When I first started telling my friends and acquaintances about Patrick Gunkel, the first association people typically made—the first heuristic/meme to pop up—was that of John Nash, the schizophrenic professor featured in A Beautiful Mind.
For a long time, I strongly resisted this connection.
There are, at least superficially, a lot more differences than similarities.
One of the biggest differences, for example, is that Nash was able to achieve success and become an insider to academia before becoming afflicted with mental illness. Nash started a family. Meanwhile, Gunkel was perpetually nonfunctional in both of these respects. He dropped out of high school and never seriously looked back. He tried to find stable intellectual employment and get hitched, but throughout his life these goals eluded him. It was probably not mental illness that prevented Gunkel from achieving his goals. Gunkel was a very unique person, probably on the autism spectrum, probably with a personality disorder, probably with ADHD. But he was, on the whole, logical—until his last years, anyway—stable and relatively sane.
And unlike Nash, Gunkel was not a mathematician or technical expert. Nothing Gunkel did with ideonomy was recognized academically the way John Nash transformed game theory in his late 20s. In fact, during an episode that Gunkel probably tried to distance himself from later in life, he tried to become a mathematician just after getting kicked out of MIT in 1974, but his attempt blew up horribly for several reasons. So Gunkel spent his life as a generalist, “following his nose” from one idea to the next. When Gunkel’s development of ideonomy called for statistical expertise, he understood what needed to happen conceptually, but his work was totally wrong. (This will be discussed in a future post.)
In short, although the life of John Nash did descend into disorder and chaos, he was able to come back from the brink and win the Nobel Prize. That was a voyage and return story. But Gunkel’s story never had this arc.
From day one, Gunkel was on another plane of existence, another planet.
He was like the aliens in the movie Contact, he was building a machine out there in space and then he was going to transmit the plans to Earth so that you could build the machine for yourself and figure out how to visit.
And Yet… and Yet…
For all the differences between Gunkel and Nash, there were, actually, a few notable similarities. And these similarities emerged for me the longer I spent considering Gunkel’s story.
The ability to think differently and question assumptions was woven into Gunkel’s cellular fiber. He couldn’t help it. He just refused to limit this questioning to one particular or appropriate venue, and instead went to lectures and asked outrageous questions that got him kicked out.
Also with Nash, Gunkel saw something in the world that nobody else could see. Most importantly, from a very young age, Gunkel was chasing a generative method that would let humanity have “all possible ideas.” With ideonomy, Gunkel discovered that method and provided the theoretical foundation to bring his vision into existence.
Like a hunter stalking some rare beast none of us knew existed, Gunkel spent his whole life pursuing the beast and laying out the trap. Few people understood what he’d done because of how far ahead Gunkel’s mind had gone. But the rare beast is real, it does exist. And the trap is ready to build for anyone who cares to do so.
With ideonomy, Gunkel saw where artificial intelligence was going to lead and he invented a whole science to use it. I know that I trashed Gunkel’s essay The Year 3000 in a prior post, but this was the flip-side of his fervent belief in the future, which was already well established by the time he was in his early 20s.
Why bother living and struggling to solve today’s problems, Gunkel thought, when you can skip right to the end and use artificial intelligence to solve the biggest problems of them all—and then discover more of them?
Man’s Defects and Limitations
Even though thinking more deeply about Gunkel led me to make more connections between him and Nash than I originally thought possible, I was still on the fence about Gunkel’s “beautiful mind” until I saw this hand-drawn, undated image among his archival materials.
Almost nobody has ever seen this, and it may not be duplicated without permission.
This image shows clearly the way Gunkel approached ideas as multidimensional constructs.
Although the image is unfinished—as with a number of other Gunkel charts and drawings—he did enough, I imagine, to convince himself that the technique was powerful.
Like a 20th century William Blake, whose unique vision involved the blending of text and imagery, Gunkel’s unfinished image clearly shows interest in finding new ways for structuring and transmitting knowledge.
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This is jumping ahead, somewhat, to the vision of ideonomy as Gunkel saw it, but one thing that is critical to observe about this image is that it’s actually a visualized list.
The list title is “Man’s Defects & Limitations.”
The items on the list are the attributes Gunkel includes—words like Aging, Frail, Arbitrary, Cruel, Mortal, Irrational, and Lustful are contained within the image to provide a bounded set that defines the scope enclosed by the words of the title.
Although the drawing is, like many Gunkel works, undated, it was probably done around the late 1970s or early 1980s—a time when Gunkel was on the verge of coining the term ideonomy and getting hit with the revelation he’d been heading toward his entire life.
Unfinished for a Reason?
Looking at this image, I can’t help but try to put myself in Gunkel’s mind as he was making it.
I can’t be totally sure why the image is unfinished, but I don’t think it had anything to do with running out of ideas. That wasn’t a problem Gunkel ever had.
Rather, I wonder whether he realized it would be hard to write new words horizontally in the legs of the human figure on the way down to the feet. Gunkel’s handwriting was very small, very precise. But perhaps even he felt intimidated with the prospect of having to fill the remaining spaces on the figure.
I wonder if the image, while visually interesting, conferred a limitation rather than an advantage.
I wonder, in fact, whether this was one of his earliest experiments in chart-making that led him to abandon the idea of trying to contain ideas within forms and instead treat the entire paper as a zone for his ideas.
As far as I’m aware, Gunkel had no other attempts to make a chart like this again.
Instead, as we will see in coming newsletter issues, Gunkel went in the exact opposite direction with his charts and sought expansion rather than limitation.
Until next time…