Foundation, Foundation and Empire, Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Although this book would deal with understanding human society through the indeterminacy of human quanta, the specter of psychohistory (and the second foundation) presents a Newtonian ideal by which the observer (second foundation) is able to erase its existence perfectly, “eat its own non-existence” so that we are left with perfect knowledge of the workings of humankind.
I found the journey of reading this to be exhilarating — even though that there is mathematical expression of society, knowledge, unconscious and human zeitgeist as one logical coherency to be a dubious idea. Nonetheless, this aesthetic has long been sought after. In modern times that we can start with Thomas Hobbes, as Phillip Ball does, in Critical Mass and understand that statistics was first developed to hide the inconsistencies of experimentation in physics. So we return back to the Kantian norms of finding the hidden logic of reality, one that is somehow suprasensibly suspended beyond our everyday material reality but governs those relations completely.
There is much to find interesting, despite the conservative nature of the story. Asimov is a very imaginative writer.
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