Simulating the past: From Virtual Reality to SocioPhysics

BARCELÓ, JOAN ANTON; DEL CASTILLO, FLORENCIA

Tübingen

Conferencia; 46th Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology Conference; 2018

Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen

In this paper, we present a radical interpretation of the words ?virtual? and ?artificial?, distinguishing ?virtual realities? from ?artificial societies?, but insisting on their necessary interrelationships. Our approach relies on the assumption that we should explain past social events by showing how their results and consequences fit into a causal structure, that is to say, a vast network of interacting actions and entities. The potential of this theoretical framework is associated with the fact that we make emphasis on the production of very large numbers of alternatively possible ?futures? (or ?histories?)can be produced by varying initial conditions or a specific parameter setting of interest or by subjecting the theoretically specified model to random perturbations. And those ?possible? worlds are not ?reconstructions? of what we know it may have happened, but formally testable hypothetical models. Some examples from the domain of social interaction and its effects on cultural identities will be used along the paper, and we will discuss how the physics of non-linear dynamics can be used to represent social change, avoiding the usual mistake of confounding social agents with atoms.