Garnets Thoughts On Pseudo Science

==GarnetChaney Thoughts On PseudoScience==

===Why do our minds seek our correlated sets of coincidences?===

I had the wonderful opportunity to spend a lot of time recently with people who are very much experts at astrology and vastu. (Vastu is the Indian precursor to Feng Shui.)

My astrology expert friend has tried to take astrology and make it very much an objective science, where predictions are made exactly on what is said in the chart. A big part of the astrology involves taking keywords expressing aspects of the chart and synthesizing them into easy English sentences that express a probability. He wants to express those probabilities before knowing anything about the individual, so that they can be objective and based on the facts of the chart, not an intimate knowledge of the person. The knowledge of the person comes later, as a validation.

Here is an example of how the facts are applied: Some planet in a certain house is said to signify a marriage, and also a foreign involvement, so you might say "This person is likely to get married to a foreigner", or "This person might take his high school sweetheart to a foreign country and marry her there." I attended just the third day of a three day class, and I was able to take some keywords like, money, inheritance, problem, and turn it into the prediction "The person might be ruined by inheriting money." My friend was very impressed, and held my prediction up for applause from the rest of the class. One of the class members had been studying astrology for 18 years, and couldn't make any sense of it, until he attended my friend's class.

He kept telling his students to just read the chart, get the keywords, and synthesize the predictions. To me it was easy, it was just taking some keywords and making them flow in a nice English sentence. This is apparently not so easy for some of the students.

My friend has the most beautiful study in his home. It is a long narrow room, with floor to the ceiling bookcases on the long walls, full of every imaginable book on astrology, personal effectiveness, and all kinds of other interesting topics. I noticed a Turbo Pascal version 2.0 manual hidden among the books and I asked him about it. Turns out he used to be a programmer! It all clicked, he was turning astrology into a procedural program.

This is just as I thought after the class. The process of picking the keywords based on setting up the chart could be almost entirely automated. It would be an incredible rule based system, but largely automatable. Of course synthesizing the keywords into actual predictions might still require a human, but a lot of the tedious work could be accomplished automatically.

I then asked him my favorite question: What is it that makes astrology work? Is it gravitational? If so, I believe the grass in my front lawn probably exerts a bigger effect gravitationally on me than Jupiter. I've joked for years about how if this is true, one could dramatically change their life just by mowing their lawn.

We didn't go very far on that, he could see my point. He then said that when we are born, the cycles we go through are set in motion and keyed to certain fundamental timing cycles that are also present in the rest of the universe. Hmmm.... So I asked him, if since Jupiter has a 12 year cycle, and this lets people predict based on their chart when things will happen in that 12 year cycle, what happens if that person emigrates to Mars, and there is nothing in the heavens that has a twelve year cycle? How will the person ever keep in sync? How would a new person ever discover this twelve year relationship? Would all of astrology need to be changed for people living on mars? And what if you were born on Earth, but moved to Mars, which astrology system would you use? And what about Alpha Centari, where you can't see the solar system planets anymore? Should we be broadcasting our ephemeris to the rest of the universe, so that intelligent life elsewhere can finally understand why things have been happening to them on 12 year cycles?

To step back from such problems, perhaps astrology is just a set of coincidences that people noticed and correlated. Someone noticed certain cycles that seemed to keep happening, so they found something to pin it on. When some prediction didn't work, they found some extra thing to factor in to explain why things didn't work.

Vastu predated FengShui. I listened to an introductory lecture on Vastu. Vastu has 140+ rules which define how to have the best living or working space. The speaker, (a respectable looking fellow who could have been your banker, or a professor), not only related the differences between Feng Shui and Vastu, he told how Feng Shui was a Chinese attempt to create an atheistic version of Vastu. Vastu adds a fourth spiritual dimension, where you worry about which deity is ruling which point of the compass. The speaker really seemed to sincerely believe that putting your heavy stuff in the SW corner of a space would anchor the negative energies of the avatar of Rahu.

I kept expecting the speaker to admit it was a joke, but he was very serious. He wasn't willing to entertain the possibility that the Chinese might have improved Vastu; he was sure Vastu was correct because it was older. He talked of taking Vastu to all kinds of countries, including Israel. I asked him how he dealt with the strict Jewish prohibitions on polytheism? He said they just didn't tell them about Rahu, and then they liked it just fine! We had a good laugh over that one.

I pressed him in a friendly sort of way as to whether he'd done any objective validation of Vastu, or could it be that it was mostly just a placebo effect that makes it work. He'd return to anecdotal proofs, and I'd again ask him for a real study, like a double blind study. After all, as Richard Feynman, physicist says, if there is a real phenomenon going on, we as scientists need to study it so that people can use it effectively. On the third try, I added "We owe it to the cripples who might be depending on us for a cure", which finally got the group thinking.

Anyhow, the long and short is that there was no real study to prove things. Certainly they have some good ideas like getting rid of clutter. And certainly if there is a placebo effect, we shouldn't deny it to those who can benefit from it.

As a rational person, and also a Bible Fundamentalist, I realize it isn't worth my time to try to get any deeper into astrology, and probably not Vastu either. If I really think a chart reading is needed, why not let my friend do it? I've got more important things to do, like philosophize on wikis!

But I've still been thinking about what drives people to believe in something like astrology? What is it about our thinking processes that makes humans seem to have a real tendency towards these kinds of things like Astrology? Why do we seem to crave having a correlated set of coincidences?

Is it just the biological drive to survive, and how our brains are good at finding patterns as a survival mechanism? Or is there something fundamental to our neural structure that makes these things come into being? I remember being taught in Bible class as a child that man is fundamentally spiritual, and if we don't fill ourselves with that, there will be a vacuum that other things will rush into.