Studying ideonomy has been the most intellectually rewarding experience of my life. The more I’ve studied ideonomy, the more it has revealed. In my opinion, ideonomy is at the center of the spider’s web that is human knowledge. It is the light that illuminates, explains, and gives meaning to everything else. I am aware of the heaviness of this statement, but I believe it is true.
From time to time, very important thinkers have woken up from the dim slumber that assails the greater portion of humanity. These thinkers have left Plato’s Cave and glimpsed some logical arrangement of ideas, like a constellation of stars, and they have returned to tell others about it. Recent figures such as Marx, Freud, Einstein, Jung, and Campbell could be considered examples. The classic Greeks—Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle—are others.
These and many other great thinkers have changed the world and how people view it.
But none of them have been proven “right.”
Even scientists like Albert Einstein, who used mathematics to discover principles with universal utility and stunning repercussions, left plenty of mysteries.
And mathematics is, after all, an arbitrary language.
It’s a language that correlates very closely with our experience of reality, but “the map is not the territory”—i.e., math may represent our reality, but it’s not reality itself.
When Patrick Gunkel came charging out of Plato’s Cave with great excitement as a young man in the early 1960s, I don’t think he saw a constellation.
I think he saw the entire sky.
He saw that the marvelous constellations these amazing thinkers kept discovering were simply different ways of perceiving, rotating, or connecting the same fundamental ideas.
If you look at a kaleidoscope and turn it, the glass beads fall into a new arrangement.
There are no new beads added to the device; it’s the effect of the mirrors and underlying laws, including the laws of visible light, that dictate what new shape you see. There is logic and there is order to it.
By analogy, Gunkel did not feel that our experience of reality could be reduced to a single principle, a Grand Unified Theory.
Rather, he believed that our experience of reality emerges from a “logic” or ordering of principles—the construction of the tube, the kaleidoscope mirrors, and whatever underlying laws are controlling the fall of the beads and the play of light.
This is a similar notion to Conway’s Game of Life, which shows that four simple rules can generate emergent behavior in a two-dimensional space.
Gunkel understood that kaleidoscopes and Conway’s Game of Life were just simplified simulations.
What he wanted to do was apply the same analogy to reality itself in order to discover what underlying laws intersected to create our emergent experience.
These laws, whatever they may be, are at the heart of Gunkel’s concept of “order.”
One of Gunkel’s most important ideonomy divisions is ORDERS.
And without understanding Gunkel’s concept of “order,” I believe, it is virtually impossible to truly understand ideonomy itself.
Reality as an Illusion
Before showing where in Gunkel’s writings he discusses the concept of order, I think it’s also important to touch on Gunkel’s philosophy, which he called the Efflorescent World View.
The verb “to effloresce” means “to bloom.”
Gunkel felt the universe exists in a perpetual state of becoming, transformation, elaboration, and emergence.
One obstacle that may prevent someone raised in a western nation from gaining a more complete understanding of ideonomy is that the Efflorescent World View is much more aligned with Eastern philosophical and religious concepts than Western ones.
"In my efflorescent world view of principles and corollaries,” Gunkel told Austin American-Statesman columnist Billy Porterfield in an October 1989 interview, “there are hierarchies, and the effect is that of lower and higher things, of ever higher gods of which there is no highest God.”
Like the Hindu concept of maya, reality is, for Gunkel, a layered manifestation of some ultimate existence that becomes more complex the more one tries to understand it.
Therefore, all so-called “truths” are simply illusions that have not yet been pierced.
The process of invention and discovery is infinite, with new knowledge modifying the context of all prior knowledge and creating even more opportunities for knowledge in the future.
Following some of the writings of Francis Bacon, who famously identified four “idols” that were interfering with humanity’s unbiased investigation of nature, Gunkel saw language as one of the chief illusions responsible for obscuring humanity’s view of the magnificent potential latent in our experience of reality.
“An idea is always an impediment to our seeing anything beyond itself,” Gunkel wrote in his Blue ideonomy volume.
Although somewhat absurdly placed as a parenthetical aside in a discussion about why “cats are not cats”—i.e., the concept of a “cat” is a heuristic that prevents people from recognizing important details about particular cats—the fundamental concept is incredibly important.
Once people come up with an idea, name it, and develop various heuristics associated with it, they cease identifying other possible ideas that could also be connected. What social scientist Daniel Kahneman called “System I”—lazy, heuristic-loving thinking—over “System II”—deeper, more intensive thinking—becomes engaged.
The concept works in reverse, too: when euphemisms are brought into play, confusion about what is being discussed becomes an issue.
In the political arena, for example, consider the hesitation many heads-of-state now have for calling military intervention in other countries a “war.”
President Trump called the U.S. attack on Iran in early 2026 an “excursion.” And the Russian Federation still calls its full-scale invasion of Ukraine a “special military operation” even though it’s ground on for over four years and led to hundreds of thousands of deaths in both Russia and Ukraine.
These attempts to obscure the concept of war have various legal, political, and social benefits for the perpetrators.
It’s not a new strategy, either.
What was the Roman “Pax Romana,” for example, other than brutal conquest dressed up as a peace-keeping operation?
According to the Roman historian Tacitus, the Caledonian chief Calgacus said of the Romans: “They make a desert and call it peace.”
By assigning a different word with alternative associations to a commonly understood concept, more accurate and complex realities are more easily ignored.
Gunkel’s First Attempt to Understand “Order”
Gunkel’s interest in the concept of “order” predates the ideonomy project by over a decade.
In fact, Gunkel listed one of his thought experiments while an MIT employee in the early 1970s as critical to his development of ideonomy.
For this thought experiment, Gunkel spent a lot of time in a small windowless office on the MIT campus staring a picture of a tree.
Gunkel was meditating on the tree as a way of trying to understand what patterns and principles might exist regardless of the idea, thing, subject, or experience being processed by the brain. He was trying to come up with a universal science that would qualitatively (rather than quantitatively) characterize all possible ways the universe might be organized.
Gunkel wrote up his findings in a manuscript called “Order in Experience,” which was included in his “Brain Book.”
He even shared the list with Ed Fredkin, who made it available in his papers via the MIT Distinctive Collections archive.
Here’s an excerpt of the first two pages of Fredkin’s version of the list to give you a sense of what’s on it.
For the first five “orders in experience,” Gunkel identifies:
Recurrent - many subjects are not unique but recur over and over again.
Identical - despite the complexity of the world there are also identical aspects, such as can be found in atoms, and identical experiences (Gunkel mentions the sight of the sky appearing between tree branches).
Homeomerous - there is much in the world composed of similar, uniform, or identical parts.
Homeoteleutic - that which starts out incompatible or dissimilar may end up being similar after all.
Dense - the world is thick with meaning and variety.
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There are 73 entries on the list in all.
As with almost everything related to Gunkel, this list has never been appropriately studied, used, contextualized, or connected to other knowledge.
For example, Gunkel’s view of “order” is, by his own account, similar to the ideas of theoretical physicist David Bohm, whose writings explore the possibility of a more fundamental substrate (“the implicate order”) of which our perceived reality is merely a partial projection.
Both Gunkel and Bohm were inspired by the early 20th century philosopher-scientist Alfred North Whitehead and his process philosophy. And yet nobody has ever cross-walked, or attempted to deconflict and merge, Gunkel’s writings with Bohm’s—or with Whitehead’s, for that matter.
From an applied perspective, perhaps some or else all of Gunkel’s types of order could be reduced to operational principles and serve as foundational parameters for a simulation game.
Simulation and game designers may also find the general tone and nature of the list inspiring as well, to say nothing of its particulars.
“Order” in Ideonomy
One thing that is delightful but also maddening about Gunkel’s writing is that he never seems to structure his work with a reader in mind.
The insights Gunkel delivers—many of which are intuitive for him—seem to come almost as asides, as though we’ve been approximately on the same page with him, and his purpose is simply to provide some added context or color instead of providing a frame for interpreting his entire project.
What this means is that some of his most critical observations and ideas can be found sprinkled throughout his work as asides just like the parenthetical quote from “cats are not cats” above.
It really makes you wonder whether he was ignorant of how average minds functioned, could not be bothered with what “an average person might know,” or whether he was aware and playing a sort of intellectual scavenger hunt for those who were dedicated enough to decipher his writing.
So it is that we find, buried on page 205 of Gunkel’s “bright green” ideonomy volume, the following incredible statement, which is a statement not replicated anywhere else in Gunkel’s writings on ideonomy, so far as I can tell:
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.
Wow, I thought, when I read this sentence for the first time.
A mission statement for ideonomy. So that kind of helps.
It’s a complex statement, but when you put that into the context of Gunkel’s existing investigation of order and his philosophy or outlook on reality as I’ve explained above, yet one more layer of ideonomy’s purpose and potential snaps more clearly into focus.
It’s not just a way to invent new concepts or understand existing ones, but a procedure for interrogating the fundamental, multidimensional structure of reality, which appears first in the mind as ideas and ideation.
The above quoted statement from Gunkel occurs in the context of a discussion of order.
In fact, the bright green volume is a remarkable document with sections that can be cross-walked to many of ideonomy’s divisions to help ascertain what Gunkel was driving at with them—in this case, the division ORDERS.
In the section on order in the bright green volume, Gunkel elaborates as follows:
By “order” here, is not simply meant pattern, sequence, form, law, manifold, control, relationships, or the like, but something more fundamental that is hard to define, either to other persons or to oneself. Although a more satisfying definition will have to remain a problem for the future, a partial characterization of order is possible now, or at least there are things that can be said that will point the reader's mind in the right direction.
Order, then, might be understood to represent an especially, or perhaps maximally, fundamental level, type, or sense of structure; or whatever kinds or concepts of structure are most apt to transcend place, time, detail, variation, discoveries of new phenomena, substitutions of one class of phenomenon for another, movement from one science or subject to another, or even changes of perspective or logic. In a crude sense order refers to the factual or possible arrangements of things in nature or the mind. It might also be said to designate the generic or specific structure of any physical or abstract space; or the essence of any spatial, temporal, or semantic manifold. It signifies the interrelation of the deepest categories of reality, and the derivation of lesser order therefrom.
So there you have it.
As I’ve said before, Gunkel was hunting a rare beast that few of us even knew existed, much less thought about how to capture.
To return to one of my remarks above, Gunkel had by this point recognized that everything about our experience appears first in the mind as an “idea.”
Therefore, a science of ideas would be a crucial to those who sought to understand what fundamental orders overlap to create our emergent, kaleidoscope-like experience of a reality that seems ever-changing but in fact—or so runs Gunkel’s hypothesis—operates within certain levels of order.
Although future idea scientists working in the division ORDERS and Cybelology have their work cut out for them, their role is an incredibly important one—involving, as it eventually will, the synthesis of a massive amount of information to discover fundamental patterns of reality.
At least Gunkel left them something like the first draft of a map.
If you want to read the full “Order in Experience” document, it’s available as part of Gunkel’s “Brain Book” starting at PDF PAGE 481 of Professor Om Gnawali’s share drive here: https://www2.cs.uh.edu/~gnawali/gunkel/Brain%20Hypotheses%20and%20Their%20Broader%20Implications%20%201972-1974,%20MIT.pdf