More Foundation concepts: the Division of Logic and the Church of Science

So I finished reading Asimov's Foundation, and the details have already faded since I closed it about two weeks ago.

I think I kind of get why it's an important book, taking world-building to a new level and elevating the genre of science fiction by a few degrees of respectability. For its relatively low page count, Foundation is big in scope and ideas. But I didn't quite love it.

If you know it only by its reputation, as I did, then you probably don't know much about it at all. Foundation began life as a series of interconnected short stories. The basic premise: it's been foreseen that the Empire is in demise, and a foundation is established to preserve its knowledge. I stand by my initial impressions.

Asimov introduces some terrific concepts: psychohistory and the Encyclopedia Galactica chief among them.

And I love the application of symbolic logic, using it "to prune away all sorts of clogging deadwood that clutters up human language." Upon submitting to symbolic analysis the transcripts of Lord Dorwin's discussions during his diplomatic mission, the Division of Logic

"after two days of steady work, succeeded in eliminating meaningless statements, vague gibberish, useless qualifications — in short, all the goo and dribble — he found he had nothing left. Everything cancelled out."

"Lord Dorwin, gentlemen, in five days of discussion didn't say one damn thing, and said it so you never noticed."

(I wish we could run those analyses on the some of the meetings I'm forced to attend at work.)

And the Church of Science, established by the Foundation in order for the barbarians to more readily accept the science of the Foundation. Hah! Its high priests are in charge of the power plants. This is a wickedly satirical story.

The book reads to me as a cross between The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, for its general tone, humor, and spaciness, and Game of Thrones, for its backroom dealings and back-stabby politics. All of Foundation was narrated to me in my head by the voice of the Guide, giving characters here and there a whiff of Zaphod or Slartibartfast, and adding greatly to my enjoyment.

I should note that the book contains one female character. I was reading some forum or other recently, and someone was criticizing an author for not writing women well and it led to accusations that the author was misogynistic. And so I happened to notice that to that point, I hadn't encountered a woman in Foundation. I don't think Asimov has been accused of these things. However, clearly he is a product of his times. (Possibly there are actually two female characters in Foundation — I can't be sure because my attention foundered toward the end.)

Is my life changed for having read Foundation? No. Am I dying to read the rest of the series? Not particularly. Am I glad to have read Foundation? Sure, but more for its historical significance than for the actual story. I wasn't quite in the perfect headspace for it, but I'll give the rest of the series a chance someday.

Have you read Foundation? How does it rank in your personal sci-fi pantheon?

Check out io9's chapter-by-chapter discussion of Foundation, its strengths and weaknesses and its big ideas.

"The Galaxy is going to pot!"

I'm reading Isaac Asimov's Foundation. Classic of science fiction, blah, blah, epic and political, I never had any interest. Plus its daunting reputation, the bigness of it, a TRILOGY, the titles often all caps, as if it really were the foundation of something.

Well, a friend pressed it on me. And it's so small, Foundation is just over 200 pages. And me between reading plans, and looking to augment my sci-fi education. So here I am.

In all these years, how come nobody ever uttered the words "Encyclopedia Galactica"?

The back cover is all empire and warfare, blah, blah.

Had somebody told me "Encyclopedia Galactica," and explained "foundation" as in "research foundation" to assemble a repository of all human knowledge, I'd've been all over this years ago, even if the project is just a pretense.

We all know that one respect in which the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy scores over the Encyclopedia Galactica is that it has the words "Don't Panic" inscribed in large, friendly letters on the cover. The publishers of Foundation should learn a lesson from this. Every edition of Foundation I've ever seen has the opposite of large, friendly letters on the cover. They usually bear large, imposing letters, self-important, sometimes angry, sometimes mocking, god-like. On the cover of the book I'm actually reading, the title is small, but still unfriendly all caps, overly confident; the gold foil makes it brash. If it looked friendlier, if it soothingly assured me everything was going to be alright, I'd've warmed to it much sooner.

I'm about a third of the way in. To this point, Foundation:

• Brings a whole new level of understanding and humour to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I never knew how much the Guide owed to Foundation — an awful lot, with regard to theme, plot points, and structure, it seems.
• Defines psychohistory as "that branch of mathematics which deals with the reactions of human conglomerates to fixed social and economic stimuli." Which ties in very nicely with my reading of late (neuroeconomics, two-system thinking, black swans, etc.), as well as setting the stage for an infinite improbability drive.
• Takes a piss at academia — indeed, the University structures are "almost ivory in color." Hands-on research is eschewed in favour of the scientific method: book-learning.

Onward!

"The Encyclopedia first," ground out Crast. "We have a mission to fulfil."

"Mission, hell," shouted Hardin. "That might have been true fifty years ago. But this is a new generation."

"That has nothing to do with it," replied Pirenne. "We are scientists."

And Hardin leaped through the opening. "Are you, though? That's a nice hallucination, isn't it? Your bunch here is a perfect example of what's been wrong with the entire Galaxy for thousands of years. What kind of science is it to be stuck out here for centuries classifying the work of scientists of the last millennium? Have you ever thought of working onward, estending their knowledge and improving upon it? No! You're quite happy to stagnate. The whole Galaxy is, and has been for Space knows how long. That's why the Periphery is revolting; that's why communications are breaking down; that's why petty wars are becoming eternal; that's why whole systems are losing atomic power and going back to barbarous techniques of chemical power.

"If you ask me," he cried, "the Galaxy is going to pot!"

No one knows nothing

First, let me dispose of Socrates because I am sick and tired of this pretense that knowing you know nothing is a mark of wisdom.

No one knows nothing. In a matter of days, babies learn to recognize their mothers.

Socrates would agree, of course, and explain that knowledge of trivia is not what he means. He means that in the great abstractions over which human beings debate, one should start without preconceived, unexamined notions, and that he alone knew this. (What an enormously arrogant claim!)

In his discussions of such matters as "What is justice?" or "What is virtue?" he took the attitude that he knew nothing and had to be instructed by others. (This is called "Socratic irony," for Socrates knew very well that he knew a great deal more than the poor souls he was picking on.) By pretending ignorance, Socrates lured others into propounding their views on such abstractions. Socrates then, by a series of ignorant-sounding questions, forced the others into such a mélange of self-contradictions that they would finally break down and admit they didn't know what they were talking about.

It is the mark of the marvelous toleration of the Athenians that they let this continue for decades and that it wasn't till Socrates turned seventy that they broke down and forced him to drink poison.

— from "The Relativity of Wrong," by Isaac Asimov.

This week I'm reading Plato's Euthyphro and Socrates' Defense as part of the coursework for Søren Kierkegaar​d — Subjectivity, Irony and the Crisis of Modernity.

The concept of subjectivity has not been raised in this week's lecture, but deducing from my own subject experience, I'd have to say it pervades pretty much everything. As a reader certainly I've observed that a lot of what I get out of a text depends on what I put into it.

Not just effort to understand, willingness to suspend disbelief, research into historical or biographical background, but simply mood. I can think of a few books that I approached with such seriousness that I failed to appreciate that they were intended to be comic; others that I was lighthearted about should have imbued me with sadness or heaviness. Sometimes it is the fault of the writer, not giving sufficient clues in the opening pages as to the tone in which a book ought to be read, or relying too much on the reader to carry a tone without providing the words to support it. More often than not, it's simply a matter of the wrong book at the wrong time.

And so it is with Socrates that I came with openness, enthusiasm, and humour (thinking all the time: Really? I'm taking a course on Kierkegaard? How ridiculous am I? What the hell?).

Euthyphro in particular I found funny. I picture Socrates smirking, even winking at a hypothetically more-evolved thousands-of-years-hence audience, as he mocks his victim to the point of humiliation, being deliberately obtuse and nitpicking over semantics. Sure, it's in the service of a greater good, establishing a higher truth, but it's not nice, and I wonder if sometimes he goes too far, ignoring other perhaps lesser but still valid truths that emerge along the way (for example, it's clear to me that Euthyphro values the ties that bind society over the ties that bind his family; but this potential tangent is swept away). Certainly he brings nothing positive to the interrogation — he destroys his opponent, but creates nothing in the place of the void he has unmasked.

In short, I agree with Asimov' implied assessment: Socrates is a real jerk.

The laws of humanics

"Human beings have ways of thinking about human beings that we have not." Had Giskard been human, the remark might have been made with regret or envy, but, since he was a robot, it was merely factual.

He went on, "I have tried to gain the knowledge, if not the way of thinking, by reading human history in great detail. Surely somewhere in the long tale of human events, there must be buried the Laws of Humanics that are equivalent to our Three Laws of Robotics."

Daneel said, "Madam Gladia once told me that this hope was an impossible one."

"So that may be, Friend Daneel, for though it seems to me such Laws of Humanics must exist, I cannot find them. Every generalization I try to make, however broad and simple, has its numerous exceptions. Yet if such Laws existed and if I could find them, I could understand human beings better and be more confident that I am obeying the Three Laws in better fashion."

"Since Partner Elijah understood human beings, he must have had some knowledge of the Laws of Humanics."

"Presumably. But this he knew through something that human beings call intuition, a word I don't understand, signifying a concept I know nothing of. Presumably it lies beyond reason, and I have only reason at my command."

— from Robots and Empire, by Isaac Asimov.

Never quite to zero

The Robots of Dawn, by Isaac Asimov, is the third Lije Baley & R.Daneel Olivaw novel (the second that I've read).

Baley is called to the planet Aurora to investigate the "murder" of Jander Parnell, a humaniform robot — and one of only two in existence, the other being Baley's partner Daneel.

More so than The Caves of Steel (which I thoroughly enjoyed), this novel is an extended exercise in logic. Right near the start, in fact, there's a pretty intense discussion regarding whether a robot could be said to be "alive," and whether a robot could then be said to have been "murdered," a victim of roboticide. Generally, one would say a robot is destroyed, its usefulness terminated, and should it in questionable circumstances, the crime would be considered an act of vandalism. Here, the humaniformity of the robot is a factor in taking the case to another level.

The novel is almost all talk, dialogue, in the form of cross-examination and explication, and very little action. Asimov, through the Baley character channels Hercule Poirot, in conducting the investigation generally, and Raymond Smullyan, in negotiating the paths of logic related to the Three Laws of Robotics.

While Smullyan's logic puzzles may make my brain hurt, the type of paradox in which complex instructions given a robot are in contradiction of one or more of the Laws — and sorting out the the relative worth of defying an order versus breaking a Law — could immobilize a robot, or cause it to short-circuit.

Baley said, "And something like this, I take it, was what happened to Jander Parnell. He was faced with a contradiction in terms and his brain burned out?"

"It's what appears to have happened, though that is not as easy to bring about as it would been in Susan Calvin's day. Possibly because of the legend, roboticists have always been careful to make it as difficult as possible for contradictions to arise. As the theory of positronic brains has grown more subtle and as the practice of positronic brain design has grown more intricate, increasingly successful systems have been devised to have all situations that might arise resolve into nonequality, so that some action can always be taken that will be interpreted as obeying the First Law."

"Well, then, you can't burn out a robot's brain. Is that what you're saying? Because if you are, what happened to Jander?"

"It's not what I'm saying. The increasingly successful systems I speak of, are never completely successful. They cannot be. No matter how subtle and intricate a brain might be, there is always some way of setting up a contradiction. That is a fundamental truth of mathematics. It will remain forever impossible to produce a brain so subtle and intricate as to reduce the chance of contradiction to zero. Never quite to zero. However, the systems have been made so close to zero that to bring about a mental freeze-out by setting up a suitable contradiction would require a deep understanding of the particular positronic brain being dealt with — and that would take a clever theoretician."

It's a very entertaining novel and not at all what I expected. It reminds me a little of Stanisław Lem in its simple compelexity, following a set of basic premises to their logical conclusion.

Oh! And! There's robot sex! Or at least, human–robot sexual relations. On a planet where everyone sleeps with everybody else (including fathers and daughters). Which is, in the context of the conditions under which humans colonized the galaxy, all very plausible speculation as to how society and its morals might evolve in the circumstances of a given planet.

Faith in the old human brain

"Humans," said R. Daneel, "have their own peculiar make-up. They are not as reasonable, in many ways, as we robots, since their circuits are not as preplanned. I am told that this, too has its advantages."

The first and only time (till now) I read Isaac Asimov was as a kid, some 30 years ago. I read I, Robot then, and I felt my young brain stretched in exciting ways.

Since then, I learned that Asimov is revered by some as a god, and this intimidated me.

Someday, I thought, I'll get around to The Foundation Trilogy, even though it sounds so big and... foundational. But I have a coworker now egging me on to check off the sci-fi classics, and she's acting as my supplier of sorts. What a surpise to see the trilogy wrapped up in three slim volumes.

But of the handful of Asimov my coworker lay before me, I opted first for The Caves of Steel, based on the reference in a blurb to a "womb-city" and, of course, the cheesy cover art.

I was afraid it would feel dated — the language, the science — but it's highly readable and inventive (some quaint concepts of, for example, data storage are easily forgiven).

The story concerns a murder investigation, which appears to be related to strained human–robot relations.

The most surprising thing about this novel — and I think it's telling that I find it surprising at all — is the sense of optimism Asimov conveys — for science, humanity, the future. (There's a hint of religion in it, a guiding Christian principle, but I'll call it a brand of humanism.)

Baley muttered, "Eight billion people and the uranium running out! What's unlimited about it?"

"What if the uranium does run out. We'll import it. Or we'll discover other nuclear processes. There's no way you can stop mankind, Lije. You've got to be optimistic about it and have faith in the old human brain. Our greatest resource is ingenuity and we'll never run out of that, Lije."