Foundation by Isaac Asimov, a philosophical discussion

The Foundation book used in a philosophy class.

Foundation Series by Asimov

My daughter headed off to University this September and signed up for that polarizing class of Philosophy. Just like Accounting 101 or Creative Writing for the non-creative, the topic of Philosophy is one of those subjects you either love or hate. No middle ground, and I'm going to stand firm on that statement.

Anyway, I looked over her booklist and cringed at the names. Plato, Socrates, Hercules...all the classics. Those heavily annotated, footnoted, translated, and still impossible to read, writings by toga wearing Greeks. 

BUT, a big but, then I saw a title and author that brought light to my heart - Foundation by Isaac Asimov. WTF? Foundation is a philosophy book?!

Is Foundation a sci-fi book or a philosophy book?

No, no, no. Foundation is not one of those fancy-dancy high browed thinker books. It's a sci-fi story of a galactic empire collapsing and being built up again. There are no deep quotes that can describe the book like, "Men are disturbed not by things but by the principles and notions which they form concerning things" (Epictetus). Nope, it's a book that is actually fun to read (Philosophy is roasted!). Foundation is not something that I would shelve under Philosophy. If anything I would put it under 'Space Opera'.

Am I missing something?

I reread the book with a different mindset. I did my best thinking man pose, put on my ancient Greek philosopher toga, grabbed some wine and grapes, and settled into a public bath with my old paper copy of Foundation.

Holy crap, there were a lot of philosophical questions raised in this book.

One overwhelming idea is about nation/empire cycles. Are we destined to always repeat the same rise and fall of nations? Is appears that Asimov thinks so. Foundation takes place thousands and thousands of years in the future, and we are still doing the boom and bust of nations - just in the future it is on a galactic scale.

This reminds me of another book I read recently: Ray Dalio's best seller - The Changing World Order : Why Nations Succeed and Fail 

Dalio's book explains how nations rise up, build empires, rule the world...then fail. Time and time again from the Romans, through the British Empire, to the United States of today, nations have followed very similar paths. His theory relies on historical data and human psychology.

In the Foundation book Asimov shows us a galactic empire following this rise and fall pattern. The Ray Dalio of the book is named Hari Seldon and he uses the new science of Psychohistory (a mix of psychology and history...see the connection?) to bring everything down to a mathematical equation - and the equation shows a galactic collapse is imminent. Seldon uses this new science to come up with a plan to save humanity from 30,000 years of dark times to rebuild, and cut that rebuilt time to only 1,000 years. 

This brings up that great philosophical discussion on free will and determinism. If we as humans keep repeating this cycle over and over again, do we actually have free will?

According to Dalio's theory and Asimov's Foundation story, we might not have as much free will as we want to believe we have. The future is already marked out for us. Maybe not exact down to the minute dates and times. We can't say exactly when a nation/empire will fail, but we can say that at some point in one hundred years it will. That's just the nature of human beings.

In Foundation Hari Seldon uses his Psychohistory to predict the future. Throughout the book, time and time again, it drives home the point that that the future is predetermined. In fact, some of the ways out of the many crisis points is to do nothing at all. Is this book saying in the grand scheme of things we have no free will, no impact, on the destiny of human kind? 

That's something to discuss in Philosophy class.

Geez, I guess I missed the mark on this book when I read it the first time. I just took it on the surface, as a sci-fi story about rebuilding human civilization in the far distant future, not a book about free will and determinism as a species!