Psychohistory: Can it be Possible?

PsychicTaco115

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Escapiste, this thread deals with the vast future and all of the possible outcomes

Science-fiction writer Issac Asimov first concived of this idea in his "Foundation" series of novels. In short, the psychohistory is quotes as being "the science of human behavior reduced to mathematical equations."

Psychohistory works with the economic/social changes of the times and with the reactions of large groups of people.

So I ask, do you believe that sometime in the future, Psychohistory may become a reality?
 

Grygor

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Not possible, for the same reason accurate weather forecasts more than about a week in advance are impossible - these are complex chaotic systems, wherein small changes in initial conditions can result in major changes in the eventual outcome.

To say nothing of the fact that "psychohistory" deals with the sphere of human action, meaning that its very existence adds information to the system - the net result being that the simple act of making a prediction can change the eventual outcome, aka the self-fulfilling/self-negating prophecy problem. It's the same reason why economic forecasting is not particularly effective.
 

TWRule

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Strings of sociology have already sort of tried moving in that direction, though it is going against current trends in the philosophy of human sciences.

It's a possibility, sure - it'd be a methodological joke though.
 

Hal10k

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Even in the context of the books, psychohistory only worked because there were trillions of people in the galaxy, allowing more room for error in predictions. I don't think we're going to work out a definitive science with only a few billion people.
 

Esotera

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The Butterfly Effect is the main problem, as others have stated. Using weather as an example if you are given the current conditions, it's fairly trivial to predict what the weather will be like tomorrow. If you're onsite, you can predict whether it's going to be raining or sunny just by checking the cloud cover. But when you extend this to a three-week forecast, it becomes impossible to say with any accuracy what the weather is going to be like in one town, due to compounded error. It is possible to do long-term forecasts that will broadly describe what rainfall/temperature are likely to be like, but that's quite a blurry picture.

Basically it's reductionism - condensing a complex idea into a very simple one, and losing its original meaning. Researchers tried it with an African ecosystem back in the 70s/80s, recording what all the animals were eating, how many there were, and tried to model it, and it was a failure because life is a chaotic system. It's exactly the same reason Kurzweil's claim that a human brain can be modelled by 2020 is absolutely ridiculous, he has reduced proteins and other biological components to a bunch of meaningless numbers.
 

Stew Coard

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well one can assume it's possible, but the it would so complicated we would probably have to evolve(metaphorically or literally) to a level previously unimagined
 

Bato

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You can have Human behavior distilled into mathematical equations.
It's been done, it's being done. On a broad scale, at least.
Biological Anthropology is a branch of Anthropology that deals more with the chemistry of the body, rooted more in why our biology produces these certain ways of thought. And it is possible to some small degree predict what MIGHT happen.

But I don't know if we can achieve Psychohistory with it. Though if it is at all possible we are far from it.
I wouldn't strike anything out as impossible because if you ran up to some Roman back in Antiquity explaining what a computer is he would have called you insane saying that such things are impossible.

Anyway, Ethics gets weird with math. [http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2624#comic]
 

SciFi Maniac

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(disclaimer: I only read the first two books in the series so i don't know if what I'm about to say has already been answered.)
The problem I had with Psychohistory in the books is that it doesn't take into account individual actions. I understand that predicting the actions of a large group is (relatively)simple, but what if one nut in a position of power decides to wreck crap up for their own amusment. Would Psychohistory foresee Nero burning down half of Rome?
Would it have predicted Stalin beating the snot out of every political rival within arm's reach? Would it have predicted Atilla the Hun's random untimely death?
 

SciFi Maniac

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I just think that some lunatic with no motive and no rationality could throw it all off...Still, awesome books though.
 

Kahunaburger

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No. Why?

A. As mentioned, a single human is to our knowledge a pretty irreducibly complex system. Seven billion are even more complex.

B. What happens in human society is very much dependent on technological advances. This century would look very different if we hadn't split the atom or designed the computer. So unless psychohistory can predict, with perfect accuracy, what things that we don't even know exist yet we will discover, not gonna happen.

EDIT: That said, Isaac Asimov is a bau5.
 

Evilpigeon

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Theoretically possible, I'm pretty convinced that the universe is deterministic so therefore it'd be possible to accurately predict the course of history given enough information. Highly unlikely that we'll be able to do something like this, the level of technology required to do so would be unimaginably complex however.
 

Spectral Dragon

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Evilpigeon said:
Theoretically possible, I'm pretty convinced that the universe is deterministic so therefore it'd be possible to accurately predict the course of history given enough information. Highly unlikely that we'll be able to do something like this, the level of technology required to do so would be unimaginably complex however.
This is a good summary - it's POSSIBLE, but I don't think it would be even CLOSE to useful within a millenium. For starters, we can't devote the amount of technology needed for that prediction, and we still don't have enough people to form a solid pool to look at. Though it'll definitely be applied within a century on some level. But like all phenomenon, given enough prior information, we can crank out a prediction. Though like the weather, it becomes more difficult the more variables are available.
 

Apollo45

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Grygor said:
Not possible, for the same reason accurate weather forecasts more than about a week in advance are impossible - these are complex chaotic systems, wherein small changes in initial conditions can result in major changes in the eventual outcome.

To say nothing of the fact that "psychohistory" deals with the sphere of human action, meaning that its very existence adds information to the system - the net result being that the simple act of making a prediction can change the eventual outcome, aka the self-fulfilling/self-negating prophecy problem. It's the same reason why economic forecasting is not particularly effective.
SciFi Maniac said:
(disclaimer: I only read the first two books in the series so i don't know if what I'm about to say has already been answered.)
The problem I had with Psychohistory in the books is that it doesn't take into account individual actions. I understand that predicting the actions of a large group is (relatively)simple, but what if one nut in a position of power decides to wreck crap up for their own amusment. Would Psychohistory foresee Nero burning down half of Rome?
Would it have predicted Stalin beating the snot out of every political rival within arm's reach? Would it have predicted Atilla the Hun's random untimely death?
To the first one, this. Kinda. To the second one, read the rest of them because they're awesome.

Psychohistory by its nature gets more and more inaccurate the further away from the time of... erm... prediction I suppose. There's a reason Foundation lasted as long as it did, and it's because there was a second Foundation that had developed psychohistory into something of an art form that was helping to guide events in the galaxy.
 

Owyn_Merrilin

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Apollo45 said:
Grygor said:
Not possible, for the same reason accurate weather forecasts more than about a week in advance are impossible - these are complex chaotic systems, wherein small changes in initial conditions can result in major changes in the eventual outcome.

To say nothing of the fact that "psychohistory" deals with the sphere of human action, meaning that its very existence adds information to the system - the net result being that the simple act of making a prediction can change the eventual outcome, aka the self-fulfilling/self-negating prophecy problem. It's the same reason why economic forecasting is not particularly effective.
SciFi Maniac said:
(disclaimer: I only read the first two books in the series so i don't know if what I'm about to say has already been answered.)
The problem I had with Psychohistory in the books is that it doesn't take into account individual actions. I understand that predicting the actions of a large group is (relatively)simple, but what if one nut in a position of power decides to wreck crap up for their own amusment. Would Psychohistory foresee Nero burning down half of Rome?
Would it have predicted Stalin beating the snot out of every political rival within arm's reach? Would it have predicted Atilla the Hun's random untimely death?
To the first one, this. Kinda. To the second one, read the rest of them because they're awesome.

Psychohistory by its nature gets more and more inaccurate the further away from the time of... erm... prediction I suppose. There's a reason Foundation lasted as long as it did, and it's because there was a second Foundation that had developed psychohistory into something of an art form that was helping to guide events in the galaxy.
Further spoilers That didn't stop things from going /way/ off course in the third book, though, largely due to the actions of one nut in a position of power, as SciFi Maniac put it. I kind of stopped reading after the third one. I read the fourth one and part of the fifth one, but it was like Dune 4-6 -- lacking pretty much everything I liked about books 1-3.
 

Twilight_guy

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No. Mostly because in order for that to work you have to be able to have a universe where everything is predictable. Every particle must be predictable first in order for every person to be predictable. The [a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle"]Uncertainty principle[/a] tells us that this is not so. Since the micro-universe is uncertain we can surmise that since parts of our behavior are determined by this universe (brain chemistry and such), we are unpredictable, at least some extent. Even a small amount of uncertainty when multiplied over a huge system like the entire world for a period of time such as weeks or months would be off the mark due to this uncertainty.
 

thethird0611

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There is some backing to this, but its short term, not really long term.

A few reasons why and why not this would be possible - (Actually study over this that ive done in college in the school of Psychology)

Neuro - This can actually be done already, but in a very small scale. We can hook you up in a machine that reads your brain waves, give you two buttons, and tell you to press one randomly. We can predict it before you choose it. Our brains are wired a certain way where things can be predicted and coerced. We know that the brain make up of the parents can help form the brain make up of their children (physically). The only thing is, brain make-up only influences us toward a certain decision.

Social - Easiest way to explain this is that if we can figure out where pressure on an individual is coming from, we can predict how they will act. The only thing is, we are social pressured daily into different things. So there is that always changing factor.

Conditioning - Ill make this short. We have to know everything about a person to know be able to predict the reinforcement/extinction of anything that they would be conditioned into.

So short term, yes. Long term... Not so much. Unless we became all the same person, it cant happen, because of just how complex we are between each other.

Hope this all came out correctly.
 

Imthatguy

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Yes sir my scientists[1] have been investigating such algorithms to succesfully further the cause of the Injustice League.

[1]http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_HvktAQiCOI0/SfCquxUUI9I/AAAAAAAAAqw/ia384zdyCDQ/s400/Darwin1.jpg

OT: I Don't think so since humans can be extremely unpredictable and that unpredictability, and the potential for that unpredictability to influence events, is only grow as the technological revolution continues.
 

randomsix

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Part of the problem is that the existence of an algorithm that predicts human behavior will change that behavior, if it becomes known. I would imagine it would be incredibly difficult to create a model which takes its own existence into account, almost to the order of trying to create a set which contains itself.