Monday, January 02, 2017

Excerpt from Web Dialogue on Psychohistory.





Excerpt from Web Dialogue on 'Psychohistorical Dialectic'.







Dear Readers,


I have excerpted, below, my response to a recent blog-entry, by another blogger, regarding Asimovian Psychohistory.

Enjoy!


Regards,

Miguel







Blog-Entry:  See -- https://skullsinthestars.com/2016/12/26/isaac-asimovs-foundation-trilogy/#comment-92358


My Response:  There is an ancient name for the pattern that constitutes the trilogy within Asimov’s eventual ‘heptalogy’, and that you note as follows — “To summarize the Foundation series in another manner: each sequel challenges the premise of the previous book, forcing the reader to challenge the assumptions that he or she has developed.”

Going back at least to Socrates and Plato, and, perhaps, to Zeno, that name is “dialectic”.

The ‘self-reflexivity’ essence of dialectic also applies to the nested nature of Asimov’s relationship to — and USE of — “psychohistory”, that you also note, as follows: “In Asimov’s work, psychohistory provides the ability to predict the behaviors of large groups of people as a whole and even manipulate those behaviors. I swear that Asimov applies this idea to his own readers in Foundation and Empire!”.

A group calling itself ‘Foundation Encyclopedia Dialectica’ has endeavored to bring Asimov’s insights, expressed via his fictional Foundation history, into actuality.

They have developed a new mathematics — whose core is a CONTRA-Boolean Arithmetic and Algebra — and applied it to model the history of humanity on Earth, via seven ‘psychohistorical-dialectical meta-equations’, including separate ‘meta-models’ describing (1) the [psycho]history of the progression of the dominance of the forms of human ideology\knowledge, from Mythopoeia, then to Religion, and then to Philosophy, then on to Science, and on to Psychohistory itself, (2) the [psycho]history of human social formation(s), (3) the [psycho]history of human social RELATIONS of human-societal self-reproduction, and (4) the [psycho]history of human social FORCES of human-societal self-reproduction.

Using this new mathematics of ‘psychohistorical dialectics’, they have ‘pre-constructed’, symbolically, the institutional and functional structure of a successor social system to that of the present, including deriving draft constitutional amendment and statutory undergirding for that successor system, plus a plan to foreshorten the ‘New Dark Age’ that that present system impends, versus the ‘Global Renaissance’ that it also potentiates.

For more about this developing story, see http://www.dialectics.org.
























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