient.

I will go into much greater detail about these elements in future newsletters, as they map directly to my overall eight-part approach to ideonomy.

Until then, check out the new MIT website and spread the word: the sleeper has awakened.