Annotation.

The article is devoted to the interpretation of the term “modelling,” which has a long tradition in the development of computer applications in historical research. Thus, the international conference of the History and Computing Association, held in Moscow in 1996, chose modeling as its main topic. The author notes that a special role in the development of this concept belongs to Willard McCarthy, who created the understanding that modeling is the central point of all attempts to use information technology in the humanities in general. The author of the article avoids the generality of “digital humanities” and limits the consideration of the use of information technologies only to historical studies of an analytical nature. The article discusses priority approaches to modeling in history, including methodological aspects of modeling, models as implementations of computational algorithms, models as computer devices, text models, models of meaning, models for computerized historical research. For the first time, all proven modeling approaches in history are discussed. The author notes that the term "modeling" is now very prominent, but is still not entirely clear - McCarthy's original concept may not yet be the clearest definition of modeling as a prerequisite for the application of computer methods in the humanities.

10.7256/2585-7797.2017.3.24731

Date sent to the editor:

15-11-2017

Keywords:

Information technologies, computing, simulation, marking, quantification, digital humanities, textual content, semantic technologies, models of meaning, modeling

“Modelling” is a term that has a long tradition in the development of computer applications in the historical studies. Leaving aside the appearance of the terms in individual papers, one of the first volumes produced by the “workshops” of the international Association for History and Computing was dedicated to it, and the international conference of the Association in Moscow in 1996 had “modelling” as its conference theme.

In the wider interdisciplinary domain of applications of information technology to the Humanities it appears prominently first in the very visible Companion to Digital Humanities of 2004, in the chapter written by Willard McCarty, and the same author established the importance of the term in the following year with his highly influential Humanities Computing. Indeed he created the implicit and explicit understanding in the meantime, that “modeling” is at the heart of all attempts to employ information technology at any but the most trivial levels in the Humanities in general. As is frequently the case with things on which an implicit consensus has been established, that made the term modeling very prominent, but not necessarily very clear -the original concept of McCarty may still be the clearest definition of modeling as a prerequisite for computational methods in the Humanities, despite its ubiquity in recent literature.

We would like in the following to avoid the generality of the “Digital Humanities”, which are probably too vague as term of reference, and restrict ourselves to the application of information technology to historical studies - and restrict ourselves even more, by considering only those which claim analytical implications. For this domain we would like to differentiate between understandings of the term “model” as they have been used throughout the development of history and computing during the last few decades.

I. The epistemic ubiquity of models

The type of historical research which has always been most suspect for traditional, historians has doubtlessly been Cliometrics, the application of methods derived from the canon of the economic sciences towards the past. It is inseparably connected to Robert William Fogel, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. As one of the most visible protagonists of Cliometrics he engaged in a discussion in the eighties with one of the most outspoken critics of all attempts to open historical research for interdisciplinary approaches, especially approaches involving quantitative methods, Geoffrey R. Elton. This resulted in a book confronting their methodological viewpoints, which contains the following quote from Elton, attacking Fogel:

Models do dictate the terms of reference, define the parameters, direct the research, and thus are very liable to pervert the search for empirical evidence by making it selective. ... One would feel happier if those models were derived from a study of the evidence and not borrowed from supposedly scientific work in the social sciences - if, that is, historical method were allowed to control the borrowing.

The interesting thing in this quotation is not the unsurprising discovery, that Elton dislikes economic models, but that he indeed is willing to accept the need for models in principle; albeit only such he considers constructed according to his understanding of historical methodology.

We do not have the space to follow this decidedly non-quantitative and not formalized understanding of modeling throughout the methodological literature of historical research - though we cannot avoid to point to the Max Webers's ideal type -idealypus - boldly claiming a sociologist for history who wrote his doctoral thesis onThe History of Commercial Partnerships in the Middle Ages and his Habilitation on Roman Agrarian History and its Significance for Public and Private Law.

We feel encouraged to skip proving the statement, that modeling, in one form or the other, is deeply embedded into historical analysis, as we recognize that linguists who are not bogged down into syntax, but focus on semantics, have claimed, thatall our thinking is enabled by the capability to understand metaphors, which are the most lightweight type of model, or the statement of cognitive science, thatall our cognitive abilities rest on the fundamental capability to connect separate conceptual spaces, making sense of one by interpreting it in light of the other.

As soon as we dig into such broad fields as cognitive science, we are of course relatively far away from the practical needs of quantitative or any kind of formal analysis. To move back to it: one of the earliest pioneers of computer applications in archaeology, Jean-Claude Gardin, describes the impact of the requirements for the application of any kind of computer application to the Humanities as follows:

The reproduction of certain types of reasoning on the computer imposes a preliminary analysis of mental processes in terms and at a level of precision which is rarely encountered in the Humanities. It often results in cruel discoveries as to the credibility of theories or ,constructions" which are the products of such reasoning .. .

And some of his later work could be summarized as claiming that the point of computer applications in archeology is not so much the resulting analysis, but the more precise formulation of the categories on which this analysis rests. My summary of the arguments in Jean Claude Gardin: Le Calcul et la Raison, Paris, 1991.

As a first intermediate summary:

(1) There is good reason to assume that we cannot meaningfully understand reality, past or present, if we do not have some conceptual notion of how individual phenomena probably interact, a conceptual model.

(2) Any attempt to apply computer methods to help in that process requires a precision, which goes beyond the kind of model we permanently apply unconsciously.

II. Models as computational trivia

What all courses in statistics and programming have in common, is that the notion of a “variable” turns up sometime during the very first lecture or chapter. Defining your variables can easily be seen as the acquisition of the additional precision required from a model fit for computational purposes, beyond the conceptual one, as diagnosed in the previous paragraph.

Indeed, most historians (or, indeed, humanists) who apply a statistical procedure or a computational technique for the first time, get so intrigued by the requirement to define their variables that the resulting set of them is quite frequently given a prominent place in conference papers of researchers new to the field. In the eighties and nineties it is almost impossible, to open the proceedings of a conference without looking at the schema of the database employed by a project or the variables used for it. Similarly, from the nineties onwards, there are very few proceedings where one does not find examples of the markup schemes used in a project. We are not changing the subject here: the decision to mark up a specific property - a topographical name, for instance - is exactly the same as the decision to define a variable in a statistical data set for the purpose of examining the geographical dimension of a historical phenomenon.

And many of the authors of both, data base tables in the eighties, markup schemes more recently, will claim that the set of tables for their data base or the markup scheme of their collection of texts, represents the “model” they use in them study. This is, of course a misunderstanding. When we look at phenomena of social history, the “model” we try to implement by the variable “occupation”, is not the set of terms allowed in a controlled vocabulary, but the abstract dimension, for which we consider an occupation to be an indicator. The “model” which leads to the definition of a variable “occupation” is represented by the decision of the researcher between a concept of the society beingeither governed by strata or classes or the abstract categories of another theory of societal interactions. Whether the variable used for that purpose is a field of twenty characters or a code number is a mainly technical decision; this does not constitute the increase of precision required by the application of computational technologies. Similar to the question, whether you encode two different characteristics of the portion of a text by two different XML tags, or by two attributes of the same tag, is independent of the reason why you want to indicate the presence of the textual property represented by these two characteristics in the first place.

Well … The decision to encode an occupation by a numerical code rather than a character string, may of course be an indication, whether you assume to know already at the the study of the study, which categories you will encounter when you examine a historical source or whether you decide to postpone the assignment of a term to an abstract category to a later stage of your analysis, when you know a bit more about the terms which actually occur. The decision to encode a textual property by an attribute of a general tag is a decision for a solution, which makes the introduction of additional characteristics easier; the decision to use different tags effectively represents a claim that you know all relevant characteristics which will appear before you start.

Or, to summarize:

(3) Schemes of variables and markup implement a conceptual model, they are no model.

(4) Technical details of the definition of a variable or a markup scheme nevertheless depend on conceptual assumptions.

III. Models as computational devices

A set of variables is no model, but it may implement it. The consistency of this implementation is reflected by the possibilities a model opens up.

In social demography / history of the family, for example, you can usually at leastdescribe a phenomenon, like the influence of a position in the social system upon the age of marriage. Youmay be able to test hypotheses about this influence, if the derivation of age from the sources is sufficiently consistent, that you can be sure that age differences are not only statistically significant, but beyond the numerical fuzziness created by the habit of rounding ages in demographically relevant sources right up to the end of the 19th century. Test these hypotheses, that is, by the usual statistical methods based on probability theory and the notion of the significance of a result derived from it.

There is of course a long tradition of tests going well beyond that: Already in 1978 Kenneth Wachter, Eugene Hammel and Peter Laslett published the results of a micro simulation, in which they simulated the demographic developments in historical communities and compared the frequency of family types predicted against the empirically observed occurrence of these types. The difference in scope between the basic testing of isolated hypotheses and the testing of a complete model by a simulation can scarcely be overestimated. Nevertheless, one has to observe, that the number of examples of such studies is quite small. And those that exist have made little impact: While t he world we have lost justified the existence of the Cambridge group as a center of family history and demography for decades, the simulation study we mentioned was not even noticed much in the family history community.

This is somewhat frustrating from a computer science sense, as only in a simulation a “model”, as a consistent test of assumptions about theinteraction of the set of variables representing each observation, gets sufficient computational substance to observe the dynamics of a development. Data models which allow one to study a snapshot of a historical development are necessary to do anything with information technology, but they just model a static view, or a series of static views, not a dynamic development or process.

One of the reasons, that the microsimulations of 1978 never received the visibility of the presentation of snapshots of a changing system, has of course been, that to understand them required the willingness to engage in a rather challenging methodological discussion of quantitative results. It is interesting, that more recently multimedia simulations which test intuitive assumptions have enjoyed much greater visibility: The best known example for this is still the Virtual St. Paul"s Cathedral Project [ https://vpcp.chass.ncsu.edu/ - accessible September 12th 2017 ] which uses a combination of a visual “model” of the (pre-1666) St. Paul"s Cathedral and an acoustic model of the effects of its geometry upon a sermon preached in the context of environmental noise, to recreate a soundscape of a historically significant event.

The concept of a “model” is more complicated here as it looks at first. Specifically as two models are combined, which are quite different. On the one hand, we have a “model” as a set of assumptions about the acoustic results of an environment with, among others: echo effects upon the voice of a speaker; the distribution of noise in such an environment created by large groups of people listening, but not being completely quiet; the effect of other environmental sources of sound. This is a strictly dynamic model, which implements assumptions about the interaction of variables depicting a process. Here a verification of previous assumptions is at least partially possible. If speakers cannot be heard by the perceived audience, according to our knowledge of acoustics, the reasons for their influence upon such an audience must be different from the rhetorical brilliance ascribed to them.

On the other hand, there is a “model” in the project, which derives a 3D projection of the geometry of a building. This “model”, however is in no way the model of a process, but simply a geometrical drawing, covered by various 2D textures. Unlike the acoustic model, it doesnot generate a result from a set of assumptions about the way in which the object has been created but simply displays a graphic. 3D models, which could compare the results of a simulation of a building process, reflecting contemporary technology or assumptions of architectural intend, are still far off. So the fact that you can show an elaborate 3D model of a vanished building isno proof that contemporary building techniques were able to build it.

All of which we have mentioned because:

(5) Models may simply be understood as a framework for the process, by which part of the reality is depicted in the digital sphere: a 3D image on the screen just renders a (possibly only hypothetical) geometrical description.

(6) Closely related models may, however, also be seen as the basis of a dynamic process, which progresses from a well understood starting condition and delivers a prediction of a result, the effect of which can be compared with the assumptions of previous interpretations.

IV. Models of text

As we mentioned in the introduction, the extremely high visibility of the term “modeling” enjoys currently in the interdisciplinary discussions comes mainly from the Digital Humanities, predominantly connected to philological studies. Indeed, McCarty's diagram showing the stages of modeling between a Humanities question and the support for its solution by computer science starts from a “cultural artefact (poem, painting &c)” and leads via the “artefact as system of discrete components and relations ” to the “machine as an operational model of the system”.

This is an important observation, as it may indicate a difference between what modeling means to a historian as opposed to modeling following McCarty. For a historian, at least in the definition of history employed by the author, a “cultural artefact” is not studied as a system but as an indication of the state of the societal or cultural system which produced it. McCarty would probably protest against that interpretation of his intentions, as his scope of modeling certainly is much wider and considers also the conceptual models employed by a discipline used for the interpretation of information derived from artefacts. But that it is so easy to understand a hierarchy of models starting with an artefact and arriving at a model of the “system” represented by the variables describing that artefact, is probably the reason, why the bulk of the current discussion in the Digital Humanities finds it extremely difficult to differentiate between modeling and encoding: indeed, many discussions about modeling in the Digital Humanities lead directly into the rules of how to apply the encoding instructions of the Text Encoding Initiative, which is valuable for many things, but has so far no recognizable underlying model of what constitutes a text, which would be independent of the description of the tags one might embed into it [ I notice with interest, that the energetic defense of the TEI against all misrepresentations most recently presented by James C. Cummings at the DH2017 conference, stillnot claim, that it has an underlying abstract model: James C. Cummings: “A World of Difference.” Myths and Misconceptions about the TEI”, in: Digital Humanities 2017. Conference abstracts, pp. 208-210, https://dh2017.adho.org/abstracts/DH2017-abstracts.pdf accessible Sept. 12th, 2017].

This reflects a tradition which philological studies certainly had for a long time. Whether they still do, depends on the representative of these disciplines you talk to, some of them arguing emphatically that it is a thing of the past: the focus on the canon of the great masterworks of literature. The more you subscribe to the notion, that a literary artefact is unique, the more obvious it is, that a model of that artefact must emphasize the uniqueness of this specific one. Only if you are interested in that literary artefact as the result of an intellectual climate - or indeed, process within it - in a specific stage of development, there can be an interest in a model which goes beyond the individual item. This was described already in the early nineties: Jerome McGann in his influentialRadiant Textuality mentions, that the great skepticism of literary scholars against the notion of an encoding standard of any type was derived from their understanding, that it was the very definition of a literary work that made it different from any other.

The discussion about the encoding of texts as a pre-requisite for their analysis, or at least processing by computers, has therefore been focusing mainly on the most appropriate way of preparing an individual text for such processing. Which in the loose categorization of models we have derived so far, would definitely be headed under “models as computational trivia”. A very interesting development beyond that, when one looks at the epistemological effects of information technology within philology, is the focus on “distant reading”, which arose during recent years.

Summarizing a school of research within seven lines is always dangerous. The following paragraph is my interpretation, not necessarily that of one of the representatives of “distant reading” as a currently highly visible trend in the Digital Humanities.

You can appreciate and analyze a work of literature as a unique item. To understand it better, you may look at other literary items secondarily, be the other contemporary literary creations or precursors or successors in a tradition. Literary studies so far are described by that. On the other hand, you can try to get a feeling for what is common in a large body - thousands or tens of thousands of texts - of literature as the result of a process responsible for their production and use that understanding to interpret the position of an individual literary item. The latter is my attempt at defining “distant reading”.

“Distant reading” as such is only possible with the help of information technology; to make it possible, you have to have thousands or tens of thousands of texts available in machine readable form - and there is no way to get trends from them, unless you apply quantitative and statistical summaries of the textual features in those millions of pages.

“Distant reading” therefore starts with the statement, that traditional literary studies are actually ignoring most of the existing literature. As here the general concepts, beyond the individual item, are of primary concern, it is not really astonishing, that the author who discovered distant reading as a concept is also the author who produced so far the most consistent attempt at models oftextual content beyond the individual text.

Whether out of this more recent development, a more general abstract model oftexts arises, which is as close to the implementation of individual technical solutions as the TEI, remains to be seen. From the point of view of quantitative methods it is so far a bit disconcerting, that there is a veritable flood of studies which currently try to implement distant reading primarily by various visualizations. Disconcerting, as one should remember, that the once famous titleHow to Lie with Statistics did strictly speaking not treat statistical methods at all, but only the ways, how to visualize the results produced by them. On a more abstract level, that the current visualizations are usually not grounded in probability theory is no real consolidation either, as the various tools are based on idiosyncratic heuristics and are not method invariant. That the huge majority of end-user visualizers seems to be ignorant of the problem of method invariance does not really improve the situation.

Historians - or some at least - actually have been aware of the problem, that the sources they consulted are only the tip of the iceberg: Theodore Zeldin's monumental history of France between 1848 and 1945 consisted of 2000 pages, in which he went through numerous strands of French history, in politics, society, education and many more. In all of these he described the traditional view and then did show in some detail, that this view was based on an extremely tiny (and presumably highly biased) description of the existing sources. Unfortunately at his time information technology was simply not up to an attempt at “distant history.” Such an attempt - minus the zeal for questionable visualizations - would be a major hope for historical research.

Summarizing:

(7) As textual scholars have so far focused on the uniqueness of texts, an abstract model of text beyond rather trivial considerations of processing does not exist.

(8) Understanding that information technology allows us to do away with constraints of textual canons, may help us to get such models.

V. Models of Meaning

The Semantic Web is one of the greatest promises of information technology. It describes a world, where information in the internet is seamlessly integrated on the fly, all existing sources of information automatically and dynamically referencing each other. And then, maybe ithas been one of the greatest promises. Of the various layers of technologies, which were supposed to realize it, the first four - Unicode + URIs; XML + xmlschema; RDF + rdfschema; ontologies - have been operative within four or five years after the seminal paper in 2001. Layer five - logic - exists in academic papers and layers six and seven - proof; trust - are only marginally less shadowy now than seventeen years ago.

This seems to be a harsh statement. When one looks at the program of recent conferences in all branches of history and the Humanities, the number of papers on various semantic technologies and derived activities - linked open data, most prominently - abounds. Ontologies for many domains of knowledge exist and continue to be developed further. Nevertheless, the wider visions of 2001 look only slightly less visionary today. But maybe we should ignore the vision and concentrate on the question of why the semantic technologies as such are so obviously popular with Humanities scholars and only later come back to what restrictions the less broadly broader view may impose on their further development within history and the Humanities .

The most prominent achievement of the technologies semantic within the Humanities is certainly the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM) [ http://www.cidoc-crm.org/versions-of-the-cidoc-crm accessible Sept. 12th 2017. No authors are given, as the authors of the current version, which is not directly addressable, change over time], which arose in the cultural heritage domain, as an international standard for the controlled exchange of cultural heritage information. More prosaically: as a possibility to connect information contained in the various types of catalogs for libraries, archives and museums. It has in the meantime been extended well beyond the originally addressed users and is now also used to encode “knowledge bases”, which are only loosely connected to the original finding aids of the individual institutions, say structured biographies of persons who can be found as authors in the catalog entry for a book, or an archival document, or as artist of a piece in a museum - or as a person mentioned in the text of a book, scanned and converted by OCR into a full text available for analysis. These descriptions are organized in a way promising that as soon as the biography of an author is changed in one of these biographical knowledge bases, all the catalogs (or other knowledge bases) which refer to this person can immediately use the more complete information.

A service which should be available to everyone who knows how to address the individual ontologies - i.e., catalogs and supporting knowledge bases. Everybody - that is, also the individual researcher, who wants to let his or her private data base look for information on objects and persons appearing as part of a research project, without the necessity to look for the individual reference object explicitly. As a promise: whensoever I enter a new person into my data base, the software administering it will look worldwide, what information is known about this person.

The enthusiasm for this approach and the undoubted success it has achieved within larger information systems of the cultural heritage domain (much more rarely in private data bases, so far), is rooted in the conceptual model underlying the different ontologies. That the CRM is by far the most important one for history and the Humanities is related to an extremely intelligent basic decision: while the definition of what constitutes the basic unit of any kind of dictionary or catalog can be widely variant, the CRM simply assumes that it orders “somethings” which have existed in time and been involved in different events over the period of their existence.

This extremely simple model of a “something”, which has a history, has proven astonishingly flexible and allows indeed for very successful lookup services.

We have mentioned initially however, that the original vision of the semantic web is stuck since some time; stuck actually at exactly the level, where the undoubted successes of the CRM are happening: the layer, where the semantic information ordered in the form of ontologies shall be used by higher order services for inferences.

The problem here, at least in the opinion of this author, is a simple, but subtle one. An ontology is a model describing some fragment of reality with the help of categories (in the case of the CRM: “classes” and “properties”) which can be assigned values. I.e., they are variables from a computational point of view. And, as we have observed in section II above, the values ​​of a variable can take, reflect a conceptual model of the phenomenon described. So an ontology - even one as powerful as the CRM is undoubtedly - describes relationships between instances of variables, which are meaningful only within the semantics of the person or process selecting the values ​​of these variables.

In the case of the semantic technologies, this problem is theoretically solved - as the value assigned to a class or property can itself be a reference to another ontology. So, if all social historians agree upon one conceptual model of the societal system reflected in occupational terms, the semantic technologies provide a way, to implement that model. If they do not agree, the two ontologies cannot be interconnected correctly, however. Or rather: with an effort only, which so far has proven prohibitive.

In the world at large, this is probably the reason why the “semantic web” as such is stuck. How large the scope of necessary semantic agreement between historians is to arrive at true integration remains to be seen.

Most important:

(9) The semantic technologies, most notably the part of them connected to the creation of ontologies, provide a model for the representation of semantics interconnective at the technical level.

(10) In practical implementation, ontologies provide this technical interconnectivity only at for categories at a relatively high level, while the values ​​of the technically precisely modeled categories rather soon are the ones, which reflect an often only implicit conceptual, not a precise and explicit technical , model.

VI. Models for computer supported historical research

Many of the types of “models” - or maybe, more loosely: the usages of the term “models” - which occur and have occurred in the last few decades of applying information technologies to the Humanities in general and historical research in particular, are very close parallels to problems in information technology in general. In the last section we already mentioned, that the problem that inconsistencies between idiosyncratic semantic descriptions in an ontology have a tendency to be pushed down under several conceptually clean and unambiguous layers of surface categories. This is the more problematic, the wider the scope - which explains why what may be promising in therelatively narrow domain of history or the Humanities may be hopeless in the still-not-semantic web.

I would not want to close however, without pointing to a topic which over the years has interested me seemingly more than most other people: the question, whether there are some properties of information in historical research, which are different from information as processed in information technology more generally. Some of that can become quite abstract and possibly look esoteric at first glance. So let me restrict myself to a rather small, seemingly trivial example.

Time. In the first newsletter, with which I started my career in 1979, I described the need to implement solutions in historical data bases to handle temporal information - calendar data - differently than in contemporary data bases. Historical sources contain dates in strange formats - quoting the feast of a saint, rather than the day of a month; in many sources dates have to be modified when used in computations - say in sources mixing Julian and Gregorian dates; virtually all historical data bases contain time spans - June 15th - July 10th 1870; may disciplines use epochs - second half of 16th century. In 1979 I proposed a technical solution for this within the software I was working upon.

Since than I have listened to and read papers describing solutions to subsets and supersets of the same problems innumerable times, usually by authors who were not even aware that others had been working on these problems before.

This endless reinvention of a wheel which could be rolling smoothly since a long time can be stopped only, if we arrive at a situation, where the technical model for the concept of time implemented in computer technology - “an integer offset from a day zero” - is modified to allow the kind of temporal formats and queries, which historical disciplines need. And this model has to be hidden at the same low level in the technology stack, as the current one is. Only then can historians use the concept of time necessary for them as easily, as time for current purposes can be used in computer systems today.

As mentioned, this is an intentionally trivial example for a problem which can become quite fundamental: how far is the model of information underlying current information technology appropriate for handling information as handled in historical studies?

(11) Information technology today is built upon a model of the information to be processed, which is derived from engineering and the hard sciences.

(12) Only if we manage to replace or extend it by a more general model also reflecting the requirements from information as handled by the Humanities in general and history in particular, will we progress beyond existing limits.

VII. Summary

“Modelling” is a term which has enjoyed great popularity in the discussions of all applications of information technology during the last decade, which has not necessarily contributed to the clarity of its meaning. The various ways in which we have proposed to use it in the sections above can be seen as an attempt at clarification. They could also be seen as an attempt to find a red line guiding through the development of the field during those decades.

That conceptual models are a prerequisite for thinking about the past cannot really be doubted by most schools of thinking in historical methodology. The difference between historians using computational tools for analytical purposes and such who don’t is that the former are forced to use a greater precision in the variables in which they implement their models than the latter may bethe major difference between the approaches.

While most sets of variables used in historical research so far implement models, which allow only to study relationships within a snapshot of an historical process described by these models, simulation uses models to test not a snapshot, but a conceptual model of the process producing that snapshot Such models are more difficult to implement, though they have existed for a long time. That they are difficult to implement, may not be the major reason for their scarcity, however: if they are difficult to implement, to make them appreciated by most audiences is even more difficult. This may change radically, when we use such models in a way where they create results to be communicated by multi-media.

Even newspapers can scare modern people. Someone discovers in the news the possibility of the planet turning into a concentration camp in which everyone, including the administration and security, will end up. Someone, under the influence of the media, began to get confused about moral standards, like the “mother of Ukraine.” Poor women from TV screens scold those who sent their children to Novorossiya with bad body armor. Apparently, they want their children not to feel fear when they kill other people’s wrong children. At the same time, ladies are eagerly rushing to Europe, which has the right population. They are not even embarrassed by the fact that the European population no longer needs not only strangers, but also their own women, who were replaced by parents No. 2. Do you want to look into the future and find out what else the people will come up with? To do this, the author had to carry out research on modeling the historical process. Modeling is a common working tool for us both in the study of thermophysical processes and in geometric modeling of technical objects. And criticism from professionals and readers will gradually help to take into account the specifics of history.

Methods for predicting the future are quite well known. It is necessary to formalize the historical process, represent its characteristic parameters as a function of time and see where the “curve will lead” in n years. To improve the accuracy of forecasts, the part of the curve describing the known past should be large, and the part of the curve in the region of the unknown future should be relatively small. Therefore, the conclusion of the formation theory of K. Marx about the inevitably coming socialism seems to be a completely justified result of the analysis of the race of productive forces and production relations. At the same time, it remains unclear what socialism is, but let’s not quibble. But the conclusions about the coming communism can be criticized by any mathematician, and recent history refutes them. Extrapolation over long periods of time is incorrect in general, and in Marx’s case in particular. Because the segment of the past available for his analysis was not large enough both in terms of territory and time. It was located only in Europe and actually began with feudalism (previously present in other territories or incomprehensible to his theory Asian production method, or a slave system with incomprehensible organizational and economic mechanisms, or variants of the communal way of life that have not changed for millennia).

So, in our analysis, history is viewed as a continuous process that has a trajectory of change over time. Since humanity is part of nature, it is assumed that general patterns of development can be obtained within the framework of the science of nature - physics. For the size and physical conditions of people's lives, the laws of the branch of physics - mechanics, which studies the movement and interaction of any bodies, including people, are very significant. Therefore, the work began with a fairly simple search mechanical characteristics of the current qualitative state of the historical process. The choice of a mechanical characteristic was determined by the desire to make evaluative reasoning clear and unambiguous. Exploratory studies included the construction and analysis of patterns of interaction between people in large groups (tribe, state, empire, etc.). It was also taken into account that large groups consist of smaller groups: elite, aristocracy, classes, parties, mafias, ethnic groups, professional communities, etc. The diagrams clearly showed how the efforts of small groups are added up or extinguished, which, taking care of their own interests, and solve common problems of a large group. But the important result of the analysis for us was not the diagrams, but the conclusion that the characteristic ways of relationships and interactions established between people in the process of any social activity can be represented by complexes of simple methods: coercion, competition and cooperation. They are discussed in more detail in (website “Mechanics of History”, Doctor of Technical Sciences Denisov M.A. http://history-mech.nethouse.ru).

The described methods of relationships and interactions between people are further considered as simplified mechanical analogues of the characteristic features of socio-economic formations used in Marxist philosophy. The terminology of the formational approach will be used here sporadically and only for convenience. Along with its shortcomings, it has a number of advantages, among which, in this case, the most important are: the elaboration of development mechanisms and the wide popularity of the concepts used. In intermediate discussions, it is believed that the method of coercion approximately corresponds to the slaveholding and, its mild version, feudal formations. The method of competition is put in line with capitalism, and the method of cooperation with socialism. In fact, each of the formations is a complex system with subsystems of different levels. Each of the subsystems uses different methods of interaction or combinations thereof (for different social strata, different forms of government and government systems of different countries). That is, the models (analogues) adopted for analysis reflect not so much the essence as the overall differences between the formations from each other.

The development of the historical process over time is shown in the figure as a graph. In addition to qualitative characteristics of the current state of the historical process, it also uses very approximate quantitative characteristics. This refers to the relative values ​​of conventional quantities plotted on the ordinate axis. The main one of these quantities is " uniform distribution of benefits, rights, opportunities and responsibilities among community members". Here we may have in mind material benefits that determine the well-being of citizens. Rights may include: the right to education, social security, judicial protection, the right to property, i.e. socio-economic and legal rights. The section of opportunities may include freedom, opportunities for free development. Responsibilities include military service, responsibility before the law. Of course, this is not a complete list of what living beings strive to get from life, but part of what is significant to our contemporaries. Own idea of ​​the likely interests of distant ancestors and descendants can be compiled based on common sense and practical experience.

In addition to the uniform distribution of benefits, other interpretation options are offered for the changing parameter in the figure. This or " community capacity to mobilize resources"to solve major common problems (defense from the enemy, bring the economy out of ruin, solve social and environmental problems, etc.) or" degree of protection by the community of the interests of ordinary members (majority)". To some extent, the latter is the proportion of the population that “benefits” the current way of interaction between people because it corresponds to its interests. For insects, “interests” are the possibilities of protection from enemies, obtaining food, and relative independence from living conditions. Protohumans probably additionally have a need to gain advantages in the intraspecific struggle for existence, and even a desire for the comfort of existence within a united community in which the strong can eat, maim or rob the weak.With Homo sapiens, in the process of development of society and the emergence of new opportunities a long list of needs, some of which are listed above.

For reliability of extrapolation, the development curve is considered throughout the entire history of social matter. The details are not important to us, so what happened a long time ago is determined generally and approximately using logical reasoning. The curve plotted on the graph is periodic. On it, period I shows the process of change for simple forms using the example of social insects (socialization period). The history of human ancestors is represented by period II (the period of anthropogenesis); the prehistoric period of Homo sapiens is shown by the III period (tribal period); the historical period of mankind is the IV period of the curve (the period of states) and the projected period of the history of mankind is V (the planetary period). The subject of the analysis of the work is periods IV and V, and periods I, II and III are considered as a hypothetical qualitative illustration of the general picture and development trends.

On the image socialization period I reflects the long process of insects’ transition to a social form of movement and the formation of corresponding population structures. They lack rational activity, so nature has to reinforce behavioral changes in the form of unconditioned reflexes, that is, rebuild the nervous system so that insects can form a swarm. In terms of the theory of cooperation, this means a transition from an isolated existence with an intraspecific struggle to the death for survival and food (coercion mode), to competition for food without mutual destruction (competition mode), and then to unification against common enemies (cooperation mode).

Ancestors of people ( period of anthropogenesis II) could change forms of behavior based on individual experience, acquiring appropriate skills. Scientific information about them is very limited. Probably, in the process of historical change of species, the ancestors (hominids) acquired: the ability to purposefully think about their actions, speech, and emotions. It is considered known that the last of the hominids, the Neanderthals, inhabited Europe 200-100 thousand years ago and disappeared 35-25 thousand years ago. They were not the direct ancestors of modern humans and may not have produced common hybrid descendants. Homo sapiens lived simultaneously with Neanderthals for about 10 thousand years and, theoretically, could have been responsible for their death. Researchers consider it more likely that Neanderthals died out from the cold, since 30 thousand years ago glaciers covered most of Europe. Molecular geneticists even believe that Homo sapiens, who learned to sew clothes and make effective tools for labor and hunting, were able to survive only with great difficulty. Moreover, their number decreased literally to a few individuals, and then increased.

Period II in the figure very roughly shows how the relationships between the proto-people, who at first were few in number and weak, became more complicated. Gradually, they had to move from a separate existence based on the method of coercion (mutual eating or appropriating other people's food) to a method of cooperation (mutual assistance) with the formation of families, and possibly clans. The family, as we know, is an “elementary unit” in which everyone helps each other. If parents do not protect their children in the forest or steppe, they will be eaten by predators and the story will end. If they don’t help a relative in the fight against a dangerous predator, there will be no one to help them in a similar situation. What has been said is just logical reasoning, but it follows from them that cooperation in the family has no alternative. There is also “coercion” in the family: they quarreled, the children do not obey, the grown-up sons did not share something. But this is episodic and does not apply to the whole family, but only to part of it. Family members have a common goal and collective ownership: housing, tools, territory, land, food. This is still the case in many families.

Thanks to cooperation, survival has become easier. There are more proto-humans, but less free territory. One can imagine that discord began, fights over hunting grounds, etc. Our distant ancestors turned out to be capable of generalizing obvious facts. You killed a hunter from a neighboring family - his relatives killed your brother. Everyone is losing their protectors and breadwinners, everyone is feeling bad. Therefore, perhaps, at first they stopped killing each other, then they noticed that families united in a clan could hunt larger animals, organize round-ups and drive game to hunters, etc. Clan associations appeared in which families acted according to the method of cooperation. The clan turns into a community with elected (or “self-appointed”, but recognized by community members) leadership and a common goal - to survive and, if possible, then comfortably.

ABOUT prehistoric tribal period of humanity III little is known. Our ancestors may have had to go through a coercive existence because of the disunity and weakness that resulted from their original small numbers and hostile environment. It is very likely that they inherited the use of the method of cooperation at the level of families and small clans consisting of close relatives from their direct ancestors, which will sooner or later be established. The hypothetical scenario for the formation of the genus, discussed above, is applicable for both hominids and Homo sapiens, and, in a simplified version, for a flock of monkeys. But only people were able to continue the process of unification.

The tribal way of life increased the security of people, the efficiency of the process of obtaining food and its quantity. This means that even more people began to survive, and the population density increased even more. The formation of tribes from clans began and the structural units of the tribe - clans - began to move towards cooperation. Perhaps the management of the tribe at the initial stage was carried out by some kind of elected and collective leadership, in which the heads of the clans protected the interests of their relatives. Doesn't matter. Some births may not have noticed any changes in their daily lives. Well, they will periodically take part in the collective “events” of the tribe: where they will fight, where they will build something, and “pay” in some form a “tax” at the tribal level. It’s burdensome, but they’re building it “for themselves,” but the level of safety and technology is growing. This means that enemies and hunger are not so terrible.

But this also means that the population continued to grow, and again the awareness of the danger came from neighboring tribes. The time has come to begin the process of forming tribal unions, and continued to work on the interaction of people between clans. As the number of people grew, there was a need for complex governance structures that separated government from ordinary citizens. The resulting tribes and tribal unions were structures on a larger scale and can be considered almost complete states. They have a “protection system” from the collapse of the achieved level of interaction between people in the form of traditions, customs, laws, and people’s ideas about the correct world order. New formations needed a legal system of regulation, mechanisms that fixed their composition, ensured the execution of government decisions, etc. The old orders, rules and norms probably no longer always provided satisfactory recipes for regulating new problems in management.

Thanks to the communal way of life, collective property and elective government, the primitive communal system could have continued for millennia, if labor productivity had not increased due to a more perfect organization of human interaction, if new tools and technologies and division of labor had not appeared. As a result, a product of labor that was surplus to survival appeared, members of the community had “something to share” and passions began to boil. In more familiar terminology, this means that in the process of development contradictions arose, to resolve which humanity had to begin historical period of developmenthumanity IV - period of states.

It has long been known that when there is something to share, people become gambling. Gradually, greed overpowers the restraining influence of tradition, and the energy of people’s survival is manifested in the unbridled accumulation (taking) of goods by the “elite” of the community. The greed of the elite, consisting of the most courageous, determined and motivated by greed people (let's call them strong) becomes the “engine of progress” at this stage. But when the confiscation of goods that were previously in collective use approaches completion, the task will be to preserve the acquisitions. This will consume the excess energy of the “elite of the strong” - the warriors. The social system, losing the dynamic energy of development, increases the potential energy of the “system for protecting the achieved level of development.” New ones are created: culture, morality, traditions, customs, laws, power structures that protect the inequality of people. Formed feudal social order, based on the right of the strong and brave to rob the weak and indecisive.

If the “elite” is satisfied with life, its energy fades and the energy of development becomes the energy of protest of the people, dissatisfied with the inferiority of their position. The process of compensating for his losses begins. But Only the smart can fight the strong. The smart ones are selected by competition mechanisms. The “smart elite” is learning to quietly concentrate the equivalent of power - money, uniting against the strong. Communities of entrepreneurs, workshops, trading communities, cities, etc. arise. New culture, morality, traditions, customs, laws are created again. Power structures are being established to protect the changed rules of interaction between people, competition, and doing business. The following social order is being formed - competitive capitalism, based on the right of the smart and dishonest to deceive the gullible and those with little initiative.

The inevitability of the final victory of the deceived majority can be justified by a very loose reference to the law of conservation of momentum. If a large number of people are robbed for a long time, then in proportion to the duration of the robbery, the “impulse of protest power” of the oppressed people grows, and the search for more just forms of government, oriented towards the cooperation of people, begins. " Elite of the Just“develops its own methods of struggle, creates its own morality, traditions, customs, laws, oriented towards collectivism and the relative equality of people. Power and greed fade into the background of history, and ideology and morality have to become the driving force of development. Of course, we ended up with a too loose description the process of changing historical formations: slavery - feudalism - capitalism - socialism. After achieving relative justice in the social order, the energy of protest of the majority fades away, forming a new “system for protecting the achieved level of development” with new laws and morality. A more detailed picture of the “mechanics of history” is presented on the author’s website “Mechanics of History” (http://history-mech.nethouse.ru).

For ease of analysis socialism can be defined as social system (and/or ideology) embodying the principles of social justice, freedom and equality, omitting the organizational and economic detail of the social structure. Then, in accordance with the figure, the result of the process of human development in the IV historical period will be the achievement by each individual state of a certain quasi-stable state of natural movement towards the kingdom of universal justice, distribution of goods and cooperation. This would probably be the case if states were located on territories with natural borders that are inviolable and insurmountable. But in reality, the process of “intrastate” development was superimposed on the process of “interstate” development - planetary. Borders are permeable and, if in one country the internal reserves for increasing the amount of goods suitable for consumption by the population have been exhausted, then the interests of people will turn to where the goods are - to the international arena. And it turns out that human greed is limitless.

Traces of processes that form V planetary period of human history, with a strong desire can be found even in antiquity. “Locally international” can be considered the actions of countries that conquer neighbors to create empires, and the actions of countries that conquer remote territories to turn them into colonies. But international processes became truly noticeable and then dominant in the 20th century, which gave birth to a new entity - the international community. It was no longer individual citizens or their regional communities that began to fight for the redistribution of goods, but entire states and their unions. The international community (like tribal unions previously) uses a contractual basis for interaction between subjects. In such cases, stability requires a supranational entity that can regulate legal relations and, if necessary, even use force. But such an education does not exist yet, and strong countries bomb those who are weaker. World wars began, redistribution of spheres of influence and natural resources, and an arms race. Capitalist states rallied into international blocs, while socialist states attempted to form a “socialist camp.” On the graph, the “bloc of capitalist states” took a place above the “bloc of socialist countries.” countries" on the scale of ability to mobilize resources. What is meant here is that both blocks were in competitive interaction, but within the blocks they used a method of cooperation. The leading capitalist countries pooled their resources, and the socialist countries developed on the basis of the resources of the leading country. Probably, from the moment of the destruction of the “socialist camp” it became possible to talk about the process of humanity’s transition to a new period of development - planetary. The balance of power has been disrupted, the robbery of entire countries has become the norm, and processes taking place in the international sphere have become more significant for humanity than the internal processes of countries that have entered an inertial phase.

The climb along the curve in the figure is inevitable for a number of reasons. It is inevitable because the problem of sustainable development of humanity requires the global application of a method of cooperation with its mobilization resource. But also because relatively weak countries will, at every opportunity, increase their share of benefits in the overall planetary “pie,” begging for benefits from patron countries and thereby increasing the uniformity of the planetary distribution of benefits. The most valuable benefits will be the resources of the subsoil, nature, and territories.

The likely results of the events of the predicted V period of history may be: the transformation of the planet's resources into a common human heritage, the development of the principles and laws of planetary interaction and cooperation of people in resolving or otherwise solving common problems, the creation of appropriate management structures. This direction of historical development is dictated by the need to develop methods for the rational use of the planet’s resources, prevention or combating the consequences of future global environmental or military disasters, the danger of which is very underestimated in public opinion. Any serious catastrophe can, if not destroy humanity, then reduce the number of people many times over, which will be the reason for the early start of a new period of development in the figure, associated with a decrease in the scale of events. Moreover, this period will be much more difficult than the previous ones, since many natural resources have already been dug up or polluted.

Unfortunately, a future scenario is likely in which our descendants will curse us for burned fuel, spent raw materials, poisoned air and water, for the planet hot from the greenhouse effect, for territories contaminated with radiation, etc. For them, the crime of their ancestors will become a fact, who provided a comfortable existence for themselves and their children, killing the planet and the grandchildren who need it.

The hopes of the “world government” to save resources due to a multiple reduction in the number of excess eaters will probably be in vain. Savings will be obtained, but as part of a whole complex of problems that are characteristic of the Middle Ages. If there are few people, many technologies will be lost, generations will change, and power structures of the modern type will collapse. The barbed wire will be scrapped, the chips will be incomprehensible and will be thrown away. The forceful redistribution of goods will begin and something similar to feudalism will be established for centuries. The winners will be a small number of “natural feudal lords,” that is, people of a completely different type and origin than many of the immediate descendants of the world’s rulers. Above we designated them as “strong”. They will not be interested in stories about the promised lands and the Holocaust. Well, after feudalism there will still be “capitalism”, and then “socialism”, understood as cooperation.

The conclusions of the work are based on the results of an analysis of model ideas about the historical process and logical conclusions about the course of processes in the future. The author is not a historian and therefore may allow “boldness” of conclusions and generalizations, or, conversely, ignore any historical events.

Modeling the future using the method of Vitaly Gibert [Battle of psychics]

Elizaveta Volkova

Friends, I read the book by Vitaly Gibert Modeling the future already several years ago and his method seemed close to me and really working.

Attention! In this article, you will understand how to start modeling your future today.

The main thing is to practice and do not close this page until you have completed all the exercises! This is the only way I can promise you that it will work.

Vitaly Gibert does not doubt the power of thought

Thoughts are material - and there is no doubt about it

- he writes in his book “Modeling the Future”.

If you want a car...

You just need to imagine how you sit in it.

Feel the seat under your butt...

Feel the steering wheel in your hands, just enjoy the ride - contrary to all logic!

Here and now you need to feel how this car is already yours. See its color, size and brand. Everything down to the details...

It’s as if you saw her live now, and she was definitely yours. It is important to create great joy inside from the fact that you own this car now... Right now!

Most importantly, do not confuse modeling with visualization.

Visualization is a kind of imagination, a certain idea that it is possible...

A future modeling- this is precisely the turning off of all doubts inherent in the mind, and the creation in the inner world of real sensations that this is not just possible, but is already a fact, an indisputable fact of the presence of what you want in your life.

I think many, just like me, tried to draw zeros on banknotes and walked around hugging them, but this did not add any more money to either you or me.

I'm not saying visualization is bad. It works.

But I need much faster results, so through experiments I came up with modeling.

Feel in a state of love and meditation that this is now in your life. Down to the details, down to the smallest detail, as real as if you took the mug in your hands...

You should also clearly see and feel it in meditation.

This is the key to quickly fulfilling your desire. It’s as if you are jumping from our reality to a parallel one, where this already exists... You are simply drawing it in a new reality. This is the most important thing now.

Future modeling practice

We sit down comfortably, close our eyes...

We take a third deep breath - and as we exhale we naturally enter a state of great joy and love...

And we begin to feel in our hands what is familiar to us, what we really often hold in our hands and what will be easy for us to reproduce in meditation in images and sensations...

For example, we begin to feel and imagine that we have a mobile phone in our hands.

We feel its corners, its edges... We see it with our inner vision...

All sensations should be realistic: the more realistic you create these sensations, the easier you will understand the practice of modeling.

Remember this is just a training session.

So you can feel it for 10-15 minutes, until you feel the realism of what is happening.

Don't worry if it's not so easy at first. Everything comes with experience - this too will come.

Experiment with different objects. This is easier to do if, before the meditation itself, the object is carefully studied and held in your hands. Try it and create as real sensations and pictures as possible for you.

These are just the first steps to creating your future, so be prepared for the fact that there will be bumps to trip over. The most important thing is to get up and keep going. Everything will work out. It will definitely work.

Modeling the future: attracting money

We take a deep breath - and as we exhale, we exhale all our thoughts...

We take a second deep breath - and as we exhale, we completely relax...

We take a third deep breath - and as we exhale we naturally enter a state of unconditional love.

And in this state... we feel and imagine how a wad of money appears in our hands...

Everyone has their own: some are small, some are large... Some have thousandth or five thousandth bills, and some have euros or dollars...

The most important thing is to feel this pack in your hands, feel each of the bills, see it as real...

And start counting with joy and love...

With great pleasure - as if they were really in your hands!

Smell them...

An unusual smell of money that cannot be confused with anything else.

Hear them rustling...

Just enjoy counting this wad of money...

You can come out of meditation... Well, how? Really? Did you manage to feel the money in your hands? Is it cool to meditate while counting money?

Your ability to get what you want depends on how realistically you can simulate something.

It's simple. The main thing is practice, practice and more practice.

It is important to know clearly what you want

It is important to know clearly what you want.

God, the Universe or whatever you believe in does not understand vague ideas about what you want.

He needs a clear, detailed picture in order to quickly and in the best possible way help you materialize what you want. So before you start modeling anything, think carefully about what exactly you want.

Remember the most important things:you need to want and model it just as if you were actually holding it in your hands right now.

And no other way! Only here and now and only specifics.

Remember, we always do everything only with joy and love!

This helps us, firstly, to live happier, and secondly, more fulfillingly.

And also, be ready to get your desire fulfilled right now. What if what happens? After all, miracles happen!

The moment is here and now

There is another mistake made by those who, for example, have studied neurolinguistic programming and know the “smart” goal setting system.

It says that you should write down a goal and determine the date when it will happen.

I believe that we need to model here and now. Create the reality in meditation that is necessary at the moment.

Take a canvas and paints in meditation and begin to rainbow-paint what it is in your reality now!

Decide what exactly you want. If it’s more convenient for you to write down your desire, then write it down, just write about it in the present tense! As if it had already been realized.

Make your wish as realistic as possible.

Modeling the future: your own apartment

If you want your own apartment, then close your eyes and go into meditation and describe it.

Here you go into it...

See what color the walls are, what repairs there are...

Just get high here and now from the fact that you have it. This is your apartment. Your dream has already come true. So get great pleasure here and now from what you have.

Go to the bathroom and mentally take it in. She's yours.

Sit on the sofa near the TV... Create a real sense of presence...

Remember: the brighter your experience now, the more realistic it is, the easier and faster you will get it.

The most important thing here is that your subconscious does not sense lies. You must not deceive yourself. You have to be honest with yourself... Let me explain what I mean.

You must truly believe that it is possible. What is real: your apartment is here and now.

There should be no doubts and delirium in your head, as if it is impossible, as if it was just invented in your head. At first, of course, you will have to deal with this.

According to your faith it will be given to you

But, most importantly, believe - and according to your faith may you be rewarded!

Don’t put it in your head that this is just meditation, that it’s made up. Make it possible, real in your head.

And then you will get the result very soon. He will find you himself or show you the fastest ways to realize your plans. He will put you in touch with the right people or make a lucrative offer that will help you.

I also simulated my victory in the “Battle of Psychics”.

It was important for me to show the gap from the strongest psychics in the country, who I consider my rivals to be - 95 percent!

For me it was important to do this only because I could convey to all people from the television screen that dreams must come true, that it is simple - you just need to want it...

I modeled victory with such a gap with sincere and pure intention, so the entire Universe helped me along my path... And people voted for me because they felt this love of unity. And our victory was as simulated, 95 percent. My dream came true - and people saw that everything is possible.

Desire must be pure

If I wanted victory out of my ego in order to amuse it, it would never have been given to me.

I couldn't do it - that's how the world works.

Only pure desires from the bottom of the heart receive the right to the realization and help of the space of all things.

So dream big. Even if no one has done this before, this does not mean that it is impossible. It just means that you will be the first to prove that man can do this too...

Don't think about HOW your wish will come true

Another important aspect of successful modeling: do not dictate exactly which way it should come to you.Unless, of course, the path to getting what you want is not important to you. Let it come naturally in the best and highest way. Let me explain what I mean.

Many people decide in their heads that an apartment or a car, or any other material object can be bought and only bought.

You need to earn money.

But all this can come from winning the lottery, in the form of a gift, or in some other way.

Don't dictate the path if it's not important to you.

It just happens that for some, the path is as important as the dream itself - the path to its realization lies and is inherent in the dream itself. Then, naturally, you clarify exactly how...

But always " in the best and highest way for me and for the entire Universe».

Why am I specifying this exactly?

So that God himself knows what the fastest and best path is for you. He is wiser than us - you need to trust him, and he himself will show the way. You just need to follow it, that's all.

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