I have a question that I'm hoping you all will decide to
chime in upon with some replies.

When we're talking about Psycho-History in the Asimovian sense, what would we say "it looks look" and what are the kinds of mathematics involved in its system?

Do we have any clues provided for us in the Foundation Series per my question? Because when I read the books and have looked at people's comments here on psychohistory.org and in other forums, I get the definite impression of a descriptive math system heavily characterized by flowcharting formats, set theory, and symbolic/modal logics.

Material from topology and chaos theory mathematics would also be a big part of it.

So, what I'm asking is: what math models do you see as characterizing an emerging field of psychohistorical mathematics? What does it look like for you?

I'm looking forward to your ideas. Thanks

-- Brassbabboon

Hi all,

The mathematics which we will have to use for psychohistory would be largely statistical models, I think. We would have to use interpretative mathematics which is descriptive rather than quantitative too. Set theory, as you have already mentioned is one important math which we will require.

Boolean algebra will contend with fuzzy logic for dealing with decisive problems, where all depends on decisions of one person or a small group and such.

I find the contribution which topology can make interesting. I cannot claim to know a lot of the subject, but it is a descriptive set-theory kind of math. This may be able to help us devise mapping solutions and such and hence may be able to handle the effects of small groups on larger ones and the effect of individual minds/thoughts/influences on larger populations. The mathematics of multiple dimensions will be necessary as we will be dealing with huge numbers of variables.

We may need to model chaos into the model early, if it has to survive into larger and more complex models.

Personality traits and their classification would be another thing I would look to introduce into descriptive math models. These would be weighted probabilistic math models which would largely handle dominated groups of people given stimuli and social reactions. I would like to more than just touch on these points as I have done now, but I am sure I will find more for discussion.

All comments are welcome.

--Fulcrum

Asimov said he use gas as a (simple) model where each atom has many variables but collectively the behavior can be characterized by pressure and temperature, add heat and the pressure goes up, etc.

And of course, chaos theory.

And Gibbon's Decline and Fall for the broad outline.

hey'
I think that elements of Measure theory,Set theory,real analysis and yes flow chartng all will come to play in the formulation of the subject but essentially this will be a new suject al together with axioms etc.. If you know of someone working on it do let me know.I'm a postgraduate student of Mathematics and would love to work on this.
Bye

Hi Buvana

Ive been working on not this but on aspects of production models and on making them deterministic. Ive found that for this I would require models of the mind, perception, knowledge representation ideas and related math. Could you suggest anything?

Also I feel that an algorithmic form of process recognition for a psychohistorical problem will be possible only if wer have sufficient determinism. In essence, we will have to collaborate with an influential organization so that we can make events more deterministic by influencing them. I feel that this is the only real way of achieving accuracy with our preductions and hence knowing the future of the global process to a high degree of probability and correctness. Do comment.

Cheers,
Fulcrum

Hi Fulcrum
Thanx for the reply. As you said,"models of the mind" is according to me the first step towards formulating this subject. Now this will involve different facets of maths not just one field. I think i'll have to start from the scratch as there’s no research going on in this field right now. Well, that’s bout it but I have full faith that in my lifetime i will see this subject fully formulated ...
Bye

I have been working on developing a version of Psychohistory, as inspired by Asimov, and I have come to one conclusion. Asimov's view of Psychohistory is often misinterpreted. Getting down to basic principles, Psychohistory is not about predicting history, not in the least. It is about controlling the outcome of history. Further, it is about shortening or lessening the human suffering. It obvious that the Dark Ages is a metaphor. If we could have used the model of Psychohistory to shorten the time of trouble following the fall of Rome, instead of four or five centuries, the Dark Ages would have lasted twenty-five or thirty years

Psychology is the study of the human mind. Sociology is the study of human social organization. Anthropology is the study of (generally) primitive societies. Economics is the study of the production and distribution of goods and services. All of these social sciences relate to Psychohistory. There is one big problem-understanding how humanity works, and many different views. We can certainly say there is something called humanity, but can we say exactly how to look at it. Throw in the study of civilizations throughout history and the effect the legacy of these civilizations have upon us in the twenty-first century and you can see just how complex this problem is. Psychohistory, as I see Psychohistory, attempts this understanding. There needs to be a very broad view of how humanity works.

There are so many aspects that need to be considered it escapes the imagination. A new approach in the engineering field is called a System of Systems. This is used to develop an approach based upon complicated systems and how they interact with one another. I am convinced that the development of Asimov's Psychohistory will be done in a similar fashion. When looking at the number of different disciplines needed to describe the human phenomenon, no single approach is adequate. Just asking the question about human behavior, whether it is learned or biological (the famous "nature versus nurture" debate) implies how complicated it can be. Can a Psychohistorian dare to ignore how people behave on an individual level when attempting an approach that covers many millions?

The analytical divisions that I use for teaching world history are: chronological, geographical, social, philosophical / religious, economic, and political. I create manual global crisis simulations; however, in order to create genuine "psychohistorians", youth need to begin playing with the computer social-models that are currently available.

Although, I am a new, not permanent, member of Physchohistory.org, I recognize in it some potential for providing social science educators, like myself, and students the opportunities for nuturing this nascent science.

We adults are disingenuous when we suggest to young people that their world is simple. We will gain their trust and give them hope if we can provide imaginative tools with which youth can learn to build a positive and constructive future.

I am interested in the computer models you discussed in your reply. I am a software engineer by profession, and I am using (by analogy) software engineering models in developing a version of Psychohistory. What makes the modern models of interest is the combination of diverse areas. Some of the areas can be seen as hardware, software, and organization of computers into groups (i.e., domains and networks). Additionally, the software world is working with a legacy (how analogous to human beliefs). If you have any information of these computing models, would you please reply as I think the idea is of great note.

I have just logged onto ifsmodel.org developed by du.edu . . .. This is a nominally interactive global trends simulator made available by cia.gov . . . as part of their "Mapping the Global Future" or pentennial global trends projects.

I am unqualified to compare it to the engineering models that you are using. Perhaps you could evaluate it and comment.

I'll sign off for today.

Respectfully.

Thanks for the sites. I will have to spend a bit time pondering them. You mentioned a background in world history and I would like to pose a question to you. In the history of differing civilizations and cultures there seems to be a very basic difference that happened early on and set the course of the societies. How different cultures are going back in time many centuries. There seems to be a very basic trend that is difficult to alter once set in motion. There are early initiators in the life of a society and generation after generation is built upon this initiation. I remember as a boy reading teachings of Socrates and I am sure a boy in another part of the world might do the same with Confucius. And how different a view of the world we would each walk away with.

Regards.

Hello All!

I am new to this discussion so I think that all of you had some time to contemplate what an active science psychohistory might look like. Perhaps the best way to look at this to-be-science is to look at the previous development of another science...Physics.. Physics began as a series of observations by the greeks and other cultures. It was determined that an object when thrown up must come down. However there was no measureable way to observe the actual pheonomenon until measurements of distance, time and speed were developed and somewhat standardized. Only then could the science and equations be developed to develop the idea of physics. Now consider though. They knew nothing about the atoms, quarks, strong or weak forces that character Modern Physics we know today. Newton certainly knew nothing about Einsteins Theory of Relativity or quantum mechanics. But for everything that wasn't known about physics they were still able to come up with the Basic Equations of Physics that are still taught today.
Now...what does this have to do with psychohistory? Well I think we have the same problem as the greeks did.. We don't know the measurements to use.... Or do we?????? I think we need to begin looking at what data we do have..and start with that....

@mrkoconnell

What you say about the purpose of psychohistory is true - the denouement of the future with and without the involvement of psychohistorical ideas, are and will be different. We cannot isolate and learn about what we seek to control. To control, one has to instigate a system to an end and be aware of the outcome of this instigation. That seems to be the essence of psychohistory. It is a systems approach to creating a system which can influence human systems interconnected at all levels.

I differ from you when it comes to the domain based approaches, and prefer a black box approach. In this approach, all systems with defineable inputs and outputs can be made in the form of system abstractions, and results can be derived for systems in this way, given inputs. Advances made in neural networks make it possible for us to adopt this black box approach, and have a set of input variables which result in a series of outputs which are in no way firmly and atemporally dependent on the input, since neural networks are able to learn.

Cheers,
Fulcrum

@mrkoconnell

The System of Systems approach is definitely very novel and interesting. My knowledge about this is limited to the Wikipedia page, but I have to say that even here, there is the question of "system abstraction". Systems need to be clearly defined for any of their interactions to be understood, and the inputs and outputs arising from one system and the nature of their net transfer functions should be assessed. Once system abstraction is defined, it would be easier for us to have some degree of confidence in our assessments.

As for the question on whether one man's actions can be ignored - they cannot. Contingency planning and mathematical models for sch planning can take care of one aspect of our efforts in controlling the future. However, for reaching higher successes, one needs to go further than contingency planning and infuse determinism into the human race.

I am fascinated by transhumanism, especially after reading Ray Kurzweil's essays on artificial intelligence. I happen to think that transhumanism, especially human-computer interactivity, can afford us this determinism to a greater extent, unless ground breaking research in the study of the human mind happens before the time we formulate these models.

I am not qualified to comment on the existing state of the predictive models either, but am eager to learn about them if anyone has relevant information.

Cheers
Fulcrum

In the last year, I have revised much of my approach to Psychohistory, in particular the systems approach. My first real attempt at modeling Psychohistory used what I referred to as a multi-disciplinary systems approach for which I coined the term the “unified theory of humanity.” The Unified Theory of Humanity was an idealistic attempt to combine ‘all of the sciences’ into one ‘grand’ scheme. Einstein and his “Unified Field Theory” inspired it but the conceptual analogy has run into problems; this is a deprecated concept in my present theoretical framework. Due to significant problems (that being it did not work), I dropped this ‘systems framework’ and went almost entirely to a software engineering approach. The approach relies upon a “solution framework” that models human societies, looking at different parts working together-and you may ask ‘isn’t this a systems approach?’ and the term could be used like this. A system in this sense is more like a network layout where services are connected and provided over a link to users. My problem with a strict approach like this is in development of models, the network type of approach using mostly existing services. I used a solution framework approach because it is concerned more with the development side of a system. Psychohistory needs model design, development, and a clear direction as well. I have borrowed (from software again) an open architecture approach that (hopefully) allows for additional model development over time.

We should place attention on developing a theoretical framework of Psychohistory and this is where most of my effort is going. I think there is plenty of room for the models you suggest (“black box”), for within a framework it has a place. I have heard some really far out ideas recently; super computers simulating billions of individual people for example. Aside from the practical problems, we need to keep in mind good model design. A model is as good as a model does. I have spent some time pondering underlying assumptions and expectations for my models and this has resulted in some changes. One thing funny about models is how easily they disconnect from reality. We need to place models in the painful process of testing and refinement. I have seen several web sites that claim to be “Psychohistory” and found them so conceptually ludicrous as to be painful to read. Psychohistory must be a practical discipline with a definite purpose; not a fantasy of how we might “predict the future” with some quasi-deterministic set of assumptions. I have suggested in another site that we are not even able to verbalize the purpose of Psychohistory and this statement met with a good deal or resistance. This really is our starting point, refining our “mission statement” if you will.

Revisiting a few points:

1. Super computers simulating billions of individuals sounds amazing. As a matter of fact it bis becoming possible to use swarm intelligence techniques in multi variable optimization problems. The technique essentially consists of randomized individuals defined using a class, which have characteristics which are either genetically bred over generations (as in genetic particle swarm optimization) or are communicated to other particles (individuals) by means of a global best value (which stores the characteristic of the "fittest" individual) and also a particle best value (which stores the characteristics of each particle's best values). The "fitness" is decided based on some kind of objective function definition. Its fairly straightforward to implement this for a simple optimization problem for multiple variables, sometimes as many as 30 or 40. With psychohistorical problems, I can imagine the number creeping up to hundreds, thousands and possibly millions of variables. Here comes the paradigm of AI. AI can help us identify design variables since AI can be used in pattern recognition technologies. Indeed the human brain is far more effective than even supercomputers at pattern recognition and not number crunching, at which the human brain is ten million or so times slower than the average PC.

Mathematical models progressing from a swarm intelligence framework seem independent of the variables defined also; the technique is independent of the variables. This makes it applicable in all kinds of areas.

Please see these sites for more information:

www.swarmintelligence.org

en.wikipedia.org . . .

www.particleswarm.info

There are also other non-gradient optimization techniques like Simulated Annealing and Genetic Algorithms, but PSO has proved itself against both these techniques.

2. Mrkoconnell, I would like to learn more about your work on the object oriented approach and also the "grand unified theory of humanity". It sounds sufficiently ambitious to have piqued my interest! IMO the software engineering approach is a sound first approach, but the nature of organization in the model will have to continually upgrade, possibly get upgraded by itself. I propose that the computer itself generate code genetically, using successful bits of code which it can compose further iterations to itself.

3. Mental models. How does the Jungian psychology model (also used in the Kiersey Temperament sorter) work in constructing a mental model? I did some kind of small analysis to determine factors like sociability, intelligence, relative popularity, etc for a small set of individuals using the Jungian model, with normalised values of the four preferences, but didnt make any progress that time since the definitions were themselves vague. I need some literature on psychological prototyping, possibly a set of results of the brain as a neural net and its performance.

The Unified Theory of Humanity is a model framework I no longer use, but it was in my writing of about ten years ago. It works something like this: To model humanity, we use a combination of sciences in a "multi-disciplinary" approach. We use this in a ‘systems engineering’ scenario (where a system in this case is a spacecraft system or something similar). All of the sciences are needed along with project management and engineering. Thus Psychohistory is like a complicated system requiring all of the physical and social sciences as well as engineering and management. However, I no longer use this model. Presently what I am using is based upon analogies with software engineering and so far this seems to be working for me.

Mrkoconnell,

Could you please elaborate on the differences between the software engineering approach and the combination of systemic approaches which embraces the methodologies used in different engineering disciplines? I would like to know the difference between these and perhaps you could also elaborate on the actual software you have developed (if you have) if any. PM me if you would like to.

Thanks
Fulcrum

In discussing models of human societies, it is important (if the goal is to have useful models) to understand the characteristics of models. We may present a 'nice sounding' model and become quite attached to it. When using an "engineering" or "software" approach it is important to recognize that we are using models of analogy. We can say that "software engineering" has certain analogous qualities to human societies, but it is not the same!

I sometimes hear people on some "Pyschohistory" sites discussing things like "gas models" or "Economic Physics" and am bewildered by the amount of hocus-pocus these people are guilty of. I will make this statement, a model is only as good as a model does. In performance qualities such as understanding and prediction, most of these 'fairy-tale' models just don't do well. This is in spite of how nice they may sound.

When I describe a software engineering approach, I use it because the native model deals with various hardware platforms, protocols, and interfaces. The software is a creative process and can easily take the path of imagination and design. In this, I find that software is quite similar to human beliefs. These beliefs often deal with real 'organic' needs as well as imagination and creativety.

In my previous excercise of "System Engineering”, I found that that was no adequate set of tools for understanding human thinking and beliefs, a quite important part of human life. Software, on the other hand, deals with ideas by analogy. I am preparing a book for publication called "The Mythology of Reality-Foundations of Psychohistory" in which my approach to modeling is spelled out.

A symbolic element of psychohistorical analysis must, of necessity, be more complex than normally used in mathematics. Think on the already common levels of abstraction; the number representing a quantity. From there, we get the variable which represents an unknown number. Functions can represent the change in one variable as another changes. Psychohistory requires higher levels than these- namely, the application of many many functions at a time where each is nonstatic, and capable of change, or even further than that. A society which values money more than ethics weights its choices more towards those ends, and its functional sets reflect this. So one symbol must be used to represent a functional unit at the psychohistorical level. Exactly what that is is up for debate.

Your question is significant, even profound. I have contested the views of some over Psychohistory and just what value should be placed in what I refer to as the 'Asimov Orthodoxy.' The first part of this is the 'addiction to prediction.' Many consider prediction to be the primary aspect and I must disagree. It is not the prediction of the future we need, but a way of making the future come out the way we wish. That in itself is quite a task-what do we want to happen? Next is the obsession with Physics models. I have carefully looked at the proposition of using Physics models with respect to human societies, and I don't see much of a connection (see a book called "Critical Mass"). The subtleties of Asimov's book is found in the placement of societies in key locations, not some romantic notion of people behaving like a 'gas-molecule model.' Another, often overlooked, aspect is the ideal of reducing needless human suffering. This is really the whole point of Psychohistory. In creating models, we must not be the slave of an idea, but the master. Models reflecting human societies must understand the behavior of societies. Policies flowing from such models are more likely to succeed than a wishful attachment to models that do not apply well.

the math was always probabilities
1the math was not the problem
it was the data that was the problem
psycho history is alive and well
its just scatterd out their in little pieces
forward foundation and prelude to foundation show in theory
what information is needed
we use it everyday
a good picture is arteries and vanes info in probabilities out
isaac asimov wrote of complex science making it easy to understand
please read the solar system and back may 1972 easy fun read some of the science was cutting edge for the day but it reads like lucky star

population /agriculture=
in #/ in available calories =
calories per person
calories per person/2000=% of rda
%of rda / population = % of possible death through malnutrition
.....
domestic agriculture expressed in calories
labor hours to produce calories
agriculture diveded by labor hours =calories perhour of labor
.....
then energry ....and on and on for each nation state currennt
.....
......
next is past statistics
religion per nation ,,,,,,state amount given or taken in gdp
goverment same ,,,,, in gdp
social conditions ,,,,