Recent reading selections led to comparisons between Herbert and Asimov's most respectively famous science fiction series, Foundation and Dune. The novels are structurally similar. Both books center around a messianic figure whose attempt to save humanity is foiled by stagnant government systems and the past. Both authors use pseudo historical quotes to head each chapter and share similar theories about cultural evolution. But while Foundation first posits a positive concept of psychohistory*, Herbert questions the emotional and moral questions that arise and ultimately decides that prediction** is a trap that in limiting unknowns, limits the imagination.

Half a century later, Wired presents the obsolescence of traditional scientific models/methods (empirical and experimental) in favor of statistical data crunching (made possible by computerization) in The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete, which sounds an awful lot like the beginnings of a psychohistorical thought machine. During a Calculus class at Pasadena City College, a visiting Cal Tech professor proclaimed in a fit of pique that derivatives "could" be used to calculate probabilities in history in order to apply them to acts of prediction about the future. Max Cohen's maniacal study of stock market algorithms in Darren Aronofsky's Pi: Faith in Chaos is just such an exercise. But the face of "God" hidden in the complexity of mathematical social flux reduces Cohen to a lobotomized zombie in the end. Prediction however remains popular aside from Tarot cards and crystal balls. For 2007 and 2008, US News & World Reports names Actuarial Science and Data Miner on their Best Careers list.

In a way, the statistical view of scientific proof is a nod to the relativist form of reality over the viability of absolute universal law.
In any case, moving from the mechanical quantification model of knowledge to the data accretion model, there is a shift from classical scientific Western inquiry of truth finding, or the workings of things, towards experience and recording of occurrences as truth making. The laws of Feng Shui derive from projecting an outcome through observation over a relatively long and documented period of time. Such and such a thing (a beam often falls on the bed beneath it during an earthquake) is observed to be true, so that the truth becomes law (do not sleep beneath a roof beam), which engenders more proof for the original truth. In a traditionalist society like ancient China, such determinism is not a wholly supernatural act but one that over time has become mythologized Today an admonition about sleeping under beams seem more like a mix of city planning then cultural superstition. Nevertheless, such an example hold seeds of self fulfilling prophecy, a method of data accretion that has in a way become culturally "universal truth".

But what does all this have to do with Asimov and Herbert? You need a big computer to assimilate such huge loads of information, and Herbert argues, what bigger computer is there than the human brain? The experiential takes on a spiritual dimension in Dune that is particularly alluring, mostly because it transcends all material aids for thinking. Whatever the allure of prescient ability, the most fascinating aspect of all this is a sense of convergence between diametrically opposed ideologies, a blurring of lines between the cause effect of knowledge and thinking. In dealing with the limits of language, knowledge, memory, time, or faculty, the Asimov/Herbert paradigm show bifurcations between two views of reality (Western and Eastern*** as well as other such oppositions) that are not perhaps as dissimilar as once thought.

*a mathematical analysis of social interaction to extrapolate statistical data in order to build a LPS model (least possible simulation model) which in turn can be used to reveal the probable affect/effects of any given social phenomenon. The goal is to foretell the future and forestall doom.

**psychohistory as carried out to a logical endpoint. by non-computerized means, the intuitive processes of the human mind (such as weighing the various aspects of design problem and coming to a satisfactory if not perfectly ideal solution) expands so that the analytical faculties necessary for calculating infinite quantities (including all permutations of time events) is possible. humans, in herberts conception, are limited from messianic power only by mental faculty and lack of knowledge. To some degree Herbert's psychohistorical prediction depends on an analysis that operates only in subconsciousness and reminds me most of Eastern religious world-views.

***Buddha's take on Creationism.