What Ideonomy Can Do

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Invert Things

The normal or assumed relationship between two things can sometimes be inverted or be shown to be inverted. Even if this is only rarely the case, it can have profound consequences. Hence consideration should always be given to possibilities of this kind.

Examples of generically invertible or reversible relationships include: That of a (supposed) cause and its (supposed) effect; That of antecedent and postcedent (or of temporal or spatial priority); That of governor and governed; That of two things interpreted or functioning as opposites of any type (e.g. as 'big and small'); That of things that come first and second in relative order of importance or urgency of treatment; That of two things that are viewed as logically including, and included in, one another respectively; Etc.

Where an inversion is discovered it may simply be in the nevertheless important sense that unsuspected reciprocity, interdetermination, or symmetry exists between things formerly viewed in a rigidly hierarchic or one-sided way.

A wonderful example of a possible revolutionary inversion of an assumed relationship, that might occur in science in the future, is to be found in biology. The traditional paradigm has always held that, relative to the macroorganisms, the Earth's microorganisms (viruses, bacteria, algae, fungi, ciliates, etc) are, i.a.: simpler, less evolved, less diverse, less interesting, older, redundant; and perhaps also stabler, less important, of peripheral interest, even unnecessary to "higher" life. Recent theory and experimental evidence suggests that the relationship in all of these respects may be more nearly one of equality, antisyzygy, or inversion of tradition. Conceivably the tiny organisms are more complex (morphologically and physiologically), more evolved and sophisticated, more diverse (biontically and taxologically), more interesting, older (in a partial but surprising sense), irredundant, more variable (genotypally and phenotypally protean), of more central or even of supreme interest, and necessary or even all-important to (what hitherto have been thought of as being "higher") life-forms. Indeed, the so-called microorganisms may even be 'bigger', if recent evidence favoring the revisualization of bacteria as multicellular, finitely extended colonial, or infinitely extended Gaian organisms (possibly functioning via lateral gene flow as a single gigantic genome for the entire bios) continues to accumulate!

Modern physics offers many possibilities for revolutionary inversions of things and world views: Perhaps what we think of as real matter and physical phenomena are merely epiphenomena and negative: holes, defects, perturbations, or side-effects in a vastly or infinitely more complex, fundamental, differentiated, powerful, and interesting Dirac quantummechanical sea or plenum of so-called "vacuum" or "virtual" interactions. Perhaps the 'universe' is not expanding outwards but collapsing inwards, sensu progressive miniaturization of all of its systems. Perhaps our natural view of time is logically topsy-turvy, and a truer picture of time would show the universe as running in a direction that we, in our present prejudiced stupidity, would misperceive as backwards. Perhaps what we term "order" is chance, and "chance" order.

Similarly, in psychology what is celebrated as the "conscious mind" may in fact be inferior, in actual degree of consciousness, to the so-called "unconscious mind" (at least in part).

Possibilities such as these involve extremely difficult questions that are largely unanswerable by the surprisingly feeble powers and microscopic knowledge of contemporary science.

A more mundane inversion that has occasionally been suggested is that wives are the covert masters of their husbands; that it is the distaff that governs American husbands and society, albeit in ways that are almost inscrutably subtle, indirect, diffuse, disguised, and 'negative'.

Are words or instead the silences between words (e.g. chronosemically) the primary element or agency of human communication? Again, is verbal language or are accompanying microkinesic, facial, or phatic messages relatively primary in face-to-face communication?

Are neurons or glias the cells of the brain that are the most active or important in human memory or cognition?

Is the highest role in the production of human intelligence played by the cortex-the traditional view-or instead by the brain's subcortical regions?

Give One Greater Access To Existing Knowledge

Vast knowledge has accumulated over the history of civilization, and is now kept in the world's libraries. But the use that is made of the potential resource it represents is negligible. Men have discovered the enormous value of systematizing what they know and learn in books, and of combining and systematizing those books as libraries, but that is for the most part the furthest stage to which they have gone to date in the infinite evolution of the modes and means of representation and synthesis of general knowledge.

Ideonomy can help us to foresee countless other steps in this vitally important progression, and it can expedite their achievement. Indeed, ideonomic science and technology will constitute the essence of many of those steps, in part because ideas could be said to represent the highest form of knowledge (so far known, unless the laws of ideas are a still higher form).

Ideonomy seeks to discover the totality of those principles and categories that are necessary to organize knowledge in a maximally meaningful, elegant, comprehensive, and powerful way. In fact it reaches for the essence of order itself.

It attempts to fashion ever more ingenious and diverse cognitive frameworks. It is only when knowledge is placed in such frameworks that it comes alive or begins to exhibit its full significance.

It can aid the automation of the storage and retrieval of data and knowledge. Ideonomic divisions and organons--and the tendentially infinite, orthogonal, universal, and combinatorial dimensions of all meaningful concepts, things, and possibilities that ideonomy seeks to discover, systematize, and exploit--represent virtually ideal means for and ways of organizing all knowledge that should be sought or that would be recorded or recalled. Knowledge is always amplified, implicitly, by other knowledge--regardless, in a sense, of the nature of that other knowledge. But the amplification is not self-evident or automatic--at least on the basis of present methods and means for handling knowledge. Those subjects that are critical for the future revolutionary transformation and resultant amplification of knowledge are noology, artificial intelligence, and ideonomy.

Knowledge needs to be expressed via the most natural and synergistic meta-structures in idea spaces, or via certain: trees, chains, series, networks, hierarchies, radiations, vergences, lattices, matrices, rings, circuitries, fractals, plexures, aegagropilas, Peano curves, "chaoses", etc : and their adinfinite homogeneous and heterogeneous: combinations, permutations, evolutions, recursions, cellular automata, myrioramas, dualities, asymmetries, 'linguistic possibilities', etc.

Of fantastic importance as humanity enters the twenty-first century of the Christian era is that the great dream of the visionary H. G. Wells, of what he spoke of as a "World Brain", be realized at last. This was to be a gigantic and unending enterprise to reorganize all human knowledge as one vast encyclopedia.

The sum wordage in all of the world's different books, today, is five powers of ten greater than that found in the largest encyclopedia. This immense and absurd gap symbolizes the need and opportunity that Wells' recognized. In effect, we should immediately undertake to plug the little- appreciated gap by creating a series of encyclopedias, or a single electronic encyclopedia with hierarchical levels, each an order of magnitude greater than one another. The representation of all knowledge would become telescopic in this way.

Such an encyclopedic 'telescope' would miraculously augment mankind's access to its own self-hidden knowledge. Extant knowledge would become equivalent to a much greater fund of knowledge.

But the hierarchic design of such an encyclopedia almost presupposes ideonomy for the creation of its categories within categories within categories of data, meaning, wisdom, and intelligence.

Yet greater access can be given by ideonomy even to the fragment of knowledge represented by a single book or article, or to the knowledge existing obscurely in the shadowland of one's own mind.

Help Bring the Totality of Human Knowledge into Play in the Treatment of a Single Thing

Not only can ideonomy help one to extract maximum information from a single datum, but it can facilitate the simultaneous and synergistic application of all knowledge to one, arbitrary thing. Of course both desiderata and both functions are profoundly complementary; indeed they are mutually essential.

By demonstrating the unsuspectedly great, and in certain respects infinite, complexity that is explicitly or implicitly possessed by, or that relates to, anything whatever, ideonomy calls attention to a multitude of additional dimensions that are correlative of the thing with other things and to which the totality of existing knowledge can be referred. Ideonomic and cognitive methods that are valuable with respect to other knowledge and things, in this way also become valuable in the treatment of the given thing and of our knowledge of it.

The intercorrelation of total knowledge being increased ad infinitum by ideonomy, each and every bit of knowledge inevitably becomes applicable--and ever more applicable--to random things. The contextual meaning of things--their consignification--can be raised exponentially and without cogitable limit, apparently.

When in the future ideonomy is united with artificial intelligence, it will become possible for computers to automatically and instantly reconstruct something like the sum of human knowledge so that it centers on, and has the form of, any given thing that would momentarily be illuminated. In other words, all knowledge will be representable as a a single universal wheel whose spokes radiate from, and converge to, a particular matter-of interest, or any element of the world of nature or the world of thought. There will be some analogy to the optical effects produced by a hand lens moved over a page of print, to phantasmagoria, to anamorphosis, or to the crazy imagery seen over a man's body when he steps before a motion-picture projector and becomes a living screen.

Here the relevant ideonomic principle is that all things are interrepresentable and intertransformable. Also, all things can be viewed from the perspective of all other things (even if the latter are inanimate, since the mathematical basis of such projections is absolutely universal). Moreover, all things may well have a monadic character, as is implied by certain recent theories in mathematical physics.

The key to much of this would be for the totality of knowledge to be given an integral and conoidal structure; also a certain elasticity, and mobility of its parts. Other things that come to mind--analogically and suggestively--are Fourier analysis, statistically self-similar and self-dissimilar curves (fractals and the Mandelbrot set), projective geometry ... In fact, the list is perfectly endless.

There is no known or imaginable limit to the unifiability, reducibility, and simplifiability of knowledge. No matter how much of a sprawling welter it may seem nowadays, it will always be possible to miniaturize it arbitrarily much. The effect of all such changes will once again be to enlarge man's ability to bring the totality of his knowledge into play in the treatment of a single thing.

Ideonomy can show the universe of analogies that all types and realms of things have to the given thing, and also all of the meaningful differences that obtain. It can tap the infinite intercorrelations that both analogies and analogs have among themselves: correlations variously having to do with appearance, behavior, kind, composition, structure, laws, causes, effects, circumstances, probabilities, etc.

If one is naturally curious about things and takes a trip into the wilderness, the meaning of what one finds there will be enhanced if one is accompanied by all sorts of experts: pedologists, geomorphologists, mineralogists, hydrologists, geographers, geochemists, meteorologists, historians, botanists, mammalogists, ornithologists, herpetologists, entomologists, microbiologists, ecologists, astronomers--even artists, poets, lexicologists, philosophers, psychologists, mathematicians, and ideonomists.

The proper approach to anything is pantological.

Improve the Use of Human Knowledge

If one has knowledge, what are all of the things that one can and should do with it? This is a profoundly important question that we can confront better if assisted by ideonomy.

Actual and possible uses of knowledge include: To clarify the meaning and nature of knowledge; To learn the sources and mechanisms of knowledge-both actual and possible-and the methods and means of its production; To compare one type of knowledge with another, so as to learn about the diversity and possible forms of knowledge; To suggest where knowledge is defective or absent; To gain insights into one's own mind; To derive other knowledge from it; To educate and train minds; To generate new inventions, innovations, goods, services, industries, and ideas of every type; To make predictions that test its validity, or to design experiments that can reveal its values and uses directly; Etc.

Specific examples of hypothetical or definite needs for, or uses or values of, knowledge are: Knowledge of how the human brain works could enable us to rectify the brain's maladies and to give intelligence to machines; Knowledge of the geophysical, geochemical, and geomorphologic mechanisms that have produced bodies of ore over Earth's history would expedite our discovery and extraction of valuable minerals; Knowledge of the causes or laws of business cycles might help us to prevent unwanted economic fluctuations; Knowledge of the idiosyncratic educational needs and talents of individual children would allow teaching and learning to be more efficient and productive; Greater knowledge of the degree, causes, and forms of genetic variation in the general population would improve the identification, treatment, and prevention of many diseases; Knowledge of the actual mechanismic origins and geneses of our motivations might enable us to exercise greater control over those motivations and to become more self-determined; Etc.

The utility of knowledge depends upon the form into which it is put, and the quantity, rate, and excellence of the use that is actually made of it will reflect the overall diversity, ingenuity, suitability, manipulability, knowability, completeness, perfection, synergism, and convenience of its representations. The development of such .representations of knowledge over the course of time is at once a science, a technology, and an art-and ideonomy can assist with all three phases. Eventually ideonomy will even combine with artificial intelligence to automate, eternalize, and maximize the major and minor evolution of the universe of epistemic representations.

Each new bit of knowledge that man acquires has natural relationships to, and corollaries and implications for or in terms of, myriad other bits of knowledge already in existence. In the future ideonomy will help man to consolidate the totality of human knowledge in a single worldwide electronic (and photonic) network; and once the network exists, the science of ideas will facilitate the instantaneous propagation of new data, and subsequent ramification and interadjustment of meaning, throughout the omniscient network. The ideonomically orchestrated process of association of information and ideas in the mind-like network will represent a chain reaction that, once begun, will continue uninterruptedly from picosecond to picosecond, around the clock, beyond the human lifetime, and forever.

Ultimately all human minds will constantly, intimately, and progressively interact with this network; humanity will shape it, as a result, and it will shape and transform humanity. A vast mental coalescence will occur. Knowledge, thought, wisdom, intelligence, consciousness, and inquiry will be organized, interwoven, and multiplied to infinity.

Knowledge of where and how to use particular forms of knowledge will continually increase.

For example, knowledge will evolve about where and how to use new knowledge about, or relevant to, the stomata of leaves. New data about the mechanism that controls the opening and closing of stomata may have a natural tendency to relate to knowledge about, or research involving: Plant diseases caused by tiny organisms that gain access to the interior of the plants via stomata; The phylogeny or systematics of stomata; Effects of ambient moisture or CO2 levels upon stomatal cycles; Genomic regulation of the ontogenes is and repair of stomata; Biochemical pathways of plants; Herbicides; More primitive structures from which stomata may have been evolutionarily derived; Other organelles that in the course of evolution may have begun as but diverged from stomata; Etc.

Moreover, what is learned about the machinery of stomata may have implications for the biomorphogenesis of all sorts of opening-like organelles and microstructures in the membranes of plants and other organisms; and indeed, for the morphogenesis and mechanics of pit-like and hole-like structures and phenomena throughout nature or in all sciences.

The acquisition, indication, coordination, characterization, extension, integration, and exploitation of knowledge of all such relationships and interrelationships--whether of leaf stomata or of other things--could be guided by ideonomy.

Advance Language

Ideonomy can help with the creation of new and novel languages and with the investigation and improvement of old languages. It can aid the use of all languages.

The 'linguistic' problems, questions, and possibilities with which it could help are in fact innumerable:

We still do not know what language fundamentally is or does;

The earliest historical origins and forms of language--and languages--are unknown;

The total degrees and forms of imperfection of the languages we use are not known;

It is not known whether language--in the verbal sense--derived in the course of evolution from other biological codes--or a whole series or hierarchy of such codes--of a nonverbal nature (e.g. microkinesic, electroencephalographic, biochemical, ontogenetic, or phylogenetic);

The ultimate evolutionary possibilities and capabilities of language the room for improvement in the role it could play in thought, communication, or art, for example) are a mystery;

The laws that have governed, and that still govern, the historical evolution of language have not been discovered;

Linguistic intelligence has not yet been created in a machine (save in a minimal sense);

Words and etyma can be systematically and canonically combined, permuted, and transformed to generate new and better words, concepts, and propositions;

The physical universe itself may be pervaded with languages of a sort, whose decipherment and use may be necessary to fully understand and control some or all natural phenomena; etc.

All existing languages are primitive and deeply flawed, and it will be possible to use ideonomy to rationalize them.

Thus there are far too many words that refer or relate to certain concepts or things in our language, and far too few--or no--words that serve or can be made to serve certain other concepts, things, or purposes. The distribution and specialization of words are often hard to justify in any way, and our reason and creativity, in particular, must be unavoidably diminished by them.

Grammatical and other linguistic rules should be altered or replaced to give far greater communicative, aesthetic, and cognitive flexibility, scope, and power to languages; or an entirely new language should be created on the basis of the most perfect rules imaginable.

Myriad new languages could also be the specialized vehicles of myriad new modes of thought. They could be insightfully concreated by ideonomists to maximize the intellectual, psychic, and professional diversity of the human race, or to foresightfully canalize civilization in the most desirable set of directions.

Of course language especially evolves through the empirical process of innovation, experimentation, exploration, modification, and natural selection on the part of innumerable persons in innumerable situations, interacting with one another over time.

Yet there are ways in which ideonomy could be made to simulate, or to be equivalent to, this grand natural process; indeed it could probably be made to improve upon it, and it could certainly serve and supplement it.

The ways in which words regularly change, or have been steadily evolving over time, could all be made systematically explicit to mankind, as the collective architect of, and ultimate authority about, language. Further verbal innovations, both deliberate and spontaneous, could thereafter be guided and hastened by this evolutionary and methodological awareness. Moreover, the process could be equipped with critical feedback loops that it never benefited from historically.

Of greatest value, however, would be ideonomy's ability to create--and facilitate the comprehensive, swift, and purposeful exploration of--that stupendous and yet elegantly structured idea space progressively approximating to the abstract universes of all possible words, languages, and statements, and of all concepts requiring or useful to same.

The endless solitary and cooperative mental play of persons within this - at once all-permitting and all-defining - realm would enable society to know in advance the infinite possibilities, tendencies, needs, wants, uses, meanings, and transformations of language, and to gain that partial control over the evolutionary process that is halved by paradox.

Mankind's mental movements within this prescient space, and over the course of time, could also be plotted and extrapolated by ideonomy making automated use of multivariate analysis, multidimensional scaling, and related statistical techniques. The space, in effect, could be given its own organic and self-extending intelligence.

Just as a trivial example, imagine that one wishes to say something - say because the problem of saying it has been posed to one, or because one would like to describe a phenomenon. An ideonomically programmed computer could instantaneously formulate and put before one, side-by-side, the various alternative or canonically defined ways of saying it. One could then examine this spectrum or group: to confront the nuances, ambiguities, divergences, contradictions, and other verbal, semantic, and cognitive complexities, baldly and from the outset. One might then proceed to make one's choice from among the possibilities, and use it in one's discourse. Or perhaps the exercise would simply have been a valuable experience that widened one's linguistic, intellectual, or spiritual horizons - or a pleasant diversion on an otherwise dull day or during an unoccupied moment (with subtler benefits).

Identify Laws

By laws are meant the tendencies that things, phenomena, ideas, and data have to display characteristic and identifiable patterns of behavior-and sets of relationships-that are fixed, fundamental , and universal.

Then again, one could say that laws are those patterns of being that are by definition MAXIMALLY: universal, simple, fundamental, eternal, invariant, reliable, necessary, predictive, useful, differentiative, unifying, verifiable, consequential, meaningful, distinct, synergistic, logical, systematic, governing, 'natural', unalterable, axiomatic, tested and proven, e/vc.

The word laws also refers to attempts to formulate such natural patterns with the simplest means and in the most elegant, and correct, way.

Rules are relaxed equivalents, or artificial mimics, of laws; laws and rules intergrade on a continuum (of many dimensions).

Ideonomy questions the prevailing assumption that at least some laws are absolute; e.g. absolutely: universal, fundamental, simple, invariant, increate, eternal (final), true or proven, monomorphic, underived (primary), transcendental, assumption-less, etc.

That is, ideonomy constantly asks us to entertain the opposite possibility, that all (known or discoverable) laws 'are': artificial, subjective (psychomorphistic), refutable or unproven, temporary, evolutionary, expedient, relativistic, circumventable, local, partial, partially inconsistent or contradictory, complex, presumptuous, illusory, misleading, subordinate to other laws, evolutionary, variable, e/vc.

Ideonomy can assist the treatment of laws in many ways, or the discovery, investigation, description, or exploitation of their: causes, effects, interrelationships and relationships to other things, behavior, histories, futures, dimensions, properties, -degrees, ranges, structures and meta-structures, merits and defects or limitations, predictions, proofs and checks, exceptions and anomalies, uses, exemplifications, transformations, analogies, differences, cooperations, conflicts, mathematics, implications, classifications, problems and errors of use, explanatory powers when combined, elements, complexities, levels and hierarchies, extensions and generalizations, mutual derivations, convergences and divergences, paradoxes, 'operational spaces', methods of use, etc.

It can suggest future laws that will be discovered or that should be sought; ways to seek them; and consequences of their existence.

It can restate old laws in new, significant, and irredundant ways.

It can help answer the profound question: are there infinitely or finitely many natural laws, are there just a few laws, or is there but a single, supreme and universal, law that (discoverably or undiscoverably) governs the whole universe or the whole of reality?

It can help us to define what a law is in the first place, or the totality of different things that a law may be or might be viewed as being.

It can correct whatever is defective in our formulation of a law or increase a law's: universality of use, frequency of use, consistency of use, breadth of validation, approximation to the truth, precision of prediction, logical necessity, complexity of development, importance throughout science or society, etc.

It can survey the set of all things whose laws have not yet been discovered.

Laws have many values and uses; they can: Discourage lines of research that are futile or wrongheaded; Direct research along efficient, logical, fundamental, inevitable, and complementary channels; Simplify the teaching, learning, use, and corroboration of knowledge; Concentrate and define the essence of knowledge; Simplify our perception of nature and reduce phenomena and systems to their canonical possibilities; Facilitate--and render more truthful--the classification of phenomena; Accelerate thought and enhance our intelligence; Increase the interconnectedness of human knowledge; Stabilize the internal meanings of science; Vastly reduce the redundancy of scientific investigations; Facilitate the quantification, calculation, modeling, simulation, symbolic treatment, and automation of things; Etc.

At the present time we are presumably ignorant of most or all of the laws governing: Psychogenesis; Psychodynamics; Society; Sociogenesis or human history; Morality (or what is right and wrong in a fundamental sense); Art or the sense of beauty; The history of mathematics as a whole; Ontogenesis; Physiology; Human health and pathogenesis; Animal behavior; Animal communications; Ecosystems and the bios; Biological evolution; Intellectual development and thought; Sunspot cycles; The occurrence of earthquakes; Atmospheric and climatic dynamics; Chemical evolution and reactions; Economic relationships and fluctuations; The lives of galaxies; Cosmic evolution; Laws in general and their development (noogenesis); The general relationship between Quantum Theory and Relativity; Language use (in any deep sense); The structure and interpretation of the brain's electrical waves (or EEG); The total interrelationships of all possible ideas; The interrelationship of physical and mental reality; Our perception of time; Probabilities; Mosquito flight; Visual perception; Classification of knots; Morphogenesis of pure or physical forms; Games; Jokes; Melodic development; Human happiness; Etc.

Illustrative examples of known (or assumed) laws include: Ohm's law (V = R1); Stefan-Boltzmann law (total energy radiated from a hot body increases with the fourth power of the body's temperature); Dalton's law (of additive pressures; total pressure a mixture of gases exerts equals the sum of the separate pressures each of the gases would exert if it alone occupied the whole volume); Joule's law (H = R12); Avogadro's law (equal volumes of all gases and vapors at the same temperature and pressure contain equal numbers of molecules); Mendel's law of segregation (in genetics; paired hereditary units representing alternate characters separate during gamete formation so that every gamete receives but one member of a pair); Law of mass action (in chemistry; reaction rate is directly proportional to the molecular concentrations of the reacting substances); Kepler's law of areas (in celestial mechanics; a radius vector joining any planet to the Sun sweeps out equal areas in equal lengths of time); Second law of thermodynamics (mechanical work can be derived from a body's heat only when the body is able to communicate with another at a lower temperature; or all actual spontaneous processes result in an increase of total entropy); Law of large numbers (in statistics; the probability that the mean of a random sample differs from the mean of the population from which the sample is drawn by more than a given amount approaches zero as the size of the sample approaches infinity); Law of superposition (in geology; where there has been no subsequent disturbance, sedimentary strata were deposited in ascending order with younger beds successively overlying older); Law of supply and demand (in economics; the competitive price that clears the market for a commodity is determined through the interaction of offers and demands); Law of constant angles (in crystallography; the angles between the various faces of a crystal remain unchanged throughout its growth); Law of the minimum (in physiology; when a process is conditioned by several factors its rate is limited by the factor present in the minimum); Law of tangents (in plane trigonometry; in any plane triangle the tangent of one half the difference of any two angles is to the tangent of one half their sum as the difference of the sides opposite the respective angles is to the sum of those sides); Etc.

The notion that quantitative laws are naturally superior to qualitative laws is a harmful fallacy that simply springs from scientists' long-term preoccupation with the former class of laws and with their progressive neglect of the latter class; it reflects the differential amount and standard of development of quantitative reasoning. In reality qualitative logic and laws are capable--and will always be capable--of attaining whatever levels of power and sophistication are open to the narrowly quantitative approach to nature.

The imbalance that presently exists between quantitative and qualitative thought is probably at once dangerous to civilization and a drag upon all intellectual progress. Ideonomy promises to play a critical role in restoring balance and in releasing the synergism that is implicit in the combination of two naturally complementary views of reality.

Aid Learning

One can learn faster if one explicitly understands the bases and goals of all learning, and is able to play a fundamental role in the learning process, rather than being relegated to the role of a passive spectator or an obedient student.

A major lesson of ideonomy is that the primary value of the knowledge one acquires in the course of learning lies in the combinatorial possibilities of that knowledge rather than in the static form it initially has when it arrives from the outer world as simple data.

Learning can be amplified by increasing the explicit and discoverable connectivity of knowledge and ideas. The options for the thoughts of the individual, for the sources he can turn to to learn more, for the interpretation of data in variant ways, for the uses of knowledge and ideas, and for the individualization of learning so as to bring it into accord with the peculiar talents, knowledge, and inclinations of each learner at a given moment and in a given situation, can all be expanded productively by adding to the connectivity and connectability of facts and possibilities.

Enabling the very process of learning--its map and dynamics--to be seen can be of benefit.

So also can methods and means for revealing what knowledge, ideas, and learning are not: the myriad structured and contextual things they neglect, skirt, or omit. Perhaps something else that could or should be learned can be pointed out, and plans for its future treatment can be encouraged.

Learning can be made more powerful by synthesizing different lessons and displaying their synergism.

Reveal the Limitations of Things

Before one can improve upon things, or have any inclination to do so, one may have to be conscious of their shortcomings.

One also has to know what things are, or the set of properties that define the quantitative dimensions along which the being of a thing may be positive and yet less than perfect or infinite.

The limitations of things can in fact be revealed, with the aid of ideonomy, in many different ways: By analogies among things suggesting their kindred limitations; By clusters of things; By classifications of things and of their modes of limitation; By comparisons of things aimed at revealing their differences, and hence their differential limitations; By principles guiding the discovery of natural limitations of things in various situations and circumstances; By clearer definitions of what limitations are or mean; By demonstrations that the practical limitations of things can be exceeded or are unnecessary, or that there are unmet needs, wants, or possibilities; By revelations of the sources, causes, and mechanisms of the limitation of things; By exhibition of the fact that things may exist and have consequences at many levels simultaneously, and that their limitations at those levels may differ greatly in degree and type and vary nonmonotonically; Etc.

Among the possible generic limitations of things are limitations of: form, size, magnitude, strength, perfection, completeness, diversity, resources, clarity, importance, efficiency, effect, productivity, utility, simplicity or complexity, individuality, stability, existence, activity, generalization, specialization, correctness, fundamentality, number or availability, etc.

Possible causes of limitations include: Underutilization; Underproduction; Underdevelopment; Self-limitation or negative feedback; Masking; Abortion; Suppression; Underactivity or inactivity; Lack of assistance or facilitation; Mismanagement or malfunctioning; Disharmony or conflict among things; Retrogression; Absence of biological or mental design; Deficient resources; Etc.

Particular examples of limitations are: Mouse's mental limitations; Finite mass or size of the universe (hypothetical); Limited psychic diversity of humanity; Finite power of biological life to adapt to hostile environments; Radio receiver's limited bandwidth; Imperfect instructional skills of a teacher; Limited felicity of a metaphor; Finite or quasi-finite diameter of an elementary particle; Limited artistic range of a given genre; Finite range of intermolecular forces; Limits to the variability of human history; Polymorphic limitations of the mammalian genome; Bounded capacity of biogeochemical cycles to cope with global industrial pollution; Limited authority of the laws of government to deal with unusual situations; Etc.

Questions ideonomy could help ask and answer include: How do different limitations of things interact? What limitations derive from limitations, or give rise to other limitations? Which limitations are desirable and which are undesirable? What controls the actual expression of limitations? What are the virtual--as opposed to actual--limitations of things? Of what limitations and types of limitations are we knowledgeable? What is our ignorance about limitations of things? What limitations need most to be investigated? What are all methods, means, and ways of researching limitations?

Enhance Logical Rigor

To think logically one needs or may need to know, or might profit from knowing: Comprehensive fallacies to which reasoning is prone, or that naturally occur in certain situations or in connection with certain things or ideas; The goals and purposes of logic; Practical ways to avoid common errors of reasoning; What the most perfect reasoning known to man to date is or is like; Assumptions that are continually being made--either explicitly or implicitly--or that would be useful in the gamut of generic cases; What degrees and criteria of 'logical rigor' and proof are--or one would deem--necessary, acceptable, or optimal in a given instance; The equilibrial interadjustability of various alternative or interdependent facts, probabilities, possibilities, representations, ideas, methods, arguments, postulates, relationships, things, etc; Cost/benefit ratios of various alternative logical treatments of the matter; Both the consistent and the novel meaning of what is logical--or of things--at various hierarchical levels; Things' exact properties, qualities, relationships, structures, and processes; Recurrent paradoxes; Things' sets, laws, and transformations; One's knowledge and ignorance; Things' classifications; Useful checks, tests, and experiments throughout the course of reasoning; Spaces and manifolds in which the different relevant things can be moved about, rearranged, combined, transformed, substituted for one another, explored, etc., in the mind; All possible, interrelated, relevant, or important logical: terms, concepts, operations, relationships, entities, principles, representations, strategies, products, propositions, etc (of a 'universal' nature); Possible interferences, discordances, contradictions, inconsistencies, and complex interactions (as well as co-probabiIities and synergisms) of different facts, ideas, evidence, arguments, hypotheses, etc; How to synthesize reasons or unify reasoning; The generic and specific problems and solutions; Possible ambiguities and alternative perspectives; The complexities and simplicities of a matter; Universal or apposite logical meta-structures (chains, series, inductive-deductive vergences, networks, trees, radiations, knots, rings, cycles, matrixes, clusters, 'topological tessellations', etc); Universal and special questions to ask (relevant to the logic of a situation); Generic and specific corollaries and implications; Peculiarities of one's own mental processes and the logical variations of mankind (including the logic of another person who produced something that one would logically analyze or use); One's options, and the decisions one must make, in reasoning; What one's mental abilities and limits are; The stage of completion or development of a logical or cognitive task at the time one receives or encounters it; How to reason with imperfect, inadequate, or flawed knowledge-of the facts or of the nature of the problem--or in an uncertain, approximate, expedient, ad hoc, heuristic, fragmentary, or speculative way; What the weak and strong nodes and links in one's own--or in all--reasoning are; Canonical criticisms of, and excuses for, different reasonings or elements of logic; How to combine data or arguments so as to maximize logic and proof or the appearance thereof; How best or alternatively to reverse or reconstruct one's reasoning when mistakes are made or discovered or other forms or objects of proof are required; How to abstract and formalize the logic of things; How different types of things have been reasoned about or were demonstrated through logic historically; Logical and epistemological bases and presuppositions of one's diverse and random beliefs, knowledge, perceptions, methods, words, grounds, etc; How to qualify or condition truth; Why ultimately all arguments are refutable or all logic can be shown to be imperfect; What false reasoning or mispredictions would mean; Etc.

The goals, purposes, powers, and values of ratiocination include: To predict things; To check things; To prove things; To challenge or refute things; To criticize or evaluate things; To explore, understand, or or explain things; To discover things; To generate, develop, or perfect ideas; To help order, systematize, or manage things; To constrain and circumscribe things; To communicate or explain things to--or to interest or persuade--other persons; To teach things; To simplify things; To discover general laws--or deduce consequences--of things; To heighten certainty or security; To identify the antecedents or foundations of things; To vindicate intuitions; To enlarge and train intelligence; To universalize things (or enable them to be put in a universal form or to be consistent with a universal system or with universal standards); To sharpen the description or characterization of things; To connect, interrelate, synthesize, or unify things; To reconstruct the thoughts or situations of other persons; To retrace the path--or foresee the future--of things; To quantify things or facilitate their measurement; To aid the visualization or modeling of things; Etc.

Logic is not equally developed or equally applied in different sciences or fields of endeavor, or in terms of all phenomena, problems, concepts, etc. Not only do the standards differ but the very style, nature, and language of the logic varies. Ideonomy can be used to improve the standards of reasoning everywhere, and should help to make logic at once more uniform and more diverse. The greater uniformity will mean that reasoning and results in one science or one area will be more quickly, efficiently, exactly, and powerfully translatable into the logic and knowledge of some other science or area of endeavor. The logics of all fields and things will illuminate, supplement, and correct one another. Man will be introduced to the general logic of nature.

Ideonomy can help re-wed science to logic and logic to science. It is tragic that these two complementary activities of the human mind ever became divorced, or that mankind ever lost sight of the fact and necessity of their duality and synergism. The truth is that the foundations of modern science are riddled with logical problems that could not be more stupendous, and that the manifold experimental capacities of science are things that logic itself must tap in order to be revolutionized as a science in its own right.

By systematizing, in effect, the logical problems of science and the scientific problems of logic, ideonomy may provide many important clues for how these two subjects can at last be reunited.

Aid Mastery of A Subject

By dealing with universal concepts and cognitive universals ideonomy can give a privileged insight into any subject or matter and reduce the labor that is required to develop mastery-of same. From a certain perspective every subject is the same subject; its structure and content, its methods and purposes, are general. What has been learned or mastered in one subject can apply elsewhere if it is properly translated and generalized and if the new domain is introduced in an appropriate way. Similar laws, relationships, probabilities, contexts, circumstances, phenomena, behavior, strategies, etc will be found to obtain; the truly novel, irredundant, inconsistent, and contradictory elements will be minor, or can be shown to be minor even in the face of conventional wisdom.

Ideonomy can help one to know in advance what it is that one does and does not know about a subject, and such knowledge about one's knowledge can lead to more efficient roads to learning.

Moreover, by giving one a better idea as to what the different things are that one might learn about a subject, ideonomy may render the subject more 'personal', and this can heighten the amount that one eventually learns about the field and the intensity of one's mental involvement in it.

Ideonomy can reveal what it is that is most fundamental about a subject, or the things upon which so much else depends. Conversely, it can underline what in the subject is relatively superficial, unimportant, derivative, and redundant. Since much that is commonly taught to be important and fundamental in subjects actually is not, ideonomy can aid mastery of the subject relative to norms.

One may learn a subject more quickly and thoroughly if in the course of learning one is able to view it critically, and with ideonomy it is possible to criticize something even with minimal knowledge of it, if only because there are more or less universal defects that things tend to have.

Similarly, one can better understand a subject if one is aware of the ways in which the subject has been developing over historical time, or aware of the probable future development of the field from the imperfect thing that it is now or that it is at the time when one tries to master it.

Learning of a subject may be made easier if one becomes conscious of the uses to which all of the things within it may be put.

One may learn a subject better if one is able to define its concepts more readily or completely or in arbitrary ways.

Awareness of the assumptions that one brings to the study of a subject, or that permeate the subject itself, can be helpful.

Ideonomy can also enable one to ask basic questions about anything, and call one's attention to generic answers to these questions or to questions in general. Moreover, it can equip one with the ability to pursue powerful chains or series of questions, and even entire hierarchies and networks of questions.