One of the most interesting questions that confronts a thinking being is whether people can comprehend the ideas and thoughts of one another. I believe that we can, and I also believe that we have the means to embark upon a project that would culminate in the understanding of all human ideas.
If we define an idea as the mental conceptualization of something, including physical objects, an action, or sensory experience, either now or in the future, then the number of objects in a living being's universe is finite.1 If we apply the methodologies used in genetics, psychology, animal behavior, sociology, history, and other disciplines to those ideas, it would provide us with the basis of a mental mapping project,1,2 with the goal of describing the diversity of human ideas in any given situation or dilemma. This is not a diagram of a physical structure, like a genome or proteome, ...
