From: Scott Chase (osteopilus@yahoo.com)
Date: Tue 27 Jul 2004 - 07:49:57 GMT
I've been reading Asimov's Foundation series. I've
made it through to Second Foundation. This Asimovian
psychohistory sounds like it might be a good plot
device for a science fiction story, but I'm not sure
how well it would work in the real world. Historic
systems are too stochastic and contigent to allow
prediction on the scale of Seldon's Plan, even if
probabilistic. Even in Asimov's story line, at least
as far as I've read, it doesn't seem Seldon had the
foresight to have accounted for the effect of the
mutant Mule.
Maybe it all works out in the end. I still have
several books to go. I'm also reading Prelude to
Foundation which gets into more detail on Seldon's
life before he became a prognosticating holgram making
appearances during Seldon crises.
And what's with these crises anyhow? Are these akin to
Kuhnian revolutions or the rapid phases of punctuated
equilibria?
What's the difference between psychohistory *sensu*
Asimov and what Nostradamus is infamous for having
done in our past? Is Hari Seldon just a glorified
soothsayer with a slide rule?
Don't get me wrong. I actually like the Foundation
books so far, as *science fiction*, but I'm not buying
the hardcore Asimovian psychohistory as applied to the
nonfictional world we happen to live in, the really
messy one with so much sociological complexity that we
have a hard enough time coming to terms with the past,
not to mention predicting the future.
What's more realistic, the Asimovian psychohistory
where history is predicted based on treating mobs of
people (billions and billions) statistically) or the
psychoanalytic kind of psychohistory that I've posted
about not too long ago? Their is an actual field
called psychohistory that's not Asimovian. It's
actually kinda Freudian, with Freud's Oedipal complex
in the Darwinian horde mumbo-jumbo a sort of inaugural
address.
Would memetics have any truck with such a concept as
the Seldon brand of psychohistory? If memetics is
studying something truly analogous to genetic
evolution how are we to predict anything to the degree
that Seldon did? How could we predict what the future
of genetic evolution will bring, given the stochastic
and contingent nature of evolution? I would think the
same would hold for cultural evolution or human
history, be it memetic or not. There might be room for
modest, short-term predictions, but anything more is
verging into Nostradamus territory.
That ought to wake Keith from his dogmatic slumber :-)
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