Ideonomy Explainer
In the early 1980s, a virtually unknown Chicago-born intellectual named Patrick Gunkel became convinced that advances in computer technology would soon create the conditions for a worldwide renaissance.
Gunkel believed the core of this renaissance would be a new science of idea generation enabled by artificial intelligence that would unravel the secrets of nature and human consciousness. He called this new science ideonomy (prounouced "IDEA-onomy").
A self-taught genius who never graduated eleventh grade, by the time he was 34, Gunkel had surveyed all of human knowledge and glimpsed within the jumbled, haphazard outlines of the arts and sciences a massive logical structure hidden in plain sight.
In 1981, Gunkel wrote:
I believe the emergence of something equivalent to ideonomy is inevitable in the course of the next few decades... ideonomy will lead, I believe, to ‘the industrialization of thought,’ or an ‘idea industry’ having considerable analogy to the new recombinant DNA industry, which seeks to generate new organisms by mastering and exploiting systematic laws of permutation, combination, and transformation of life’s fundamental elements and processes.With grant funding from the Richard Lounsbery Foundation in New York City, for eight years Gunkel churned out thousands of charts, diagrams, lists, computer programs, and manuscript pages to explain ideonomy to the world.
He lectured at least three times at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
He pitched his science to hundreds of experts across the United States.
A front-page feature story of Gunkel appeared in the June 1, 1987, Wall Street Journal.
Yet even after all this, Gunkel’s science of ideas remained opaque and esoteric to all but his closest friends and advocates.
It wasn't entirely his fault.
In a pattern that has repeated over and over again throughout history, a visionary who was ahead of his time tried to communicate a remarkable new view of the world and was ignored.
Although Gunkel died in 2017 before he could see his vision advanced by others, recent improvements in artificial intelligence have created a context that makes ideonomy easier to understand.
And with every passing year, the importance of Gunkel's epochal vision is confirmed more strongly than ever before...
The academic community still has a great deal of work ahead in order to understand and validate Gunkel’s ideas.
Gunkel tried to give birth to a massive new science with far-reaching implications all at once.
A neurodivergent savant, Gunkel understood his science intuitively but struggled to describe it logically, sequentially, or in relation to other academic efforts.
Even so, it's possible to break down Gunkel’s fully integrated vision into eight primary elements.
| (1) A New Theory of Forms/Theory of Ideas - Gunkel's definition for ideonomy described the science as treating “the laws of ideas” as though these were already factually proven, but he never worked to present a coherent theory. The theory exists and can be extracted from Gunkel's writing, but it has never been presented for academic peer review and discussion. Gunkel was asserting that although ideas are invisible, they are objective phenomena with effects and relationships that can be scientifically studied. See the newsletter article here: "Why Humanity Desperately Needs a Theory of Ideas" |
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CALL TO ACTION
Does ideonomy sound interesting, even exciting?
Well you're in luck!
Because Gunkel's work has been essentially ignored for over 30 years, all of these areas and more are wide open for new research that is convergent with cutting-edge work in AI, quantum physics, topographical modeling, cognitive science, and numerous other disciplines.
Get started on your own, or--better yet!--please contact us for encouragement and insight, including research suggestions and possibly even access to primary source documents that have never been publicly shared.