An Astrology Exchange/Challenge

[Almo]

1. I think that some astrologers are attracted to the study precisely because it is alternative. The sensible, rational world just seems too boring and they are looking for something with a little mystery, and probably a bit of sexiness. To believers, astrology provides a sort of edge over rational thinking, giving what they believe is "insight" that ordinary logic alone cannot give. Being an astrologer means that you belong to a club, a sort of counter-culture. You are initiated, and others aren't.

Sure. I buy that. Except astrology is incapable of making any useful predictions, and any attempt to say otherwise is futile. I don't care if people want to write horoscopes and compare star-signs. But the minute someone says the predictions have anything beyond entertainment value, I get annoyed.

 

[PixyMisa]

Rather than replying to all your comments, and before continuing with this thread I'd like to point out that you are all, like good skeptics, approaching it from the empirical point of view, while I appear to be in the land of fantasy.

Yes.

I have no desire to continue being tested and tricked just to prove to you that astrology is full of confirmation bias, vague statements and cherry picking. We all know that.

Then give it up already.

I would rather discuss astrology here as a philosophy and art

Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
Your metaphysical position is untenable,
And your trousers are on fire.

Astrology is as useless as philosophy or art as it is for predicting the weather.

as I suggested back in my reply to Hokulele's comments on my comments on the Rufolf Smit article. From this perspective, astrology might indeed seem like a fantasy, and as Joe The Juggler noted earlier on, and in another round of debate that we had last year, astrology is really a system of magic and correspondence, rather than anything empirical.

So why are you still dancing around it? It's rubbish from beginning to end. Give it up already.

So please don't be surprised by my use of analogy, metaphor, symbolism, references to religion or the occult, or my unconventional use of the word "logic".

We're not surprise, merely depressed.

As an example of a reference to religion, and in reply to an earlier question by PixyMisa about why astrologer Liz Greene did not try to predict anything about a horoscope

Except that she did. You brought it up and specifically made the point that she made successful predictions.

but rather saw it as a teaching tool

Teaching skepticism, perhaps?

I can't help thinking of the New Testament.

I can't help thinking of Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World.

Do you remember how Jesus was tempted by the Devil (please don't think that I'm comparing myself to Jesus!), and the devil said that if Jesus was so great, he should turn rocks into bread (rough transcription from memory). Jesus replied that material demonstrations were not what he was trying to do ("man cannot live by bread alone"). He was trying to get people to realize that there is a spiritual dimension to life which was just as important as the material dimension. It is this spiritual dimension that I would like to discuss on this thread.

There is no spiritual dimension to life.

So what do I mean by "spiritual". I simply mean beyond the realm of what we normally consider material evidence.

Precisely. There's no such thing.

And that would apply to modern concepts in physics such as quantum mechanics

No. Not even remotely.

the Kaluza -Klein theory

No.

space-time and all the lovely physics that I cannot pretend to understand but am hoping that Hokulele will help me get a grasp on.

Yeah, there's your problem. None of these theories are beyond the realm of material evidence. There's an absolutely enormous amount of direct physical evidence supporting quantum mechanics.

What are you guys going to do if the Hadron Collider discovers a sub-atomic particle that has just come through another dimension, or a parallel universe?

What we're going to do right now is tell you that your question is meaningless. "Come through another dimension"? What do you think a dimension actually is? And how would we know if a particle came from a parallel universe? Would it have a little sticker on it that said "Product of Earth Prime"?

You will have discovered the "spiritual" world spoken about by all the great teachers of the past few thousand years!

I don't remember Carl Sagan talking about that. Or Isaac Asimov. Or J.B.S. Haldane. Or Stephen Jay Gould. Or Richard Feynman.

Anyway, no. If we discovered another universe, we would have discovered another universe. The spiritual crap would still be crap.

And it is this spiritual world

There is no spiritual world.

and its relationship to the physical world

Therefore it has no relationship to the physical world.

that the language of astrology is talking about.

No it isn't.

You have repeatedly pointed out real testable predictions, real confirmable correlations. All of them have been either wrong or so vague as to be useless.

And so you've retreated into hand-waving new-age mumbo-jumbo. That's actually worse. Before you were empirical but wrong. Now you're just talking nonsense.

So I hope we can continue talking philosophy rather than have a constant battle over evidence, like the Black Knight (thanks for the Monty Python video) and King Arthur. By the way, the second video that you posted (PixyMisa) did not open.

Rats.

 

[Steve001]

As explained several times before, Tropical astrology has very little to do with the stars or constellations. It uses a theoretical Zodiac based on the seasons. Changes in light, along with minute changes in gravity from the Moon, could have a causal relationship, with human hormones, and therefore personality, as we briefly discussed in the other thread.

Did you know the gravitational pull on your body is about the equivalent of a mosquito resting on your shoulder.
All objects had a gravitational gradient associated with them. Many of those objects have a gravitational pull on you greater than that felt by you from the Moon. So is gravity a likely candidate ? Think this through.

 

[PixyMisa]

Further to my last post about Eysenk and Gauquelin, here is a review by Eysenk of the book "The Tenacious Mars Effect" by Suitbert Ertel and Kenneth Irving:

http://www.planetos.info/eysenck.html

"The evidence for the Mars effect is better than for most of the “facts” you will encounter in your psychology textbooks, and incomparably stronger than that for psychoanalysis; yet Freud figures in all our textbooks, Gauquelin is not mentioned! This may tell us something about psychology as a science. H.J.Eysenck, Ph.D, D.Sc., Professor Emiritus of Psychology University of London"

Freud is in psychology textbooks as a historical figure and a shining counter-example of how to carry out psychological research. He's not regarded as being any sort of authority at all, and hasn't been for decades.

 

[PixyMisa]

Did you know the gravitational pull [of the Moon] on your body is about the equivalent of a mosquito resting on your shoulder.

Or to put it another way, much less than a breath of air.

All objects had a gravitational gradient associated with them. Many of those objects have a gravitational pull on you greater than that felt by you from the Moon. So is gravity a likely candidate ? Think this through.

It's a good question that Aquila has studiously dodged so far.

 

[dafydd]

First bolded name above: Mick Jagger. Can I just point out that Mick Jagger has the same birthday as former Australian Prime Minister John Howard... It is difficult for me to imagine two people less similar than Mick and little Johnnie.

Second bold: Should one of those Johns be a George?

When Pope John Paul II died I thought that the Vatican missed a chance,they should have called the next Pope George Ringo.

 

[dafydd]

So please don't be surprised by my use of analogy, metaphor, symbolism, references to religion or the occult, or my unconventional use of the word "logic".

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean--neither more nor less."

 

[dafydd]

Stop what? The similarities I pointed out (composers, religious figures) were entirely linked on their Sun sign, Pisces.

Yes,stop it.What about the vast majority of people who were born on the same day but were not religious figures or composers? You choose to ignore them.

 

[Steve001]

Or to put it another way, much less than a breath of air.


It's a good question that Aquila has studiously dodged so far.

Let's hope they don't bring the example of the Moon creating tides and the human body comprised mostly of water.

 

[Aquila]

Did you know the gravitational pull on your body is about the equivalent of a mosquito resting on your shoulder.
All objects had a gravitational gradient associated with them. Many of those objects have a gravitational pull on you greater than that felt by you from the Moon. So is gravity a likely candidate ? Think this through.

Maybe the moon's pull on fluids on earth, including on our bodies, was a candidate back in the days when we had evolved from apes, and before we had buildings, cars and furniture. And maybe the sun's light affected us more before we had electricity. And maybe we were more dependent on the seasons in the days before we imported food from the opposite hemisphere. With heat, Air-Conditioning, artificial light, world travel and modern civilization humans have become almost completely divorced from nature.

Anyway, these maybes are irrelevant at this point and I think that you have convinced me that there is no evidence for astrology.

I'm eager to see how Hokulele stomaches the rest of the Richard Tarnas video, but apart from that I think I'll call it a day. Thank you all for your input and for putting up with my stubbornness.

 

[Sledge]

You almost have to admire the way Aquila puts forwards the most batsqueak insane theories whilst simultaneously denying them.

Almost.

 

[PixyMisa]

Maybe the moon's pull on fluids on earth, including on our bodies, was a candidate back in the days when we had evolved from apes, and before we had buildings, cars and furniture. And maybe the sun's light affected us more before we had electricity. And maybe we were more dependent on the seasons in the days before we imported food from the opposite hemisphere. With heat, Air-Conditioning, artificial light, world travel and modern civilization humans have become almost completely divorced from nature.

So what you are saying is that astrology doesn't work?

Anyway, these maybes are irrelevant at this point and I think that you have convinced me that there is no evidence for astrology.

.... Really?

 

[dafydd]

Maybe the moon's pull on fluids on earth, including on our bodies, was a candidate back in the days when we had evolved from apes, and before we had buildings, cars and furniture. And maybe the sun's light affected us more before we had electricity. And maybe we were more dependent on the seasons in the days before we imported food from the opposite hemisphere. With heat, Air-Conditioning, artificial light, world travel and modern civilization humans have become almost completely divorced from nature.

Anyway, these maybes are irrelevant at this point and I think that you have convinced me that there is no evidence for astrology.

I'm eager to see how Hokulele stomaches the rest of the Richard Tarnas video, but apart from that I think I'll call it a day. Thank you all for your input and for putting up with my stubbornness.

Thank you too,the E in JREF stands for educational. Goodbye,and all the best.

 

[Gord_in_Toronto]

<snip>

Anyway, these maybes are irrelevant at this point and I think that you have convinced me that there is no evidence for astrology.

Congratulations!

<snip>

 

[Hokulele]

OK, I have finally gotten through the rest of the video, and I see the same basic contradiction in Dr. Tarnas' interview that I highlighted in Aquila's post earlier (the "Stop that" comment). Dr. Tarnas explicitly states that astrology cannot be statistically tested especially since, "[Astrology] is something that only a poetically imaginatively [sic] cultivated intelligence can grasp." In other words, a computer or algorithm, such as those required for statistical analysis, cannot be used to determine the truth of astrology.

THEN WHY THE HELL DO THEY [ASTROLOGERS] KEEP BRINGING UP GAUQUELIN!?!?!?!

Even Dr. Tarnas spends time raving about Gauquelin. For Pete's sake, if astrology cannot be tested, you cannot use the tests you think support your claims just as much as you cannot use the tests you think demolish your claims. For the rest of this thread, I am going to ignore the science and the scientific method (which Dr. Tarnas throws under the bus several times in that interview) and focus solely on the art/philosophy argument. (Next post.)

 

[Hokulele]

First of all, I will be focusing on a definition of astrology as philosophy. I do not have a problem of setting it up this way, but I think it leads to severe flaws in believing astrology is useful for anything other than definitions, certainly not as a method for determining truth.

Philosophy is kind of a catch-all term these days, as it can mean anything from a way to think about thinking (such as logic or epistemology), or a way to define one's worldview (political philosophy, ethics, or economic philosophy).

Placing astrology in the first category means that as long as you stay within the rules of astrology, it works. In other words, it is a bit of a tautology. It also means you cannot assume the conclusions are true in any larger sense. For example, the rules of logic work well in and of themselves, but they do not always lead to "truth". I can state the following:

P₁ = All dogs are brown.
P₂ = Kiko the Wonder Poodle is black.

Conclusion = Kiko the Wonder Poodle is not a dog.

Clearly the conclusion is false, but the logic is sound. The problem is with the premises. Philosophy, unlike science, does not include a mechanism for self-correction. This is why astrology as a philosophy (in the first category) may not lead to conclusions that are correct.

If you put astrology in the second category (worldview), it makes perfect sense and works perfectly well. However, it is only meaningful or true to someone who already shares that worldview. For example, liberal and conservative political philosophies are almost diametrically opposite, so there are very few people who would accept all tenets from both camps (and we have a non-astrological set of psychological terms for such people). People can change over time, moving from a more liberal to more conservative perspective, or vice versa, but they generally do not see the beliefs of one camp as being compatible with the beliefs of another. In other words, worldview philosophical tenets aren't universal. You cannot simply say that astrology is just another way of saying the same thing, particularly when it directly contradicts what is a tenet of a scientific worldview.

So, astrology as a philosophy makes sense and is fine, but it is unrealistic to believe that it is either more likely to be true than another philosophy, and it is dangerously false to believe that conclusions based on astrological methods are true, since there is no way of testing its truth value, or correcting it if it is wrong.

Next up, art.

 

[Hokulele]

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”

Nowhere is this more apparent than in discussion of the fine arts. Heck, read any thread on Modernism in music or the visual arts on any discussion forum on the Internet! With the value of a work of art being subjective, one cannot determine universal truths from any one medium (ignoring Keats, for the moment). Art appreciation has as much to do with cultural upbringing as any inherent aesthetics, so although certain works may have broad appeal, I do not know of any that have unanimous appeal.

Although this may sound a bit outrageous, art does not hold any meaning of its own, but only the meaning read into it by the audience. This ties in nicely with statements made by Rudolf Smit in his article, and Dr. Tarnas in his interview. This does not make art useless, just not equally applicable to all situations. Artistic preferences may be based on rational considerations, emotional ones, or completely irrational ones. However, artistic preferences may be informed, but not changed. In other words, I can explain to you why I like Mahler’s Symphonies, you may be abe to understand and accept why I feel this way, but you will still change the radio station when “Titan” comes on the air.

Trying to force someone to accept your taste in art is ineffective, and possibly immoral. Taste in art is very similar to taste in food, the taste may change over time, some tastes may be acquired, but it is up to the individual to determine what they do or do not like. Some people love chocolate ice cream, some don’t care one way or the other, and some actively dislike it (poor things). Feeding them chocolate sorbet while saying, “Try this one, you will like this one!” isn’t likely to change their mind, and will most likely be seen as offensive. Drowning them in cocoa-infested confections is abusive. This is why when an astrologer appears on this board saying “Try my Tropical calculations/gelato del cioccolato!”, he or she is rarely met with broad approval.

So to conclude, calling astrology an art form is probably more accurate than calling it anything else, but keep that in mind when trying to convince someone of its value. Telling them once is fine, telling them repeatedly is the work of a Jackson Pollock aficionado.

 

[JoeTheJuggler]

Maybe the moon's pull on fluids on earth, including on our bodies, was a candidate back in the days when we had evolved from apes, and before we had buildings, cars and furniture. And maybe the sun's light affected us more before we had electricity.

First, moving the influence to the past doesn't change anything.

Second, astrology claims that the apparent position of heavenly bodies affects current events.

It almost sounds like you're trying to make astrology into something so tenuous that it makes no claims whatsoever, and this explains why empirical observations look just as we would expect them if there was absolutely nothing to astrology.

 

[Brainache]

And what about the others on the birthday list ( Ron Jeremy for example) who did not become religious figures or composers?

I have a friend born on March 12. She has a degree in Arts Law, but makes most of her money these days as a Belly Dancer. I wonder what contortions an Astrologer would go through to explain her career choices.

I was born on Febuary 29. Whenever I see lists of people who share that birthday, I can never see any similarities.

 

[Aquila]

OK, I have finally gotten through the rest of the video, and I see the same basic contradiction in Dr. Tarnas' interview that I highlighted in Aquila's post earlier (the "Stop that" comment). Dr. Tarnas explicitly states that astrology cannot be statistically tested especially since, "[Astrology] is something that only a poetically imaginatively [sic] cultivated intelligence can grasp." In other words, a computer or algorithm, such as those required for statistical analysis, cannot be used to determine the truth of astrology.

THEN WHY THE HELL DO THEY [ASTROLOGERS] KEEP BRINGING UP GAUQUELIN!?!?!?!

Because not all astrologers are Richard Tarnas! Just because he has a PhD doesn't give him any authority to talk about statistics - he is a historian, and (you're going to hate this), a Piscean to boot. From an astrological point of view, his Pisces Sun trine Uranus in Cancer correlates very well to his rather nebulous, poetic, "imaginatively cultivated" intelligence which easily (the trine) sees patterns in history (Cancer).

Anyway, I have given you all the benefit of the doubt about Gauquelin and empirical testing in general and prepared to just say that empirical evidence doesn't exist. The Gauquelin story is a nightmare - first we have the man doing the research, then someone else saying that he fuddled it, then someone else saying no he didn't, and then the poor man commits suicide. Kenneth Irving, in his Planetos website has summarized the drama quite succinctly, I think, but I'm not surprised that astrologers, who tend to be more artistically inclined than interested in statistics, have just put the whole episode on a back burner, hoping that someone else might finally verify the Mars effect, while they get on with simply saying that astrology cannot be tested, and move on to discussing the metaphysical/philosophical/artistic side of astrology, which I'm looking forward to doing.