Many methods for enhancing creativity have been identified and written about at length: juxtaposition of dissimilar things, free association, suspension of habits, reversal of normal behavior, substitution of one thing for another or simultaneous interchange, randomizing of actions or experience, epoche, exploration of one's ignorance, adopting another person's viewpoint or looking at matters from a fresh or unusual perspective, concoction of a new theory or hypothesis or then working out its consequences; examination of one's assumptions or of the theoretical, logical, or empirical bases for one's beliefs; asking of new questions, attempting to answer old questions in new ways, relaxation of criteria or experimental negation of one or more axioms or postulates, trying out of new models of things, contriving of gedankenexperiments to see where they might lead, disregarding authority or challenging received opinion, transference of some idea or method from one context to another, postulating intermediate or hybridal things, indulging one's fantasies or wishes, trusting logic over intuition or intuition over logic; trying out what is manifestly or presumably absurd, wrong, or bad 'just for the sheer hell of it'; imitating the methods, tactics, or style of some other individual; obviating a need, making one's expectations conscious or experimentally predicting things, pushing possibilities to extremes, introducing order into one's thinking; pursuing chains, trees, or networks of ideas; postulating some outcome or future state of affairs and then trying to imagine what sequences of events or logical steps could possibly or alternatively lead to it, changing the relationships between things to see what might happen or what it might mean, trying to define or explain things in new ways, attempting to synthesize many things or to get an overview of them, investigating new domains or categories of things, switching one's goals, seeing what happens-in imagination or fact- if one changes things, contemplating how one might improve or perfect things, scrutinizing the environment to see what is missing, needed, or possible; taking risks, exploring analogies or metaphors, looking for discrepancies or contradictions, constructing paradoxes, pushing arguments, reasoning dialectically or simply arguing heatedly with oneself, trying to classify or reclassify things, criticizing or laughing at things, attempting to describe things in the utmost detail, trying to maximize the rigor of one's assertions, trying to elaborately correlate different things, etc.
But such methods in themselves have limited value.
What they really require is something like ideonomy. Without it they are little more than shells, words, abstractions, undifferentiated methods, glimpses of what might be possible, unloaded trucks, unfueled airplanes, prayers, or a wordless grammar.
Ideonomy can supply them with a conceptual road map, with the grand architecture that defines all of the dimensions and describes the basic structure of everything that exists and of all that is possible, with a comprehensive and systematic library of universal concepts (of every higher and lower order), and with a public warehouse or cosmic entrepôt of eminently useful and combinable ideas.
Moreover, since most of the methods listed above for promoting creativity happen to correspond, either directly or indirectly, to divisions of ideonomy, it is almost as though the new science had been expressly fashioned to be the handmaid of creativity or the octopean servant of those methods--which in good part it was.
Many of the methods also correspond to the present or appropriate, either major or minor, methods of ideonomy itself.
In any case, ideonomy can and should be used to systematically clarify, improve upon, and further differentiate--as well as to interconnect--the set of all such methods. It is ideally suited to the Promethean task of discovering and constructing the 'ultimate periodic table' of methods, ways, devices, and other means that, alone or in combination, could: aid, diversify, perfect, maximize, and complete the personal, integral, and final creativity of the human race.
Many of the creative methods could be used together and would by no means be redundant; powerful, complex, and subtle synergisms can even now be foreseen. Here again ideonomy has a role to play, as a natural too] for discovering and exploiting possible, optimal, and paradoxical synergisms.
Criterions, which are little tools for judging or evaluating things, can be most valuable.
Ideonomy could help the human race discover maximally universal, few, fundamental, transcendental, interesting, powertul, simple, useful, uniform, comprehensible, scale- invariant, complementary, transdisciplinary (multidisciplinary), etc : but also maximally diverse, specific, complex, disparate, etc : criterions for things, or : standards, standards of reference, yardsticks, grounds, expressions, marks, or traits : for evaluating, judging, or making decisions about : things' : differences. analogies, homologies, laws, capacities, potentials, relationships, defects, limitations, causes, behavior, roles, importances, states, properties, conditions, degrees of excellence, utilities, classifications, inclusions, exclusions, taxons of order, existence or nonexistence, validity or invalidity, probabilities, interdependences, essences, forms, mathematics, systems, mechanisms, coordinate systems, scales, products, proper treatment, needs, stresses or strains, progressions (or levels of advancement), successes or failures, transitions or thresholds, simplicities or complexities, convergences or divergences; equivalences, identities, equalities or inequalities, or commensurabilities; etc.
Ideonomy can likewise assist with the progressive discovery, development, and use of: criterions for judging, developing, recognizing, and comparing other criterions; sub-criterions; hierarchies, series, chains, networks, manifolds, generators, clusters, "groups", governments, combinatorics, transformations or intertransformations, etc of criterions; etc.
It can also help answer questions such as: What are the functions and roles of criterions? For what other things, or in what other ways, can criterions be used? What are all the things that are analogous to and yet different from a criterion, and all the relationships they bear to same--including all the ways in which they and criterions cooperate or could be made to cooperate? What have been the patterns of evolution of criterions over historical time, and how might they go on evolving in the course of the future? What are all of the different ways of defining criterion, all of the interrelations of these definitions, and all of the arguments for and against them?
What are all of the different dimensions for evaluating and criticizing any criterion? What are all of the ways, methods, and means for refining a criterion, through or in terms of such dimensions? What are all of the general and specific criterions that allow or require such refinement, and what are all of the direct or indirect changes and improvements that are apt to follow from such refinements-in terms of the various specific and general things to which the criterions apply or relate?
More narrow and-specific examples of refinable criterions in a variety of fields, that might be worth mentioning here for illustrative purpose, are or would be criterions: of proof (of guilt or negligence, or of' a mathematical assertion, scientific hypothesis or theory, etc.--in law, mathematics, or science); for diagnosing or prognosing physical or mental diseases, of an adequate diet, or of toxicity (in medicine); for arranging compounds into groups or defining an acid (in chemistry); for recognizing or judging genius or greatness of character or assessing the identity of a sensation (in psychology and philosophy); for deciding whether a course of action or conduct is ethical or indecent (in philosophy); for telling whether a memory is correct, categorizing an unpleasant or mixed dream as 'nightmare', or deciding whether a story is funny or constitutes 'joke' (in psychology); for telling whether someone understands a formula or for distinguishing conics (in mathematics); for deciding upon the identity of a person (in psychology or sociology); for calling a star unstable (in astronomy); for (recognition of) achievement of 'true' (or human) artificial intelligence or of a self-sustaining controlled nuclear fusion reaction (in technology); for deciding that a stage in (an) ecological succession is a 'climax' community, placing an organism in one taxon or another, or categorizing a neuron as 'excitatory or inhibitory' (in biology); for deciding that a military engagement represented a real battle (in military science); or for classifying an ancient society as having been 'nomadic or agrarian' (in archaeology).
By identifying as many criterions for mathematical or other 'proof' as possible, or a far greater number than are ordinarily-recognized or considered, ideonomy could promote the reign of a much more complete, comprehensive, certain, uniform, suggestive, and useful proof, a closer and more rapid approach to absolute truth everywhere in science, and higher standards of scholarship and human logic
Better criterions, in general, could improve perception, intelligence,
and action; lead to more healthy -foods-, make for more purposeful scientific
and technological research; perfect psychometric and sociometric
testing; conduce to more prudent international negotiations; result
in less ambiguous and more enforceable legal contracts; aid efforts to
mechanize intelligence; and facilitate the interplay and interconnection
of the many divisions of ideonomy, and the diverse application of its methods
and organons.
Criticism is vital to the development of civilization as a whole and, on the scale of individuals, to the achievement of a better life.
Surveying the role of criticism in our world, one finds it to be both great and meager.
Great because it is so widespread and continual, and a factor in so many types of things.
Meager because there is obviously so much more that it could and should include and do, so many opportunities for it that are wasted, and so many defects, shortcomings, and evils that are missed by its lovably cold eye and fiery voice.
Perhaps the keenest critical need that society has is for the educating of its members in the critical habit. For this task ideonomy has aureate promise. It can be focused upon a single and arbitrary thing to reveal the unexpectedly obvious, extreme, fundamental, endless, and important : flaws, errors, crudities, problems, lacks, costs, dangers, inconsistencies, misfeatures, failures, mediocrities, illegitimacies, arbitrary aspects or accidental character, abusability, disharmonies, obsolescence, stupidities, inconveniences, incapacities, fragilities, deceptiveness, inutilities, corruptions, etc. : thereof. The lesson can be shocking, transforming, and permanent: a window to another world.
It can train individuals in the general alphabet and grammar of criticism, and at the same time accustom them to the language and idea of systematic improvement and attainable perfection.
It can prepare vast, diverse, universal, well-tested, and ingeniously meaningful scales of badness and goodness--encompassing the entire world of phenomena, things, events, and human values--and with these develop and perfect the awareness of mankind of what is wrong and right, and of what things are and are not. With scales such as this judgment and sensibility can be made razor- sharp, the critical faculty can be made quantitative and maximally multidimensional, the power to intuit and describe the real worth of things by means of analogy can be auqmented, and the critical sense can paradoxically be made more absolute .
By discovering and exposing one to the totally universal nature of things, phenomena, and ideas--and of the criticisms thereof, when properly understood or suitably reconceived--ideonomy can equip individuals with a priceless new ability to-consciously or unconsciously transfer criticisms of one thing to other and seemingly totally different things, or to all things, independently of the subject or situation in which the things occur.
As a result, ignorance of what is good, better, or best-or bad, worse, or worst-in the case of one thing can be corrected or clarified by existing or obtainable knowledge of the objective or considered virtues and vices of something else, that traditionally would have been thought of as having little analogy or no analogical value.
It needs to be stressed that the common defects--or evaluative dimensions and features--may not just be isomorphic; they may also have shared, complementary, identical, or profoundly interdependent laws, processes, mechanisms, structures, and essences, and they may even be homologous. Moreover, they may not just reflect or duplicate one another--in which case they would have practical value while remaining essentially tautologous--but instead may actually have something fundamentally irredundant, or even unique, irreplicable, and necessary, to say about one another's nature or mutually self-transcendent, worldly meaning.
Criticisms of any of the following things may therefore-at the same time represent actual, potentjal, necessary, or kindred criticisms of any or all of the other things, or at least may be of surprising value in developing criticisms of those things: appliances, stars, poems, nations, mathematical formulas, ordure, clouds, fish, world currencies, faces, personalities, medical therapies, religions, and military strategies.
As ideonomy extracts and combines criticisms from different fields, it may discover powerful synergisms.
The new science of ideas will also lead to the discovery of various structured sets of criticisms and to the development of specialized organons based on these collections and combinations of criticisms that are ideally suited to broad and endless reuse in the systematic, intelligent, efficient, and productive criticism of particular things, narrow topics, or standard issues.
For example, organons for criticizing, say in a fixed format or conceptual framework, formulaically, in a certain sequence, via some type of ideogram, or in an interactive idea space on a computer, such things as: papers in microbiology, student assignments, new motion pictures, job applicants, legislative proposals, a person's manners, works of art, one's own ideas or behavior, or redundant suitors.
By heightening critical awareness, ideonomy might cause individuals to: improve their friends, embark on a different career than they would have, be more discriminating shoppers, read the weather better (as a result of being more critical of their own meteorological impressions and logic), decide to move to another neighborhood or a different city, learn faster from other people, compare the behavior of two supposedly interchangeable ants, read textbooks more analytically, or reflect more carefully upon each day's events.
As a result of the use of ideonomy: a company might notice a way to improve its product or an opportunity to introduce a new product, the dead hand of the past might have a weakened hold upon future generations, a composer might reduce the muddiness of her orchestration, mentally retarded individuals might acquire a greater ability to learn or adapt (thanks to an autocritical program or mnemonic), scholars would be able to be even more brutal in their reciprocal denunciations, court complainants might be more meaningful and precise, and humorists might be more uproarious.
Everything in the world is at least in some sense cyclic--waxing and waning, and doing so repeatedly and perhaps periodically. Things may be directly or intrinsically cyclic or they may be affected by or reflect the cyclic behavior of other things.
Nature may have an infinite number and an infinite variety, range, complexity, and even density of: cycles, cyclic aspects or dimensions, and cyclic phenomena.
The cyclicity of the universe may be so rich that it disguises itself as what appears not to be cyclic or not to exist at all.
Ideonomy can help with at once the discovery, analysis, explanation, and exploitation of such cyclicity.
Cycles can be far more complex, strange, and wonderful than has been assumed. Cycles can, for example, be N-dimensional and N can be arbitrarily large.
Successive cycles may have odd symmetries and asymmetries.
Cycles can be polyphasal and the number of phases arbitrarily high.
There can be arbitrarily complex spaces and manifolds of cycles, and simple or arbitrarily complex couplings of two or arbitrarily many separate spaces and manifolds.
There can be spaces of spaces of spaces ... (and manifolds of manifolds of manifolds ... ) of cycles; there can also be cyclic spaces and manifolds.
Hierarchies, networks, plexures, lattices, clusters, trees, vergences, "groups", "categories", and other meta-structures and meta-patterns : of cycles can exist in principle, and probably must exist in fact. There can be cycles of higher and higher order and of lower and lower order.
There can be at once the following things of cycles and cycles of the following things: taxons of order, shapes, structures, changes, flows (sic), processes, etc.
There can be arbitrarily quasi-cyclic and crypto-cyclic things (things masquerading as cycles, that is, and cycles masquerading as things other than cycles).
Ideonomy can help us to discover and describe all of these things.
It can specify or suggest cycles': causes, controls, governments, morphogeneses, geneses, origins, ends, effects, roles, functions, implications, types, taxons, laws, relationships, correlations, interactions conflicts, synergisms, self-relationships, spectrums, extremes, pr~babilities, opposites (sic), individualities (idiographic aspects), conservations and nonconservations, cybernetics, distributions, commonalities and similarities, differences, transformations, equivalences, random and chaotic aspects, processes, needs, morphisms, identities, histories, wholes, contents and parts, fields, etc.
It should be possible, over the future, to reduce more and more cycles to a hierarchy of ever more : fundamental, unified or dissociated few or numerous, simple or complex, universal or special or local, eternal or brief, high- or low-frequency, biphasic or polyphasal, etc cycles, and causes, laws, types, etc. of cycles.
Ideonomy can be used to find and define all of the interrelationships between temporal cycles and spatial periodicities, including the ways in which they : cause, map onto, are analoaous to, or are homologous with : one another.
The infinity of possible and actual types or measures of quantities of things can be progressively defined or discovered by ideonomy. All of these quantities can be cyclic, or things can be cyclic in terms of them all, and all can in turn be used to characterize cycles in general, and many, to characterize particular cycles and cycles of particular things.
Many, even infinitely many, cycles will be purely or partly relative,
in respect to their qualities, quantitative aspects, and even existence.
Infinite parallel worlds of independent modes of existence will diverge
from one another, in the case of cycles-as with all other things.
Cycles essentially mean that things, variously: come and go, rise and fall, intensify and weaken, vary constantly; oscillate between extremes, states, or degrees; invert, reverse, disappear and recur, accelerate and decelerate, alternate, chain, abhor invariance, change symmetrically, are crypto-stable or quasi-unstable, are circular, involve positive or negative feedback, polarize and depolarize, involve interchange or reciprocity, require contrast to exist or be meaningful, are self-limiting, rotate or orbit, vibrate, vary incrementally, vary in stages, vary periodically, interfere with or complement one another, saltate, vary in a binary manner, pulsate, etc.
By studying known cycles carefully we can learn how to predict the existence of undiscovered cycles and undiscovered aspects of other known cycles.
Cycles can be 'woven' arbitrarily deeply 'into' one another and into the fabric of other things or of the world as a whole.
Ideonomy can enable the universe to be reseen in an infinity of ways--as it looks from the perspective of all possible cycles.
What is cyclic and what is not cyclic, and how are they interrelated?
If one negated or suppressed certain cycles, or certain cycles did not exist, what cycles--or noncyclic phenomena--would take their place?
How many cycles and types of cycles are there in: the human body, brain, or mind, or in life, society, or human history; a cell, the biosphere, or the evolution of life; music, chemistry, economics, physics, or mathematics; or geology, climatology, astronomy, or the universe as a whole?
What is the order of the relative importance of all of the different cycles that exist? Which cycles are cause or effect of which other cycles?
What do we not know about cycles and what do we most need to find out?
Arbitrarily complex cybernetic circuitry can be built up out of cycles, and even from absolutely identical and simple cycles.
There can be modular cycles.
There of course exist rings of cycles.
Some cycles may 'violate' time, by appearing to have retrotemporal or ex nihilo arms.
Cycles can be diachronically discontinuous or quasi-discontinuous.
Cycles may be dispersional, diffuse, or holonomic. They can be noise-like and quasi-random.
They can breed, control, and compete with one another; they can also define one another.
They can evolve, even anamorphically. They can branch, divergently and anastomotically. They can form coaxial bundles.
They can undergo projective-geometric transformations; they can map onto, and off of, things and processes.
Cycles can be 'negative' (sensu being interstitial or defined by their isomorphous absence in a matrix, solid, or quasi-continuum); and they can evert.
The topology of cycles can be arbitrarily specific, strange, and/or complex. There can be differential-topologic cycles.
Diachronically, cycles can either be point-like or move in space. They can be or mimic solitons.
Cycles can be arbitrarily stable or arbitrarily metastable; they can be protean.
Cycles can be absorptive and ever-growing; even infinitely hypertrophic. They can also be (infinitely) efflorescent or chaotic.
Cycles can form tangles and knots with one another or themselves; and give rise, in these or other ways, to nodes and nodal networks. They can be aegagropilous. They can be turbulent-just as turbulence can more or less be made up of them in turn.
Cycles and 'crystallographic' patterns intergrade as a continuum, that is paradoxical in some ways.
Cycles also intergrade with all mathematical series (that is, the universe of cycles intergrades with the universe of series) and together they form a continuum with transfinite anastomoses.
Cycles can have a purely virtual existence (e.g. in future retrospect, as examples of 'purely a posteriori order').
Cycles need not be a merely linear function of time, or whatever; they can also be logarithmic, hyperbolic, or arbitrarily nonlinear. Indeed, they can exist in virtually any number system or set of such systems.
Cycles can be objective or quasi or wholly subjective (or intersubjective).
Cycles of course include the set of all (known or possible) types of waves.
Cycles can have : spatial, temporal, or abstract : periods ranging from infinitesimal to adinfinite; and from arbitrarily fixed, rigid, or delomorphic to arbitrarily complex, diversely recurrent, or idiomorphic.
Cycles can be nongeometric (purely topological), e.g. as fixed-point
cycles.
Cycles can exist that occur only once or less than once (fractionally often).
Cycles can resemble--and they continuously intergrade with--spirals, helixes, helicoids, Peano curves, et alia.
The reason for presenting the above menagerie was to dramatize in the minds of readers the horrendous and yet little appreciated complexity and queerness of that future problem of civilization and science that is called reality. New instruments, or weapons, are needed to tame the intellectual and existential jungle that confronts us, and the potential importance of ideonomy should be seen in this, more realistic, light.
Ideonomy can create new issues that have never before been debated or even conceived of, which can greatly and perpetually freshen debate.
Debate plays a role at all levels in our society: from the United Nations Security Council and General Assembly on down to the competition of candidates for political office, the boardrooms of corporations, the chambers of courts wherein wily lawyers lock horns for spoils, public fora, and the little dramas staged by forensic clubs in local high schools.
But no reason to stop there: spouses happily debate, even at impossible hours; motorists argue with traffic cops, and even with one another, in the wordless--or mostly wordless--debates represented by their lazy jockeyings for road space; teachers lecturing classrooms effectively debate with the minds of their students, even when there is no overt exchange or response; one debates, imaginatively, with the author of a book one is reading--and more constantly, with one's own id and superego; perhaps even neurons 'debate' with one another.
Nor there, if one thinks, in an ideonomic way, about the essential, decomposable, metaphoric, and generalizable meaning of this under-defined and misconceptualized thing we term 'debate': for birds debate with their neighbors over where the boundaries of their territories are or should be located; companies basically debate with one another over the setting of a proper price for the same products, and they 'debate' when they compete for finite customers; surely, even if unacclaimedly, alternative biochemical pathways or processes are engaged in uninterrupted and collective 'debate' as they compete for: priority, dominance, control, acquisition, retention, exclusivity, recognition, freedom, access, development, innovation, universality, perquisites, security, etc : with respect to or in terms of finite : 'commodities' (raw, processed, and synthetic materials and manufactured structures and devices), energies, sites, territories, space, scarce and advantageous information, attention or order-taking messengers, redundant (as well as irredundant) pathways, and systems, facilities and services (for transportation, manufacture, building, communication, maintenance, inspection, government, storage, protection, or even analogs of aggression, publishing, data-processing, calculation, research and development, education, or recreation--the latter things for harmless or heuristic experimentation, library research (say in the 'stacks' of the genome), training and maintenance of skills, reschooling, coordinative and invigorative exercise, and challenging and life-simulating play) : throughout life, in ontogeny, and in phylogeny ...
... In physical chemistry similar 'debates' may occur (one thinks of the complexities of chemical kinetics and opalescence); immunologically, the body often seems to 'debate' with itself, or among its subsystems or components, over the proper way to fight a disease or an invader, or even about how to treat or define itself; in the case of the dynamics of the Earth, the atmosphere's systems (storms, air masses, cyclones, jet streams, and convection cells) seem to 'debate' among themselves over the 'proper' (i.e. derivative) circulatory structure and climatic course of the atmosphere, the ocean's currents and systems may similarly 'debate' the circulatory course, structure, and 'climate' of the sea, and in the bowels of our planet a third such debate, or series of debates, may be conducted (with outcomes, quite literally, shifting the ground beneath our feet); and, after all this, might not humble air molecules, or entire galaxies, 'debate'?
Human history appears to be an endless 'debate' about innumerable issues, which, however, may be so interwoven and synthetic that they and the debate itself are really unitary.
Given that debate is all-pervasive--and that there may even be analogs, forms, or degrees of it in inanimate nature-the scientific study of it may be long overdue. Debate may be far more important than we have imagined.
If the phenomenon of debate is to be studied by science, then it is to ideonomy that we should turn for tools and guidance.
Ideonomy can survey and find analogies between debates of every kind and upon every subject.
It can discover the essential elements, dimensions, and processes that are found in--or that are necessary to describe, analyze, understand, and compare--debates.
It can develop an apparatus for systematically characterizing and classifying debates by means of: objective and subjective properties, evaluative scales, recurring or universal questions, typical comparisons, ideograms (ideonomic diagrams), a conceptual vocabulary and grammar, standard or programmatic procedures, decision trees, differentiative and integrative categories and taxons, laws, rules, consultable advice, ideonomic principles, checklists, interventional tests, relevant experiments, a model- building 'kit', gedankenexperiments, criticisms, criteria, etc.
It can show the possible transformations, and actual intertransformations, of different debates; or how the pieces of a given debate could be rearranged to create a completely different debate.
Deception as used here encompasses such things as: misrepresentation, falsification, fraud, trickery, double-dealing, bad faith, false pretense, dissimulation, guile, cunning, cheating, subterfuge, or delusion. It refers to a willful act of deception, usually, and sometimes to unconscious or conscious self-deception.
The keys to avoiding such deception include experience, training, clear knowledge of the types and circumstances of deception, and the creation and maintenance of an aversion to being deceived .
The types, causes, circumstances, combinations, and permutations of human deception can be extremely diverse and complex. For this reason ideonomy can be of help by automatically generating, defining, and illustrating vast numbers of possibilities, both of a general and more specialized nature, or that are indicated to be, or naturally apt to be, associated with predefined, predetermined, or characteristic: situations, matters, issues, factors, events, processes, opportunities, problems, needs, subjects, etc.
But the forms of deception listed above ultimately represent a set of natural phenomena, and for ideonomy phenomena are fundamentally universal and possess universally identifiable and exploitable related, convergent, and complementary : laws, properties, mechanisms, causes, effects, criteria, siqns, niches, courses, analogies, differences, behaviors, functions, hierarchies, spectrums, clusters, elements, languages, networks, series, defects and limitations, solutions, relationships, rules, types and taxa, uses, etc.
Ideonomy should therefore be able to bring to light things of a similar and similarly helpful nature in the case of deceptions.
This could lead to the systematic avoidance, control, reduction, and transcendence of the finite or infinite set of deceptions to which we are subject and of which we are causative, or to which our increasingly intelligent machines might be subject and of which they, too, might be causative. This might or might not entrain new instances and types of deceptions, of lesser or equal number or importance. But at least the possibility exists that ideonomy could ultimately contribute to the emergence of a new civilized order that would be purged of many modern and ancient forms of deception and of the disagreeable consequences thereof.
Deception can cause: unwanted uncertainty and ambiguity, the added costs of means of protection against risks, chronic wastage of society's finite energies, unnecessary and inaesthetic strife, reduced power to predict and organize things, working of society against itself, -flourishing of diverse derivative forms of evil, etc.
If ideonomy is correct, and deception is more natural, diverse, universal, and unitary than has traditionally been assumed, then conventional efforts to combat deception may be misguided: addressed to symptom rather than cause, part rather than whole, trivial and protean species rather than important and invariant genus, etc. Ideonomy could correct such erroneous conceptions, purposes, and methods, or supplant them with a more legitimate, complete, fundamental , and decisive effort.
If deceptions are natural phenomena, are they really limited to those practiced by mankind upon itself? The tendency in early ideonomic research has been to discover progressively extra-human or universal equivalents of phenomena that traditionally have been thought of as being peculiarly and exclusively human in their occurrence, or as being limited to biology, the Earth, technology, one science, or any other subject or sphere.
That deceptions are not limited to man, we already know, for they are found in all types, and probably at all levels and in all types of levels, of life (as in the various forms of camouflage and mimicry that have evolved through processes of natural selection); indeed, even diseases (or pathogenic microorganisms) appear to thus hide and disguise themselves. So intelligence and consciousness-at least in the ordinary sense, or in known forms-do not appear to be necessary for the occurrence of deception.
But if we set the world of organisms, and of their effects, aside, might we still find examples of true 'deception' in the realm of inanimate nature (or of what we like to think of as being inanimate nature)?
If processes of natural selection and evolution operate in the purely, physical world, or extremely complex cybernetic phenomena exist there, or there are certain forms of information processing, then there might well be close or exact analogs of biotic or even human 'deception'. There are other possibilities as well.
As it happens, the exploration of such theoretical questions is a natural concern of ideonomy, seeking as it does to maximally extend, generalize, transform, and analogize phenomena, patterns, and dimensions describing things-and information, cybernetics, and government specifically.
To define a thing is to: discover, set forth, formulate, precise, distinguish, describe, limit, illustrate, or prescribe : the : meaning, essential qualities, identity, or signification : of the thing.
Ideonomy can ascertain and indicate all of the many and diverse reasons for and functions of definition, both those that have been recognized or made use of to date, and those that have not been or that might or should be introduced in the future.
It can indicate all of the ways in which things have been or might be defined, and explain the nature, logic, and value thereof.
It can progressively develop an infinity of different dimensions, methods, and means for defining particular, specific, generic, and universal things, and for doing so under various circumstances, for various purposes, to various degrees, etc.
It can discover and describe all of the canonical combinations, permutations, and transformations of : elements, concepts, words, symbols, qualities, dimensions, methods, means, referents, definitions (sic), etc : that are or could be of use in defining things. And the spaces and manifolds thereof.
It can work out and exploit : connections, chains, series, hierarchies networks, clusters, rings, etc : both special and universal : of definitions. It can also construct hierarchical definitions.
It can define, and show how to define, things that hitherto were never : defined, defined properly or adequately., definable, or definable in certain ways or for certain purposes : such as highly : esoteric, abstract, or specialized : mathematical, physical, economic, logical, legal, philosophic, musicological, technological, or psychological concepts, terms, theories, methods, phenomena, relationships, etc.
For example, it can achieve, facilitate, or instigate the translation of the gamut of mathematical concepts into verbal definitions and into a form accessible to mathematical laymen, by making use of such things as : analogies, metaphors, universal dimensions, scales, diagrams, rules, classificatory systems, conceptual series and networks, hierarchies, multidisciplinary applications to disparate phenomena, differentiations, boundaries, combinations, permutations, transformations, extremes, chronological trees, ad hoc symbols, etc.
Ideonomy can redefine any or all concepts of one field in terms of the related, or unrelated, concepts of another field, or in terms of all concepts of all fields.
It can be used not only to automate the generation of concepts but to automatically define the concepts it so generates.
It can be used to construct infinite, or infinitely complex or specific, definitions of concepts.
It can define concepts in totally new and even opposite ways.
It can set new standards for the definition of things.
It can contrive special explanatory contexts for explaining concepts.
Given one definition of a thing, it can automatically convert it into another definition or transform the original definition into a whole series of definitions.
It can show how to define things recursively.
Ideonomy can be used to systematically evaluate or criticize any definition of any thing.
It can simplify a definition.
It can help to define the words of one language by means of the words of another--or make translation more universal, fundamental, faithful, meaningful, and ideonomic.
It can show how to define an entire or maximal set of concepts with minimal, the simplest, or identical means.
Ideonomy can train people to define for others the concepts they use, or complex cases or situations to which they refer. Or to define the words they use when suddenly asked by someone to do so in the course of a conversation--in ways appropriate for or requested by that individual, or that reflect the structure of the conversation or take advantage of the things in the environment or the general circumstances of the conversation.
It can help one to recognize things that may need to be defined in any circumstances whatever, or the appropriate form and content of the definition.
By drawing analogies to existing definitions of things, it can suggest how to define new things.
Ideonomy can help plan and execute a description of a thing.
It can enable one to see better the: nature, structure, content, nomothetic and idiographic aspects, symmetries and asymmetries, essential features, hierarchical and sequential aspects, basic properties and dimensions, existential circumstances, genetic or reductive rules, interest and importance, internal opportunities, autocorrelation, problems, special descriptive needs, simplicities and complexities, combinatorial or permutational aspects, analogical and cognitive aspects, 'linguistic' opportunities, quantitative characteristics, network aspects, vergences, classifications, excellences and defects, etc : of that which is to be described.
By studying the description, and compossible descriptions, of all actual and possible types of things, it can find maximally : simple, universal, basic, meani-ngful, and relevant : descriptions of arbitrary or specialized things, and an optimal descriptive language.
By studying the set of all past descriptions of things, it can learn and make known the best descriptions and types of descriptions of things in general and of particular things, and the methods, means, and elements by which those descriptions were achieved, or that explain the virtues, defects, and idiosyncrasies of the descriptions. It can also discover ways to improve and perfect the descriptions and descriptive means.
It can train one to be able to endlessly describe and redescribe a thing.
It can progressively discover and evolve all possible means for and ways of describing anything and everything.
As one proceeds with one's description of a thing, one can use ideonomy to critique and improve the description.
Ideonomy can be used to discover what is: missing, exaggerated, distorted, redundant, ineffective, inconsistent, contradictory, confused, irrelevant, inelegant, misleading, imperfect, wrongfully implicit, indefinite, false, or detrimental in a description. Or what per contra is: necessary, central, veraciously or desirably implicit, fundamental, irredundant, successful, consistent, distinct, relevant, elegant, realistic, perfect, beneficial, original, optimal, insightful, etc : in the description.
By comparing myriad random pairs of maximally diverse photographs of maximally diverse scenes-to discover their similarities, analogies, and commonalities, on the one hand, and their differences, negative analogies, noncommonalities, divergences, and orthogonalities, on the other--it can derive a growing number of generic bases for-comparing different scenes or describing single scenes; bases that are at once increasingly diverse and increasingly interrelated, unitary, and--from the standpoint of man's descriptive needs and capacities--comprehensive or complete.
The set of generic bases for description isolated in this way will include bases of both a purely objective nature and ones of an anthropomorphic or else anthropocentric character (reflecting man's psycho-physical constitution or supervenient habits or culture).
These bases, or other bases of a different but equivalent character, can be used to construct innumerable novel descriptive tools of a more or less general or specialized kind, and these can then function as powerful aids to description, perception, thought, and artistic fancy.
Such aids, or the cooperative set of all such aids, will inevitably be equivalent in a sense to a new language, and certainly they will reshape and guide the subsequent evolution of conventional languages.
A point worth mentioning, that bears on the reason for creating these aids and on how they will operate, is that whenever certain things, as opposed to others, are used to describe things, these change the needs that remain for other descriptive elements and methods. Sets of descriptive elements, in complex but characteristic ways, at once invite, obviate, modify, and conflict with other possible--in fact, with all possible--descriptive elements and sets thereof.
Obviously the combinatorial possibilities for ever : better, worse, different, and more specialized : descriptive elements, methods, aids, and purposes are virtually infinite. This explosive complexity need not be viewed as a problem, since it can also be thought of as an opportunity for unending future ideonomic explorations and progress in the development and refinement of mankind's descriptive arts.
The problem, moreover, is actually simpler than it sounds, since there are equally explosive laws, methods, and means for investigating and consolidating the space of combinatorial possibilities; things, once again, that are of the essence of ideonomy, and that vindicate its scientific status.
Ideonomy can progressively discover and construct : hierarchies, clusters, series, chains, series, networks, circuitries, trees, functions, processes, and other meta-structures and meta-patterns : of combinatorially descriptive elements and sets of elements in the giant idea spaces that are being imagined.
The use of such rigorousIy descriptive aids will resuIt in, among other things: the discovery of new natural phenomena, entities, and laws, the recognition of overlooked arrangements and shapes of things, better classification of works of art, the more meaningful use of words, simpler and more elegant means for describing certain classes of things, new and more varied styles of writing, improved educational methods and materials, novel thoughts and modes of thought, and a clearer grasp of the mechanical bases of the human mind and cognitive bases of the human brain.
Ideonomy can take a single thing and redescribe it in a thousand different ways, even in ways that are so totally different that, in describing the same thing, they seem to be describing many totally different, unrelated, or opposite things--or perhaps a continuum or world of things.
Through exercises of this sort ideonomy could inculcate in individuals a deep appreciation of the miraculous inherent complexity of all things, even those things that appear absolutely simple. Subsequent encounters with simple or simplistic descriptions would be less apt to mislead persons who had had such training.
The deepest form of understanding seems to come from seeing things from
many very different perspectives simultaneously, or via the 'mental parallax'
afforded by a multitude of superficially divergent but fundamentally unitary
descriptions.
Illuminate How A Thing Develops
Observing a thing in motion can give one far more insight into it than can acquaintance with it when it is immobile or from outside time, but even greater insight is apt to be associated with knowledge or experience of the thing when it is in the process of developing.
How does a thing develop? What comes first and last? What discrete or continuous stages are there? What constrains successive stages? What hierarchies of developmental causes, appearances, elements, and effects are there--or how is development hierarchical? How is it not hierarchical and anti-hierarchical--and how do the opposite tendencies meet, antisyzygially?
What are the paths a thing follows in its development, and what is their structure, interrelationship, causation, importance, and irrelevance? To what extent are they the cause or effect of development --or both?
What equilibria and disequilibria flow from, cause, or are associated with the genesis of a thing?
What things coevolve in development--homologically, cooperatively, or synergistically? What is the relative and absolute extent to which a thing's development is essentially coevolutionary, and the ratio thereof? What dispersion of these quantities characterizes the geneses of the world's range of things; and what are the determinative scaling laws?
What are all of the major and minor dimensions that describe or are exhibited in the development of all things, and what is the hierarchy--or set of hierarchies--of these dimensions? What are the simple and compound, or parametric, dimensions? What are the known and unknown dimensionless numbers--both intrinsic and universal; and what are the finite and infinite : structural and functional : interrelations thereof?
When a thing develops, what are all of the directions in which-or vectors along which-it develops; and what are all of the : curves, surfaces, structures, nonlinearities, mathematical series, laws, spaces, manifolds, etc : thereof?
To what extent is a thing's genesis 'forced' or instead 'relaxational'?
What are the cyclic and other periodic properties of development?
How is development self-regulatory, programmatic, exogenous, stochastic or deterministic, iterative, recursive, and/or the like?
How is it linear and exponential -or more generally, what are all or the infinity of mathematical functions that describe it?
How simple and/or complex is development, both overtly and covertly?
What is synchronous and what diachronous in development?
How does development itself develop--en route, ab initio or embryonically, and precursively?
How does development explore and exploit experience and its environment? Is development, in general or in certain cases, a process characterized by any form or degree of: learning, opportunism, experimentation, natural selection, adaptation, fractal or chaotic variation, information processing, memory, cybernetic homeostasis, generalization, competition, active control or adaptation of the environment, game-playing, vergence, prediction or anticipatory adaptation, catagenesis, gambling, pluripotent or plurivalent flexibility, multivariate analysis cum multidimensional scaling, multiplexing (in the sense of being ambiguous and simultaneously equivalent to, or incorporative of, many different 'alternative' forms or courses of development), etc?
Does develop really terminate or is it perpetual; is it merely abeyant when it appears to be complete and past?
How important is predevelopment. or early development relative to later development or maturation, and what is the essential half-way point; does early genesis preplan or fix later (more overt) development? How consequential are chance events in developmental infancy?
How anomalous can development be--and how anomalous or individual is it?
What things are amplified by development, and what or which things are: transformed, diminished, moved, exchanged, permuted, combined, added, subtracted, multiplied, exponentiated, modulated, fused, fragmented, connected, isolated, reconstituted, recombined or re-associated, re-grouped, reorganized, etc?
What are all of the quantitative scalings of a thing's development, or how does its development occur, and what does its development consist of, at all the relevant levels of: time, energy, mass, velocity, population, size (length, area, volume, flatness, narrowness, hollowness, etc), self- curvature, pressure, energy, energy-flux, change, equilibrium, disequilibrium, entropy, probability, fractal-dimensionality, density, redundancy, irredundancy, correlation (autocorrelation and, intercorrelation), ratios (of all such quantities as these), frequencies or periodicities, efficiencies, informations, distances, angles, powers, works, capacities, mass-flux (transport), risks and dangers, costs, uniformity or quantization, governances or dependencies, independencies, interdependencies, stress, violence, strain, strength, durability, hardness, noise, concinnity, isolation or insulation, concentration or purity, normality, phase, hysteresis, 'inertia' (perseveration) , synchrony and asynchrony, reactivity; reciprocity, contravariation, or complementarity; freedom, excellence, transmissivity, productivity, precision, 'induction', etc?
Moreover, what are all of the interdependences and interactions of all of these levels and types of levels--both in themselves and as resultants or constraints?
What are the extent, types, implications, and interdependences of both our knowledge and ignorance of all of these things, or as they bear upon the development of a thing or of all things?
What is the development of a thing in terms of the development of all things, and the development of all things in terms of the genesis of a single thing?
What does not develop? Can we be sure it does not develop? Does it develop in a limited degree or specialized way? What forms of development do not exist or occur or are impossible or unnecessary? What aspects of things do not develop, in what ways do they not develop, and what explains these things?
To what extent is development, from the standpoint of the whole universe, all of nature, or eternity: morphic, monomorphic, delomorphic, constant, orderly, simple, absolute, isotropic, homogeneous, symmetric, measured, convergent, parallel, self-similar, unique, necessary, equivalent, etc?
In what universal measure is development-instead or simultaneously: amorphous, polymorphic, protean, inconstant, disorderly, complex, relative, anisotropic, inhomogeneous, asymmetric, divergent, vergent, self-dissimilar (or at least not self-similar), indeterminate, pluripotent, nonequivalent, etc?
Other questions about universal development that it is important to ask and answer are whether it is, more or-less or strictly: universal or exceptional, cooperative or competitive, 'monophyletic or polyphyletic', local or holistic, 'from-the-top-down or from-the-bottom-up' (apical or basal), pluralistic or monistic, spatially continuous or discontinuous, spatially smoothed or rough, measurable or 'measure-less', finite or infinite, knowable a priori or merely or mainly a posteriori (in retrospect), transitive or intransitive, commutative or noncommutative, reflexive or irreflexive, associative or nonassociative, distributive or nondistributive, etc?
These questions are profoundly important and yet hideously difficult. Ideonomy has in part been designed to help with the answering of enigmatic questions of this very sort.
There are other aspects of development that are important and with whose investigation or treatment ideonomy can assist.
One needs to know what all the failures may be that occur, or that can occur, in the course of a thing's development. What causes them and are they in any way causally related? What effects do or could they have? Might they actually be desirable in some sense, or necessary for successful or efficient development (and if so, are they optimal or what would be optimal)? Is development itself a 'failure' in some sense--or what, really, is the difference between success and failure, in the case of development or in the most general sense?
What instances or aspects of development are harmonious or compatible, and which are instead disharmonious, incompatible, or even contradictory? What explains their sets and interrelations, in terms of the essence or laws of development?
What accounts for maldevelopment and pathogenesis? What are all of the generic causes, factors, conditions, and circumstances? What are all of the types, dimensions, properties, and effects of the former? How common are they? How different is the world, or are things, because of them? Is their status absolute or relative? Why do they fail to occur, or what constrains, limits, or bounds their occurrence? What do they contribute to the world in a positive sense?
How does the development of one thing, or one kind of thing, lead to the development of another thing or kind of thing, and so on, in finite and infinite chains, hierarchies, networks, chaotically deliquescing trees, globally summatory lattices or pseudo-continua, etc?
To what extent do the supposedly and apparently new or novel origins and geneses of things in reality represent partial, complete, or homoousian avatars or regenerations of those things?
Is the difference between 'change' and 'development' absolute or merely relative (relativistic)?
How multivious could the genesis of a thing be? Does a thing develop as the product of a thalweg?
Is the genesis of a thing, or of things in general, finitary or continuistic? Integrational or differentiational? Gradual or "catastrophic" (continuous or discontinuous)? Local or holistic? The child or manifestation of a tree or network (closed or open graph)? Of convergence, divergence, or vergence? Of a finite or infinite matrix? Of boundary conditions, organizing centers, attractors, singularities, poles, oscillations, cellular automata, knots, cycles, cells, etc?
Or of entirely different things, such as mathematical objects that have not yet been imagined by even the purest of mathematicians?
By causing the thought and experimentation of scientists to be expanded in such a way as to simultaneously attend to forms of development, and development of things, in every discipline and of every type, ideonomy can bring about the discovery of every more numerous, diverse, and powerful developmental analogies and laws.
The development of one thing can be used to model and interpret the development of a different thing. Sometimes developmental insights stand to be gained by comparing the very things whose development is the most dissimilar, divergent, orthogonal, unrelated, or opposite (whether in reality or superficially). Novelty of situation may remove the scales from one's eyes, or a better chance for the existence or discovery of an antisyzygy may obtain, or new constellations of facts or phenomena may be given an opportunity to testify or to contribute their special clues and leads.
An overspecialized form of development may be too narrow to give the
experimentalist or theoretician the room they need to maneuver, to diversify,
connect, and test their observations, to escape from the thing's distracting
presence and irrelevant haecceity, to start over again on new ground or
from a fresh perspective, or to grow mentally, and as a result it may stifle
the achievement of insight into its own nature and into the universal nature
of development.
(48)
One could turn to ideonomy, in the course of observing the development of a thing or phenomenon, for the ideas it might give one about what to look for, as perhaps being of special importance or interest; for the instructions it might provide about how to find these things or what to look for in connection with them, for the suggestions it might make as to how to think about these things, for the questions it might ask or cause one to ask oneself, leading to new answers or even more interesting questions; for the guidance it could provide as to how to classify the general type or detailed patterns of development observed, for the words, concepts, and grammar it might supply to enable one to describe the genetic event--and to articulate one's thoughts about it--to other persons, for the predictions it might make--or permit one to make--concerning the future course of development, for the sets or series of experiments it might inspire one to perform or whose conduct it might direct or criticize, for the warnings it might give about the errors one is liable to make--or illusions one is apt to encounter--in analyzing or observing development or in theorizing about it, etc.
Random examples of geneses--or of things whose development--ideonomy could be used to illuminate are: construction of a skyscraper from below the ground up, rainbow formation, evolution of societies (sociogenesis), ontogenesis of the human body, cell division (mitosis), crystal growth (crystallogeny), cosmogony or cosmic evolution, psychic or intellectual development (psychogenesis or noogenesis), idea formation (ideogeny), emergence or progress of a disease (pathogenesis), development of a musical theme, cringle-crangle criminogenesis, development of a medical diagnosis, development of a storm front (frontogenesis), formation of Saturn's ring system, growth of mountains (orogeny) or entire continents (epeirogeny), formation of the solar system, development of galaxies, process of tumor formation (oncogeny), historical development of language, evolution of the bios, construction of protein molecules by ribosomes, cave development (speleogenesis), development of a regional drainage system by erosive runoff and streams, creation of a statue by a sculptor chiseling a block of marble, evolution of the atmosphere, historical development of a nation's public ways, random walk of a particle undergoing Brownian movement, genesis of a war, development of schizophrenia, general evolution of mathematics, historical development of a national economy, immunity production (immunogenesis), development of atomic nuclei (nucleosynthesis), evolution of a chess game, development of old age (senescence), rock origin (petrogenesis), development of a fad, growth of a delusion, moral development, evolution of science, growth of a corporation, the historical development of radio, the pure morphogenesis of the Alexander horned sphere (in topology), or the future evolution of ideonomy (or of its subdivision Geneses and Plastology).
Ideonomy could extract the common--omnigenous and universal--genetic patterns of these things and systematically apply them elsewhere, eternally, and infinitely.
Human intelligence is defined by the amount of the brain's structure and function that is devoted to different types of mental function. As it happens, a great fraction of the brain concerns itself with vision. Yet the visual structure of alphanumeric characters, words, and numbers--in space and time--is only a part of what interests the visual brain, and a part that came so late in biological evolution that the only species known to be possessed of such an interest is ours. Instead much of the visual brain is devoted to recognizing, imagining, and creating 'pure' shapes and sequences thereof.
Many types of diagrams, maps, and graphs exist as aids to thought. But such things are forever evolving, and entirely new types of them appear now and again.
Ideonomy can be used to examine the universe of all possible types and instances of diagrams, maps, and graphs, and of all needs and uses therefor. It can create innumerable methods for developing such aids. It itself has great need for such innovations. Visual devices serving ideonomy that make exclusive or major use of 'pure' visual shapes, are generically styled ideograms.
Ideograms designed specifically with the needs and possibilities of a particular ideonomic division in mind will often be so different from other ideograms, and yet so consistent among themselves, that they will merit recognition as new types of ideograms, and these types will often deserve new names signaling their typological status.
Thus special ideograms can be developed that are especially suited,
in either general or specific ways, for treating: causes (etiograms)
effects (anyograms), goods (agathograms) or (cacograms), chains of things
(ormograms), the paths of things or ideas (hodograms), motions (kinograms),
work (ergograms), decisions (legograms), controls and governments (cratograms),
combinations of things (mixograms), networks
(dictyograms), values (axiograms), ignorances (agnosograms), acts (pragmograms),
relations (dochograms), properties (usiograms), stories (enograms), environments
(periontograms), knowledges (epistemograms),
origins (archograms), assumptions (lemmograms), errors (sphalmograms),
probabilities (icograms), possibilities (prositograms), thoughts (phrontograms),
quantities (posograms)v processes (sisograms), the present (artiograms),
generalizations (eurynograms), analogies (icelograms), vergences (chiazograms),
taxons (taxograms), events (synantemograms), connections (desmograms),
emergents (blastograms), contents (endograms), changes (tropograms), and
hierarchies (klimograms).
By analogy, tree diagrams are already in widespread use and are termed dendrograms.
The first-mentioned ideograms--the etiograms depicting causes--could represent the causes in a variety of ways, including: as sequences of causes, as converging or diverging sequences or sets of causes, as clusters of causes, as causal hierarchies, as alternative causes, as parallel causes, as cyclical or recursive causes, as taxons of causes, for analogies among causes, as degrees of causes, for probabilities of causes, etc.
The values of ideograms are manifold, they can: give an overview, summarize much with little and quickly, accelerate thought, depict structure that is otherwise almost unrepresentable, focus on the essence of a thing or of a set of relationships, simultaneously show what many things are in terms of a single universal thing, facilitate parallel thinking and communication (à la the recently discovered importance of massively-parallel computer architectures), facilitate understanding of complexity; instantaneously show an entire sequence, course of events, or process of development; show how big or complex things are constructed out of or depend upon small, simple, or discrete elements; simultaneously depict many different dimensions or types of relations of things; break a matter up into a finite set of discrete but interdependent cells, operations, stages, steps, or concepts; dramatize the role of ideas in things, or in understanding things; serve as a mnemonic that can repeatedly be consulted, provide a foundation for a more elaborate treatment or discussion of a thing; serve as an organon for stimulating, generating, formulating, analyzing, transforming, or arranging ideas and thoughts; help to quantify ideas or qualitative relationships, simultaneously show the relationship of many different concepts or divisions of ideonomy to a single thing (or vice versa), show how to think about things in certain specialized ways, depict alternatives, etc.
Eventually ideonomy can be used to make the totality of developed ideograms accessible on a computer or computer-network in a maximally: efficient, interesting, complementary, and productive way. Powerful indexes, tables, decision-trees, algorithms, classification schemes, principles and rules of thumb, procedures, methods; combinatorial, permutational, and transformational formulas and structures; analogical guides, graphics and animation techniques, artificialintelligence programs, data-processing software, computer architectures and micro-architectures, computer languages and compiling software, search and experimentation programs, etc : will be created and interwoven systemically.
There are formal, canonical, and systematic ways of combining, synthesizing and mutually deriving all generic and particular ideograms that will be worked out and exploited.
Ideograms can be created, particularly with the help of computers, with the property that they have no unique description or form, but rather a capability for being continually adjusted in a multitude of dimensions and ways that makes them equivalent to an entire continuum or space of ideograms. Indeed, ideograms of even higher order, and of ever-higher order, are practical.
The size, complexity, sophistication, power, elegance, internal organization, specialization, generalization, automation, intelligence, self- development, width of application and reference, value, aesthetics, integration, mathematical structure, etc : of ideograms will evolve ad infinitum.
An infinite : tree, network, vergence, circuitry, space, hierarchy, etc : of general and particular ideograms will be bred into existence and serve the world community (and ultimately the community of intelligent machines).
In the : finite or infinite : set of (known) things that ideograms can incorporate or make use of are : arrows, boxes, balloons, Munsell color space, texture space (once it is discovered or worked out), form and cluster spaces; path, network, and cycles spaces; the spaces of all possible connections, relationships, combinations, permutations, and transformations; the space of all relevant parameters; boundaries, clusters, groups, codes, symbols, lines, pictographs, pictures, sub-ideograms, notes, lists, commentaries, instructions, curves, surfaces, solids, hyperspatial structures and motions, superimpositions, details, definitions, cross-references, ideonomic formulas and equations, scales, interpolations and extrapolations, types of brackets, isopleths, measures and indices, tables, matrices, models and simulations, keys, stochastic functions, standards, summaries, nodes, branches, centers, distributions, expansions, intercorrelations, coordinate systems, spirals, dots of all kinds (of every size, shape, color, etc), cells, regions, illusions, stories, rotations, angles, punctuation marks (both conventional and novel), nonce or universal jargon, radiations, blank spaces or gaps, fungible leaves, overlays and restructurings, displayed activities, interactive menus, etc.