There are a variety of reasons why ]earning the effects of human nature is important: the fundamental nature of physical entities may be obscured by or indissociable from human nature; cultural and biological contributions to human nature need to be distinguished and separated; limits and non-limits to man's plasticity, capacity, and potential need to be known; man's weaknesses, errors, and mischievous tendencies need to be defined and quantified precisely; unconscious anthropomorphism impairs human creativity, perception, freedom of thought, and technological innovation; and, since human nature mediates the exploration of all of physical and mental reality, greater understanding of it could lead to greater understanding of the latter things.
How--qualitatively and quantitatively--does human nature inhere in or affect human: logic, concepts, assumptions, evaluations, and intelligence; questions and answers; thoughts, mental imagery, and imagination; philosophies, world views, and beliefs; perceptions, awareness, and self-relationships; values and attitudes (or likes, prejudices, etc); goals, wants, needs, and interests; acts, behavior, events, and stories; reactions, interactions, conflicts, and cooperations; relationships and roles; aesthetics; pathology; abilities, capacities, possibilities, and degrees of freedom; languages, symbolism, models, and gestalts; decisions, methods, strategies, and styles; development; errors and illusions; psychodynamics and being; simplicities and complexities; knowledge, wisdom, and ignorance; creativity and discoveries; excellences; progress; problems and solutions; etc?
All branches of engineering share certain facets, with all of which ideonomy can help: conceptualization, invention, development, design, implementation, production, maintenance, modernization, systemic integration, use, control and management, education, etc.
Ideonomy can suggest some of the interactions among the parts of complex engineering systems that are apt to give rise to future, or account for present, problems. It can point out improbable but genuine analogies between systems that are seemingly of a wholly unrelated character that provide clues as to the source of, or solution to, a problem.
It can aid the identification of all of the possible canonical variations upon an engineering system's design.
By first indicating all of the fundamental performance and aesthetic dimensions of an automobile, it can increase the number of secondary properties--based on those dimensions--that are apt to be considered, and the rigor with which they are considered.
It can suggest neglected genera of processes that can be incorporated in, or form the basis of new types of, food or chemical engineering systems.
It can provide new types of graphics for depicting ideas about, or enabling evaluation of, petroleum or computer engineering systems.
It can furnish means for organizing powerful data bases for engineering instruction.
Show How A Thing Affects Its Environment
Things have more intricate, subtle, and important affects upon their environment than is ordinarily thought. Through illustrative examples, analogies, criteria, domain generalizations, etc, ideonomy can bring such effects to light.
For instance, shrubs are known to repel other plants in their immediate vicinity by releasing allelopathic substances; by analogy, equivalent substances might be expected to be generated and used by trees, animals, and microorganisms--or by all life. By further analogy, bodily organs, celIs, and organel les might be capable of affecting their intra-organismal environment in this way, or might be engaged in a similar chemical warfare.
A few species are known to emit substances into the environment that instead act to attract organisms of the same or some arbitrarily distant species. Suitable random sampling of the Earth's taxa could test whether or not such substances are general or universal in the bios.
What had already been found to be the case for analogs of allelopathy between organs, cells, and organelles could suggest what to expect for forms or analogs of attractants in those situations.
In these and myriad other ways a generalized picture could be constructed for how biological 'things' can and are apt to affect their environment.
Similarly, if it is finally demonstrated that solar activity does couple to, and significantly affect, the Earth's weather or climatedespite the seemingly gross insufficiency of the solar forces in the vicinity of the Earth- large implications may follow. The existence or feasibility of equally improbable couplings may be implied or allowed among other bodies and astronomic phenomena in the solar system, among stars and galaxies, and among entities and phenomena in all sciences : e.g. organisms or genes in biology, molecules in chemistry, earthquakes or seismic faults around the Earth in geology, seemingly unrelated industries in economics, cultures remote in time in historiography, features of a painting in art, disparate facts or experiences in education, etc.
In connection with how generic things affect their generic environments, ideonomy can progressively identify and explicate generic: paths, courses, processes, mechanisms, forces, effects, patterns, circumstances, events, elements, functions, interdependences, interactions, combinations, combinatorics, correlations, dimensions, dynamics, transformations, levels, hierarchies, networks, models, chains and series, shortcuts, surprises and anomalies, laws, mathematics, paradoxes, symmetries, asymmetries, antisyzygies, abilities, geneses, inversions, equalities, systems, phenomena, clusters, simplicities, resources, roles, spaces, transcendences, opportunities, order taxons, interferences, sensitivities, etc.
Specially and universally, ideonomy can help answer such questions as : whether, why, how, when, where, or how greatly : a thing affects its environment: continuously or interruptedly, statically or dynamically, uniformly or nonuniformly, identically or changingly, progressively or unprogressingly, destructively or nondestructively, directly or indirectly, instantaneously or delayedly, quickly or slowly, in many ways or one, by many means or one, in many respects or one; finitely, infinitely, or infinitesimally; temporarily or permanently, independently or dependently, deterministically or randomly, reversibly or irreversibly, absolutely or merely relatively, quantitatively or qualitatively, locally or universally, structurally or compositionally, confinedly or inter alia, with or without loss to itself, concentratedly or diffusely, proportionately or disproportionately, once or repeatedly, in the same way it affects some other environment, simply or complexly, cooperatively or antagonistically, really or illusorily, desirably or undesirably, partially or completely, connaturally or dissimilarly, 'correctly or incorrectly', irreducibly or reducibly, originatively, coevolutionarily, synergistically, etc.
Show How A Thing Is Affected By Its Environment
Not only do things affect their environment, their environment affects them--but once again ideonomy can be of help.
Ideonomy can: visualize and define all possible types and taxons of environments; suggest the properties and capacities of those environments and the ways in which they may or are likely to affect the things that they environ--be they of related or arbitrary kind; enumerate the relationships that are apt to develop between things and their surroundings; clarify the paths, media, agencies, objects, processes, modes, circumstances, etc through which environments may influence the things they contain or accompany; indicate the diverse elements and complex structure of things that are apt to mediate or receive the effects environment has on those things; provide tests and suggest experiments for determining the actual effects environments have had upon things; furnish means for exploring and exploiting analogies between the effects certain environments have on certain things and the effects various other environments may have upon various other-or giventhings, or for using the former as models for differentiating the latter; trace the effects of an environment within the thing it affects, and also back into the originative environment; show the limits of an environment's effects upon a thing; suggest what a thing: receives from, requires in, reflects of, gains from, loses through, etc : its environment; and so forth.
Some specific examples of matters ideonomy could help investigate are: how an organ is affected by its bodily environment, a cell is influenced by the contiguity of other cells, or the activity of a mitochondrion varies as a function of its cytoplasmic distance from the cell nucleus; how the properties of a molecule vary as a function of nearby molecules; how the perception of an object depends on the spatiotemporal context of the object; whether Mach's principle is correct--or the local properties of matter depend upon the structure, content, or interrelationship of the entire universe; the extent to which--in the problem of text recognition in artificial intelligence--the meaning of individual words is, or should be, a function of prior and subsequent words; the transformations of state, appearance, and behavior that comets undergo when they enter the inner solar system and approach the Sun; how the physiology of a bacterial biont changes when the bacterium is inserted into diverse consortiums of microorganisms; how the operation or effect of a particular law are apt to vary if the law is introduced in different countries' legal systems; how the ethical status of a human act, and hence the various probabilities connected with that act, are altered by the geographic and historical culture in which the act occurs; how the admirability of a military tactic depends on the campaign in which the tactic is tried; how the validity, universality, or expression of fundamental physical laws and constants--so-called--may vary in radically different physical regimes; how the phenotypal expression of a species' genotype may change in minor or major ways in different physical and biological settings and circumstances; how a speaker's conception of the meaning of his own words may change in different conversational circumstances or in a way that depends on the particular persons with whom he is speaking; etc.
Demonstrate Equivalences Between Things
Equivalences are: virtual identities of meaning, effect, function, implication, state e/vc of two or more different or unlike 'things' (be those identities unidimensional, multidimensional, or omnidimensional); properties, transformations, measures, or situations that make different things tantamount; mutually deducible, or reciprocally implied or entailed, things- or samenesses of truth value; isomorphies or isomorphisms of behavior, dynamics, treatment, cognition, practice, etc; convergently divergent things, processes, concepts, e/vc; pairs or sets of things that possess, or that can be treated as though possessing, one-to-one correspondence with one another- or the state or mechanism of such correspondence; or the like.
Analogs or analogies, per contra, refer to simple or necessary likeness--rather than to anything more or to anything less.
Therefore two things that are neither identical, analogous, equal, related, possessed of common elements, nor even (perhaps) interchangeable or 'symmetric', may nonetheless be equivalent.
The ways in which things are equivalent may variously be: overt or covert, deep or superficial, known or theoretical, simple or complex, fixed or protean, of fixed or variable degree, singular or plural, direct or indirect, intrinsic or extrinsic, separable or inseparable, of finite or infinite magnitude or character, presential or proleptic, etc.
Equivalences may be important for many reasons: they may obviate distinctions or efforts; they may allow the extension or generalization of laws, knowledge, or techniques; they may simplify description; they may belie apparent heterogeneity, disharmony, divergence, inconsistency, or contradiction; they may signalize the real structure of nature; they may indicate the primacy of relationships over things, or of processes over relationships; they may enable a problem to be solved via other routes, methods, or means; they may represent transformational invariants; their discovery may promote the more elegant organization of the mind; they may reveal what is irrelevant, nonessential, or redundant--and what is central; they may suggest universal paradoxes; etc.
Ideonomy could help to answer such illustrative questions about equivalences as: how equivalent the neuroglial cells and neurons of the brain are, say in their full or hidden functioning; whether different initial conditions of the universe will ultimately prove to have been equivalent, in the sense of equifinality; whether the industrial labor of men and women is truly equivalent, in general or in various cases; whether--or in what senses--the different branched-off universes of the Everett Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics might actually be 'equivalent'; whether matter (koinomatter) and antimatter are opposite and yet otherwise fully 'equivalent'; how equivalent plants and animals--or microorganisms and macroorganisms--are in reality; how equivalent alternative treatments of a disease are; how equivalent different economic and political systems are over the long term in sustaining and advancing the weal of the societies that embrace them; which foraging methods employed by the different species of animals are energetically equivalent (while perhaps being at the same time optimal); etc.
By errors are meant many things: fallacies, delusions, prejudices, evil conduct, acts of stupidity, omissions, and neglect (all of which are discussed elsewhere); as well as malfunctions, inadvertences, mistaken practices or acts, defective calculations or measurements, inaccuracies, failures, misunderstandings, misstatements, wrong decisions, etc.
All individual, specific, and generic errors need to be: sought out and exhumed, compiled, named, analyzed, described, defined, classified, differentiated, circumscribed, illustrated, explained, generalized, interrelated and synthesized, chronicled, operationalized, quantified, simulated and experimented upon, criticized, investigated for their actual and possible combinations, decomposed into their subtypes, extinguished, transvalued, transcended, etc.
What are the distinctive and shared errors that occur in different fields or in connection with different things: e.g. social relationships, scientific experimentation, theoretical science, artistic creation, language or communication, education and child-rearing, economics, historiography, ideonomy, military science, games and sports, criticism, medicine, engineering subfields, psychiatry, commerce, government, industry, taxology, journalism, mathematics, professional studies of the future, diplomacy, cooking, etiquette, ethics, perception, bodily movement, marriage, shopping, and debate?
What are their shared and distinct: causes, geneses, environments and circumstances, paths, courses, effects, costs, implications, elements, interactions, analogies, transformations, distributions, ranges, extremes, dimensions, fluctuations, statistics, clusters, hierarchies, networks, chains, levels and niveaus, disguises, interests and importances, probabilities, absences, thresholds, capacities and potentialities, laws and random aspects, signs, convergences and divergences, paradoxical benefits, appearances, essentials, connections, phenomena, abstract spaces, paradoxes, measures, paradoxical conservations, cybernetics, degrees of freedom, equivalences, self-effects, opposites, representations, etc?
What analogies and parallels are there between human errors and errors that occur elsewhere in nature? What might be learned from the errors that are made by other organisms or machines?
How do all errors scale in terms of necessity and avoidability?
What repetitive and unique aspects of errors are there?
What is it that we know about errors and of what are we ignorant? What are the things that we should find out first--and why, how, with what, and when?
What tools, methods, and other resources are there for investigating errors? What programs of research should there be? Who should be doing what? How might or should human research upon errors be planned? What things in ideonomy as a whole could help such research?
What errors have been made, discovered, or avoided historically--and what have been the consequences?
What scenarios should be constructed for errors that might occur now or in the future?
What errors are ambiguous, controversial, or uncertain? What excuses might be made for particular or generic errors, and how might those excuses be criticized?
If errors are to actually have bad effects, what other things are required or must happen?
How may we be mistaken about certain errors, and what errors may we be mistaken about?
What types of people make what types of errors? What in human psychology or experience, or in the organization of society, accounts for those errors?
What would the world be like without various classes of errors?
Are there bursts of errors? Are there conditions or circumstances that produce many and diverse errors; and if so, what are the reasons and mechanisms therefor? Can errors propagate and procreate; and if they can, how do they do so and how important may such phenomena be?
Are there errors that are obvious and yet unrecognized?
What errors are typically mistaken for other errors?
What are all the unknown errors that might be hypothesized to exist? Are errors more apt to be finite or infinite, in number and variety?
Possible reasons for or values of classifying errors are that: certain errors might turn out to be unexpectedly alike or identical--or on the contrary, different or unrelated; a classification scheme could enable other and future knowledge about the errors to be coordinated, accessed, and more rigorously applied; by codifying errors, classification can promote their universal discussion; classification aids discovery of the properties, laws, and possibilities of things; a scheme classifying errors universally can further the comparison of errors in separate disciplines and the transfer of relevant knowledge and insights based on the analogies, contrasts, homologies, and other relationships that are noted and explored; instruction about errors almost presupposes their classification; classifying things facilitates their perception and imaginative consideration; etc.
What are all of the errors that are made, or could be made, about a particular and random thing? Attempts to answer this question would be edifying and they would help train the mind.
What principles and advice should guide any treatment of error?
What errors are--or how are errors--caused by: defective assumptions, mistaken comparisons, active ignorance, human biases (or likes and dislikes), emotions, bad habits, flawed learning, miseducation, shared errors, poorly organized knowledge, haste,: superficiality, carelessness, activities of the unconscious mind, other errors, the limitations of human nature, problems of theories or methods, inattention, defects of philosophies, institutions, misuse of things, bad concepts, fallacious reasoning, disharmonies or contradictions, misinterpretation, mortmain or perseveration, overgeneralization, chains of events, overreaching, missed opportunities, etc?
Random examples of particular errors with which ideonomy could help are: iatrogenic human ills, corporal punishment of children which could be obviated by unflinching reprobation or clever reproofs, both the neglect and abuse of historical analogies by military strategists, overdevotion to a single sense of a concept, overly literal construals of statements, overreaction, worship of a unique standard of excellence and an associated failure to cultivate a necessary diversity, failure to contemplate exceptions, oversimplification of an idea, misreading of a contingent thing as being fundamental, failure to anticipate opposition, combining or mixing things that are incompatible or of a different nature, neglecting nonlinearities, failure to anticipate nonmonotonic developments, oblivions of past actions or modifications, failure to foresee overlaps or redundancies, unpreparedness, overselling by a salesman, overpreparation by a student before a test, excessive caution or candor in diplomacy, mutual mimicry or singularity of style or aspect of the different figures or objects in an artist's painting, technically perfect but aesthetically over-precise rendition of a score by a musician, excessive intervention of government in a nation's economy, neglect of extenuating circumstances by a jury, insufficient pauses or accentuation in elocution, failure to reproduce the result of an experiment in science, a critic's failure to recognize a novel method or objective in the literary work he is reviewing, failure to adapt a recipe to the peculiarities of one's momentary stock of food or to read between the lines of the recipe, failure of a golfer to properly compensate for the movements of his own body in teeing off, failure of one struck by Cupid's playful arrow to ascertain the actual availability and reciprocal captivation of the sudden idol, failure of the painter of a landscape to omit pointless detail or disharmonious features and to dramatize what is essential, use of simple analogy and unconcern with homology in proposing a new genus of plants, telling a joke to an audience not matched to the joke's particular brand of humor, etc.
Errors can also be classified better through the study of, or by analogies or comparisons to, things that are not strictly or at all errors: e.g. correct actions, truths, problems, acts in general, general contrasts, optimums, degrees of things, deviations, changes and transformations, surprises, anomalies, alternatives, decisions in general, disjunctions, opposites, inequalities, divergences, etc.
By reducing errors things can be made more: efficient, reliable, economical, predictable, plannable, consistent, complex (or simple), rational, understood and understandable, beautiful, safe, secure, perfect, moral, reproducible, controllable, etc.
Ideonomy can help one to examine and judge concerning the worth, quality, significance, amount, degree, or condition of an arbitrary thing.
Specifically, it could aid evaluation of: new medical tools and techniques, candidate policemen, teachers in their classrooms, proposed or attempted social reforms, homes being considered for purchase by newlyweds, political trends, the health of a lot of plants in a nursery, one's own mental state, others' evaluations (sic), neologisms, rival hypotheses in science, the stability of countries in critical regions of the world, a contract drawn up by another party, the state of the sky by one who is contemplating taking his glider up, an abstract painting encountered in a museum gallery, the efficiency of interstellar absorption of different frequencies of photons by various hypothetical mechanisms, the meaning of a poem, the capacity of a stream to transport sediments, the effects of mouse growth hormone when introduced into a canary, the ecological stability of a grassland, the sanity of a person by a psychiatrist, prospective jurors, the severity of a drought, a mathematical proof, the economic health of an ancient town being exhumed at an archaeological site, or the structural integrity of a building.
It can suggest: new ways to evaluate old things, more complex evaluations of things, new needs for or uses of evaluations, things that have never been evaluated, stages in the evaluation of things, useful evaluative procedures, ways of evaluating things through a process of comparison, arguments for different evaluative approaches, things to evaluate in connection with one another, how to combine separate evaluations, evaluative criteria, optimal evaluations, errors to which types of evaluations are prone and how to avoid them, what to look for or what questions to ask when evaluating things, one's range of options when evaluating a thing, the progressively less and more important things that there are to evaluate in a given instance, what is wrong with one's own or someone else's evaluation, problems that are apt to be encountered when evaluating things and how to avoid or solve such difficulties, how to evaluate things that are encountered for the first time or that are unusual or obscure or about which little is known, surprises that are common when evaluating things, etc.
Ideonomy's value can lie: in increasing the amount that can be learned in evaluations, in making the results and scope of evaluations more complete, in standardizing evaluations, in making the evaluative process more conscious, methodical, and systematic, in making it easier for people to begin their evaluations, in increasing the applicability of the results of evaluations, in enlarging the number of things that have already been successfully evaluated (or the amount of evaluational data available to humanity), in improving evaluative habits and in training evaluative skills, etc.
Things exist in time; when they change in time one speaks of events. The advance of scientific knowledge has taught us the importance of seeking out events everywhere and in everything. Physics would have us reduce all of physical reality to the relations and interrelations of discrete events, and developments in the mental sciences imply that a similar need may exist for reducing all of mental reality to a comparable web of discrete events; perhaps physicomental reality will ultimately prove monistic, and reducible to the dynamic relations and interrelations of pure and singular physicomental, events. Would there then be a discretistic or a continuistic manifold of such event-like entities? It is impossible momentarily to say which of these alternatives is the more likely, but probably the dichotomy itself will eventually turn out to be mistaken.
The clarion call that is being sounded is plain, in any case. In all sciences and subjects we are being asked to: reduce all phenomena to events or to their event-like aspects; show how entities are always perforce event- like, and events entity-like (or how both are variously antisyzygial--or illustrative of meetings of opposites in the greater nature of things); isolate all of the individual events, and types of events, that occur in, as, and between phenomena; identify the smallest and largest events, and all of the levels and hierarchies of events; uncover all of the simplest, identical, and interchangeable events--and at the same time all of the most complex, disparate, and divergent, and least interchangeable, events; discover all of the ways in which events interact, combine, permute, transform, and evolve--or could be made to do so; learn the paradoxical symmetries and asymmetries because of which seemingly different events or sets of events may turn out to be equivalent, or seemingly identical or equivalent events or sets of events different or nonequivalent; ascertain all of the necessary--and all of the arbitrary or contingent--temporal, spatial, and qualitative orderings of events; descry the rhythms, laws, and logics of events; find all of the systematic and paradoxical equivalences between events and nonoccurrences; reconstruct the past--and predict the future--history and evolution of events in their entirety; etc.
Ideonomy can survey and list all of the types of moments in life, both ordinary and extraordinary. It can then go on to investigate, discover, and publish all of their: ways of being scaled and actual scalings; degrees, manners, and means of occurrence, maturation, and transformation; likely and possible--or unlikely and impossible--chronologies or temporal chainings; singular and cyclical occurrences, and reexemplification in a variety of situations; mutual dependence, independence, and interdependence; causes, mechanisms, and processes; stories (all of the stories that they can occur in or give rise to, in connection with particular or generic things); diverse interrelationships with moments in the lives of other organisms, in the 'careers' of inanimate phenomena, or in the internal life of the mind itself; simple and complex effects and human meanings; internal elements and structures; subtypes and subvariations; discrete and continuous physical and mental boundaries; physical and abstract properties, dimensions, dimensionalities, and spaces; conditions, needs, problems, opportunities, uses, opposites, probabilities, criticisms, etc; defects and perfections; goods and bads; alternative definitions, descriptions, and representations; equilibria, disequilibria, and conservational aspects; finite and infinite aspects; competitive, antagonistic, and synergistic aspects; voluntary and involuntary aspects; clusters, interconnections, paths, networks, convergences, and divergences; essential and ambiguous qualities; redundancies and irredundancies; classification; etc.
Such a comprehensive canvas of actual and possible life moments can furnish both an overview and preview of life. Presented to small children, it could enable them to understand what human life is all about, to feel less intimidated by the unknown life that lies before them or by the greater living entity that is society, to explore all possible careers and discuss them among themselves or with their teachers and parents, to plan their subsequent careers, to anticipate and avoid problems, to comprehend the relative and correlative--or the conjoint--importance of life's events or of all that pertains thereto, to enjoy richer and more realistic fantasy-lives and playacting, to undergo quicker psychogenesis and greater individuation, to understand better all the subjects they are taught in which man or life is a dominant element (including history, literature, ethics, sociology, political science, psychology, and biology), etc.
But the imagined inventory and investigation of life's kaleidoscopic moments could also benefit adults, science, industry, and art.
For example, the analysis of how different people rank the same set of comprehensive life moments on a 'best to worst scale' could reveal previously unknown differences between human beings, clusters of types of personalities, different mental views of the world, ways of coping with life's problems, elusive life patterns, systems of attitudes, ways of organizing experience, divergent goals and concerns in life, etc.
Studies of life's range or constellation of special or typical moments would inevitably suggest moments that could occur but do not, or ways of expanding upon, variegating, and further evolving human existence on earth.
The ideonomic extension or generalization of the portrait of man's life moments to the lives of lower animals could variously occur: directly, analogically, gradationally, transformationally, adaptationally, set- theoretically, via logical analysis, predictively, experimentally, taxologically, recombinationally, via transelementation, interpolatively, group-theoretically, or in other ways. Great advances in ethology and zoopsychology could result as the human moments were used to imagine and decipher animals': situations, experiences, thoughts, purposes, psychologies, groupings, relationships, interactions, propensities, choices and decisions, logics, world views, psychological evolution, psychogeneses, societies, practices, behavioral schedules, etc. And there could be return benefits to 'anthropology'.
Ideonomy can identify events in different fields, or in all possible subjects, that are of a similar, identical, or conceptually related nature; and it can be used to redefine or reconceptualize recognized events in a more general, universal, timeless, fundamental, multiform, intercommunicative, manipulable, nomothetic, elementary, multidimensional, categoreal, syncategorematic, categorematic, synthetic, unitary, hierarchic, parallel, ideonomic, etc., way.
Its point of view is that it is ultimately the same set of canonical events that is occurring and endlessly recurring in every subject there is and in every phenomenon; or that all known and imaginable events are really variations upon one another or mental variants of one another, albeit diffracted by circumstances, or by the curiosities of human language and custom, into different guises. Of course the absolute singularity of the set may be infinitely difficult to demonstrate.
Events that occur invite ideonomic clarification for many reasons or in many ways: their fine structure may be obscure, their identity may be unknown, their starts and finishes or total duration may be unresolved, their temporal orientation may seem or be ambiguous, their interrelations to other events may be vague, their circumstances may be but dimly perceived or undefined, their causes and effects may not be characterized, their direction or tendencies may require analysis, their interest or importance may be unknown, their novelty (or conventionality) may be unnoted, etc.
As the detail of description of events increases, other details--and other events--come to light, in a way that may be: concatenational, exponential, supplementary, completive, complementary, recursive, network-like, etc.
Random examples of particular events that ideonomy could help to clarify are: volcanic eruption, collapse of a cliff, assassination of a statesman by what a simpler era called a madman, cellular division, blink of an eye, pronunciation of word, transition to mathematical chaos, annihilation of particle and its antiparticle, entry added to ledger, echoing of a sound from cliff face, airplane crash, evaluation of painting, sowing of seeds, rite of passage, discovery of archaeological site, supersedure of one architectural era by another, eruption of solar prominence, conjugation of two bacteriums, biosynthesis of chlorophyll molecule, learning new word, alteration of international exchange rate, electronic amplification of signal, start of cosmos (Big Bang), doing unto another what one would have him do unto oneself, invention of the safety pin, incandescing of lamp filament, star's death, birth of idea in mind or brain, fall of raindrop, drumbeat, factoring of equation, placement of notice in newspaper, oscillation of global sea level, tumor metastasis, envelopment of one army by another, rotation of ball bearing, interference of two photons, passing of law, nervous breakdown, mental block (transient amnesia), flocculation, submarine passage of turbidity current, declaration of war, collision of two continents, genesis of social strata, kissing, heartbeat, etc.
Examples of the generic things that such events may have 'in common' are: evolutionary curves, halting starts, coincidental concauses, autocatalysis, self-interference, 'false changes', rapid oscillations, amplification, interrupted progress, repetitive and diverse subevents, diachronic consistencies and inconsistencies, directions and indeterminations of direction, discontinuous endings, morphogeneses, spatial convergence and divergence, reversal, displacement, transposition, inversion, preparations or precursors, couplings, cooperative phenomena, reactions and reciprocities, linearities and nonlinearities, equilibria and disequilibria, general axes of movement, flow, regulatory conditions, limits, turbulence, central and peripheral parts, boundaries, emissions, transformations, permutations, combinations, syntheses, energies, forces, materials, processes, products and traces, fractal structure, hierarchy, 'inertia and momentum', homologs, analogs, taxons, opposites, matrices, passive and active elements, major and minor elements, dependent and independent elements, systems, fine structure, internal motions, equalities and inequalities, symmetries and asymmetries, topology, cybernetics, etc.
What illusions, fallacies, and paradoxes are connected with events?
How can events be experimented upon, reproduced, modeled, and simulated?
What do we know about generic and particular events, and of what are we ignorant? What is the value of our knowledge and cost of our ignorance?
How intricate, and important, may be nature's substructure of events?
How may events trigger events, that in turn trigger other events, and so on ad infinitum?
Ideonomy could help answer such specific questions about events as: How many different evolutionary events conspired to produce the banyan tree? How many distinct or complementary auditory events are discernible in applause or contribute to its mental structure? What body of serial, parallel, and diagonal events are preliminary to the catastrophic failure of a cliff or bridge? What set of atmospheric events are triggered by nightfall? What critical events are determinative of the essence of a literary plot? What sequence of events led up to the primordial explosion of the so-called universe? What sequence of events effected the evolution of Homo sapiens or of human intelligence? Of how many events--culminating in death--is biological senescence compounded? What chain of events completely describes the reaction of two heterospecific molecules? When an abscised tree leaf falls to the ground, how many distinct kinematic events--or dynamical discontinuities--does it experience en route?
What is bad: either objectively or perceivedly, either absolutely or relatively, either universally or locally, either eternally or momentarily, either directly or indirectly, and either in a general or in a particular way?
From the standpoint of ideonomy, evils or bads are in no sense confined to the human sphere or to human acts, but rather are to be found illustrated throughout biology and in all of inanimate nature.
This generalization has many consequences: the same considerations, methods, and means that have been, or might be, applied to the study and treatment of human or anthropocentric bads can now be used in a much more embracive, energetic, and natural way; artificial features and fallacies that have been unrecognizedly resulting from the unnatural restriction of the investigation of what is wrong or harmful can henceforth be done away with; bads can now be treated in the spirit of any other scientific phenomenon and with respect to possible universal laws; and insights that will now be gained from the probing of nonanthropic bads can be expected to clarify merely or specially human evils.
Another thing that is necessary to properly grasp the nature and possibilities of human bads is that the breadth of their theoretical and actual types be defined in full, and that all such types and taxons be exhaustively compared and interrelated. Moreover, and related to this, the abstract space of all possible combinations, permutations, and transformations of bads must be progressively constructed and researched.
Unquestionably there are many major and minor kinds of human evils that so far have never been conceived of or at least that have never been treated satisfactorily or in a way at all comparable to the treatment that has been given to more conventional bads. The ideonomist can make this prediction confidently because he hat discovered what is equivalent to a universal law: that mankind has never treated anything whatever in an absolutely complete and final way.
A scheme of types of human evil and bads can function as a checklist and mnemonic whenever or wherever attention is to be payed to some form or instance of such bads. This can prevent problems that are commonplace: ignorant confusion of one type of bad with another, use of the wrong methods to scrutinize or cure a bad or some source of evil, a corruption of the apparatus for classifying and treating bads generally, inattention to bads as a result of frustration and cynicism, overattention to narrow or hackneyed aspects of particular bads, imprecise or ambiguous descriptions of types of bads, poor indexing and cross-referencing of bads in the literature on the subject, etc.
Many phenomena of wickedness or harm must be attributed to diverse bads acting either seriatim or in parallel with one another, to the iteration of the same bad, to the mistaking of a different degree for a different type of a bad, etc.
Many bads must go unrecognized for being latent or hidden, or for constituting anomalous forms or modifications of familiar bads.
How simple, and how complex, can bads be?
How pervasive? How variable or how lasting or conservative? How extreme?
What are the total effects and consequences, and how great may be the total costs, of types of bads or of bads in general? What phenomena and features of the world can be blamed on or explained via bads?
How do bads originate, develop, and evolve? How and why do they wither away, end, or fluctuate? What passively or actively regulates, counteracts, or limits bads? What are the paths and courses of evil?
In what ways and degrees may certain bads or bads in general be good, in either a relative or absolute sense? What do we know, and of what are we ignorant, here?
How, on the contrary, may that which is or appears to be good be bad in some general or specialized way?
How ambiguous, interactive, and interlocking may the totality of bads and goods be in the unknown system of nature?
What are the ranges, dimensions, properties, capacities, dynamics, processes, systems, hierarchies, networks, domains, realms, conflicts, clusters, recursions, transformational groups, rings, trees, sets, elements, etc of each of the given types of bads?
What questions have never been asked or answered about bads?
What recurring questions should or might be asked wherever badness is considered?
In what particular and systematic ways are all bads analogous and different, and what are the implications of such analogies and differences?
What are the uses, functions, roles, and importances of bads?
What bads are complementary or inverse?
What are all the known or possible bads in connection with some arbitrary thing?
What are all the different ways of measuring, quantifying, and describing bads?
How do existing bads tend to change over time, quantitatively and qualitatively? How have they changed historically?
What are the complex relationships between bads and their environments? How do bads in one area, or in connection with one phenomenon or thing, spill over into bads in another area or in connection with other things?
How should different bads be scaled, both absolutely and relatively?
How do different bads appear; what clues and signs of their existence are there?
What ways and means exist or might be developed for evaluating and criticizing bads?
What bads are nonexistent or impossible?
What illusions and paradoxes pertain to bad?
What principles should guide the treatment of bads?
Can bads be reduced or can they merely be delayed, redistributed, transformed, or substituted for one another?
In what ways should given bads be defined, or what constitutes their essence?
Why is it important to study or treat bads?
What controversies exist, or may yet emerge, concerning bads?
Specific examples of things that ideonomy could help to treat the bads of or connected with, or that are themselves examples such bads as it could aid the treatment of: drug abuse, poor diet, human wars; wars between plants competing for the same territories, resources, or ecological niches; 'false' turns of biological evolution; forgetting of history by later generations; squandering of finite soil resources by physiologically or morphologically inefficient species of plants; internally corrosive reactants generated by the combustion of fuels in engines; connotations of old words used by ideonomy in a novel way; inefficiencies of chemical reactions paradoxically caused by excessive concentrations of the reactants relative to the nonreactants; economic growth or prosperity themselves; self-destabilizations of stars; calculational drift in a computer caused by repeated approximations, or by the accumulation and interaction of other types of errors; overly similar genes or effects of genes; the environmental noise represented by background nuclear radiation in the course of biological evolution; 'selfish' aspects of individual genes within a genome; utterly nonsensical but mischievous rumors arising constantly and insuppressibly in any society; uncontrollable semantic drift of a language over historical time; chaotic fluctuations of global stocks caused by 'pure' nonlinear dynamics; indirect problems induced throughout a musical composition by a single faulty section; opportunities for new crime created by the well-meaning passage of a law; contra-productive effects of a move in chess; etc.
Particular or diverse examples of things are often needed: by students looking for themes for essays or dissertations, by novelists seeking colorful material, by debaters hoping to make their arguments more concrete or more meaningful to certain audiences, by ideonomists wishing to illustrate divisions of their subject or to test ideonomic principles or methods, by scientists wishing to demonstrate the universality of their laws--or per contra the limitations thereof, by composers wishing to extend the variations of their themes, by mathematicians trying to prove uniqueness (but therefore anxious to anticipate counterexamples), by ideonomists who would instantiate hypothetical genera of things, or by people idly thinking.
Ideonomy compiles and arranges maximally diverse examples of maximally diverse things, and such collections can be tapped whenever a need arises for a random or particular example of something.