Theft? The Rest of Pat Gunkel’s Papers May Never See Daylight.

Something exciting has happened in Gunkel world!

As noticed by machine learning researcher Grace Kind, toward the end of September the first-known large language model (LLM) to be trained on Patrick Gunkel’s writing was set loose in an AI-human community known as Delvetown.

Without going into too much detail about how the bot, named Computer-10, was made:

I definitely felt some big Gunkel energy after conversing with Computer-10 for a few minutes.

For example, the bot suggested that black holes are similar to the human mind because of their capacity for absorbing the things around them, then proceeded to regale me with a very long list of things that both black holes and the human mind could help us to model—including societies, cultures, businesses, governments, and economies.

So I’m really pumped that Gunkel’s work, and specifically one of his lists, has been used to create a chatbot that is actually somewhat Gunkel-like in character.

As many of you must know by now, lists were central to Gunkel’s science of ideas.

Gunkel referred to lists as organons after the Greek word for “instrument” or “tool” and as a reference to Francis Bacon’s landmark 1620 book, Novum Organum.

Gunkel imagined using lists and the items on them as the raw material for assembling ideas into ever greater structures with help from artificial intelligence.

As far as I know, Gunkel did not specifically anticipate one or more of his lists being used as training material to guide the conversational output of artificial intelligence, but it’s still a pretty awesome experiment with the materials Gunkel left behind.

At the same time I want to feel excited about this, I’m going to spend the rest of my post explaining what would be even more exciting: a full accounting of the lists Gunkel produced in his lifetime as well as all the rest of his life’s work, which I understand he was carefully saving for posterity—for me and you, in other words.

In the June 1987 Wall Street Journal article “Patrick Gunkel Is an Idea Man Who Thinks in Lists,” writer David Stipp describes Gunkel’s Austin apartment as being littered with “heaps” of lists.

And in the introductory letter for ideonomy’s Orange Volume, Gunkel told Alan McHenry, President of the Lounsbery Foundation, that by the fourth year of the project he’d produced “hundreds” of lists and charts.

“Each evening, after I have added to my book, l find myself making list after list,” Gunkel wrote, “expanding divisions of ideonomy that I have already treated and initiating the treatment of those that I have neglected.”

Although MIT’s ideonomy website contains a portion of these lists, the bulk of them are clearly not available online. So where are they?

There’s also a question about the disposition of Gunkel’s unpublished manuscripts.

In a 2011 interview with a local newspaper, the Falmouth Enterprise, Gunkel showed writer Bret Runyon a box labeled “The 21 Books I Have Written.”

According to Runyon, Gunkel selected a bound manuscript from this box containing a chapter called “A Comment on the Theory of Writing in Books” as well as an essay called “Why We Laugh.” Neither of these manuscripts have ever been publicly shared.

Indeed, by my reckoning, Gunkel has only named about 11 or 12 manuscripts out of this 21 total; while some of these manuscripts are available online, some have been named but never made available. I assume all of these were in this box… but what happened to the box?

These questions about the disposition of Gunkel’s materials are rhetorical, actually.

I know the answer… and if the reader forgives me for using the creation of this Gunkel-inspired LLM as an excuse to give you all the dramatic details, I will go ahead and explain.

When I first began researching Patrick Gunkel in the fall of 2023, I learned that he was never married and did not have any children.

That led me to become very curious about what happened to his estate—including his treasured library, extensive VHS movie and record collection, and everything he’d saved from a lifetime of intellectual work including the Ideonomy Project.

I learned that Gunkel kept a storage unit in Falmouth, MA, and that after his death in 2017, a young woman who described herself as Gunkel’s “partner” at the time took possession of all his belongings.

In the summer of 2011, this woman met Gunkel on the bike path in Falmouth when she was still an undergraduate in college. Gunkel was in his early 60s. Afterward, they maintained a long-distance relationship when this woman graduated college and went to graduate school in Florida.

After Gunkel’s death in 2017, this woman divvied up Gunkel’s library and videos among his friends and donated the rest to charity. However, Gunkel’s life’s work was brought to her mother’s house on Martha’s Vineyard along with Gunkel’s second cat, Tatiana.

Gunkel’s “partner” was also known to Professor Betsey Dyer, who has been an extremely helpful source and supporter throughout my research.

By 2021, Dyer was getting ready to archive her Gunkel materials with the MIT Distinctive Archives collection in accordance with his wishes. As part of this process, Dyer reached out to the woman, who by that time was a programmer in Los Angeles.

This woman pledged to Dyer that she would archive Gunkel’s materials.

“Preserving his works through MIT was the ultimate goal,” she wrote in 2021, as shown in the below email provided to me by Professor Dyer, “and am happy to provide whatever assistance I can to help accomplish that.”

But despite this woman’s acknowledgement that she understood Gunkel wanted his papers archived with MIT, as well as her promise to “help,” she never did what she said she would.

Gunkel’s sister told me that she expected his work to be archived with MIT as well.

Throughout the fall and winter of 2023, I attempted to communicate with this woman via email without success.

Then, seemingly at random, on January 21, 2024, she finally wrote to me with a very straight-forward account of what was going on.

“I am in the process of cataloguing and digitizing Patrick’s work and have slowly been moving what is in my mother’s basement to my home in LA for preservation and study,” she wrote to me.

“My ultimate goal is to have the digital content made available in a more discoverable manner, but for now I’ll likely settle for gdrive.”

You can’t imagine how pumped I was to get this news.

I spoke to her for about an hour in the Spring of 2024 and had some follow-up exchanges via email.

I was super excited about the potential for collaboration… and yet shortly after we talked, she broke off contact with me.

Although I shared some of my research with her, no shared drive invitation appeared, and she never got back to me on some of the action items she suggested she’d be taking.

I was able to visit her mother’s house on Martha’s Vineyard in the summer of 2024 and photograph some of Gunkel’s materials still remaining there, which I’ve been posting over time via this newsletter, but my attempts to follow up with her mother ultimately failed and she stopped responding to me as well.

I’ve never learned why this strange turnabout happened in our discourse or how much of Gunkel’s life work this woman and her mother had saved.

Why would she talk to me and seem like she wanted to collaborate, then suddenly stop responding?

I now believe this has something to do with the sudden death of one of Gunkel’s friends in Spring 2024, which may have changed her sense of accountability as a steward of Gunkel’s materials, but I can’t really be sure.

The below photos capture what the woman’s mother showed me on Martha’s Vineyard, which is clearly only a portion of all the materials Gunkel kept in his storage unit:

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying we need to see all of Gunkel’s lists to make better chatbots.

Nor do I want to suggest this woman is a monster, because she and her mother did provide important support for Gunkel in the last years of his life and take care of his beloved Tatiana.

I’m trying to preserve her anonymity for the moment because I still hope she does the right thing, which was the thing she told Professor Dyer she would do in September 2021 and the same thing she told me she would do in January of 2024—archive Gunkel’s work and make it available for study.

I’ve offered several times to help.

I’ve even offered to pay $15,000 for the materials in consideration of the effort and inconvenience of storage, with the promise that I would quickly take over and complete the archiving process.

I now worry that this woman has dropped all pretension of “preservation and study” and is simply taking an instrumentalist approach.

If my suspicions are correct, there is a sad futility here.

All of Patrick Gunkel’s life, people tried to make money off him.

“A genius interested in artificial intelligence? Let’s see what he can do for us.”

I’ve documented a number of examples where people approached Gunkel with dollar signs in their eyes. So far as I can tell, such people were always disappointed.

Gunkel was a purist. He was oppositional. He was convinced his work was for the good of humanity. Everyone wanted Gunkel to give them a magic algorithm, but he refused even when he was in financial crisis.

As soon as Gunkel got the idea that someone was trying to use him—even if he was being promised fame and fortune—he always torpedoed the relationship or delivered something like the opposite of what was expected.

His life’s work of ideonomy only makes sense as a collaborative enterprise.

The rewards can only be reaped as foundational knowledge.

Gunkel’s vision is too vast for me—and, indeed, for any one person—to bring out in a lifetime; the passage of time, public attention, and collaborative effort is the only way these materials will ever accrue any value.

Maybe someone out there will know what to do next. 

Maybe this woman will finally do the right thing.

In the meantime, I’m just going to keep writing about Patrick Gunkel using the materials I have in the way I know how.