Selected Ideonomy Excerpts

Here are a few of my favorite excerpts from Ideonomy - The Science Of Ideas: Introduction, Foundations, and Applications by Patrick Gunkel.

There is something shocking in the revelation of one's ignorance. More shocking, in a way, than the discovery of positive knowledge which relaxes the mind with an awareness of finality, with the sudden reduction of infinite complexity to a mere, even tawdry singularity.

If a man was given paradise he might find it boring; but if merely told of its existence, he might find it an inspiration.

- Orange Volume, p. 127

Cognitive humor may have had an earlier evolutionary origin in pre-cognitive sensorimotor forms of humor, or in the internally 'humorous' life of e.g. bacteria; and indeed, mathematical or logical equivalents of jokes and laughter may even exist-wholly unrecognized-in the realm of physical nature. At the limit, much of what seems funny may be funny, or manifest comedial laws of the cosmos.

- Orange Volume, p. 202

Anomalies exist everywhere and yet for some reason are almost everywhere avoided. They should be sought out and embraced as important clues and opportunities and as indicators of problems, yet normally they are feared, hated, ignored, dismissed, or completely over looked.

- Bright Green Volume, p. 8

We think of human reason as pure and general, and yet it is quite likely that the neurological evolution of animals has ultimately equipped Homo sapiens with a brain that is very specialized and idiosyncratic, and for which many forms of logic—needed to understand different facets of nature—are difficult or impossible. This chance and conceivably grotesque brain of ours, moreover, may preclude the future emergence of dimensions of human behavior and character that are of the utmost importance to the perfection of civilization.

- Bright Green Volume, p. 206

One great feature of symmetry is that it gives one the power to predict things, even things that would not otherwise, or through other means, be predictable [...] Even where theoretical symmetries are apparently in reality unrealized, that absence can be so puzzling to science that the attempt to account for it is often a source of other important discoveries.

- Green Volume, p. 210

It was in my 21st year, in 1969, that I wrote the book Beyond Man: A Discussion of Super Intelligence. For some time I had been convinced that the development of a mechanical intelligence greater, in fact 'infinitely' greater, than man's was all but inevitable, and that the real course of the future would ultimately be decided by this one, illimitably consequential event. Only as the father of this godlike intelligence would man himself have a major—albeit transient or transitive-role in shaping the long-term course of world events. The somnolent way in which my fellowman contemplates this awesome and largely inescapable prospect has always seemed for me the greatest possible indictment of the intellect, rationality, and spiritual worth of our species, and therefore also perhaps its death warrant.

- Blue Volume, p. 234