a physical basis

[Ray_Murphy]

Frank wrote:

Is it the astrologer's job to try to find any physical mechanism that validates astrology?

Isn't that the realm of physicists? It would be great to have an astrology-friendly theoretical physicist (somewhat like Dr. Percy Seymour) to carry the torch, but do any astrologers currently have extensive (PhD level) training in physics?

It's not anyone's job unless some individual wants to try and prove that astrology is a physical science. Even if it is, and even if formal experiments are repeatedly successful, we would still be in a situation where we would need to demonstrate that one or more astro factors worked consistently at a particular rate over a long period of time, but we can do that already if we have confidence in any study.

For example in one of my studies of 7,400 births that occurred over a period of a few centuries (using a couple of large genealogy data files from the net) I noticed that the mothers consistently had transiting Moon opp Mars when the child was born at a higher rate than expected when the scores were examined at 20 progressive intervals. The trend was (as is usual) a bit volatile at first with small amounts of data, but it gradually levelled off, and the graph shows that it had "no intention" of creeping down to the average line - even after 7400 births.

The trend in this data is most prominent when a 3 degree orb is used, but all orbs work. It should be noted that the data doesn't include birth times and that local noon was used. The lack of birth times disturbs some astrologers, particularly when a 3 deg orb is being used, but if something like this is real, then the averaging-out of results should automatically centre in the right place.

This type of progressive graph is something I often use now, because they can show us if a high peak in a graph was caused at a particular stage in the data's timeline by such things as astronomical phenomena we had overlooked, or a direct cause, or in the case of outer planets, a batch of data in a small time-frame. For example, a graph in a survey may show that astro-factor-x was present 15% more often than the expected rate with 1000 samples over a 100 year period, but a progressive graph like this may show that there was a huge spike near the 20 year mark but it had still kept the average score up for many years, even though it was gradually decreasing - thus giving us the wrong impression.

I'm proposing that we make progressive graphs and possibly "movie graphs" (both polar and bar) standard testing tools for any astrological surveys that contain a lot of data, because if readers can see that a trend was consistent as more data was processed, then it should create more interest and more motivation for others to challenge the finding or try and demolish it.

This observation may amount to nothing at all if other large datasets don't show the same trend, or if astronomical phenomena explains it, but even if it is worthless it would show us how we can get impressive looking results that fizzle out - even after 7400 samples.

It's interesting to note that while the graph is fairly consistent and it looks impressive, it is not statistically significant because not enough data being used. This shows us why so many astrological research projects have appeared to have failed, when in reality not enough data was used to arrive at any useful answer in most cases. An example of that is Sun (or planet) sign surveys. It now seems that we need at least 95,000 samples before we can hope to get a good result, and yet some astrologers are prepared to write-off smaller surveys - when they had no hope of producing a good result.
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[John_Townley]

I agree with Bruce that we have to separate astrology that can be investigated by current and still-in-development scientific tools from its ultimate religious or philosophical side or implications, which are beyond such exploration, or we won’t get to first base. I say that despite having come to the area through an early spiritual search and resultant life-changing vision that science and religion are simply branches of the same tree and do not conflict, ultimately, at all. Both sides need to reopen their own windows so they can see each other again as witnesses to a larger, inclusive reality. Just find the closest window and begin.

And, that said, I’m delighted with Ray’s posts (on several threads here, and on the time discussion separately, q.v.) on some new approaches to looking at data that haven’t been used by astrologers before. For a discipline that has so little discipline, astrology can be very hidebound, indeed, and Ray’s approaches are a breath of fresh air. He’s been accused of everything from being a genius to a troll elsewhere in the past, not just in astrology, and his attempts to revisualize what we’re up to both climb out of the box and then inspect the box from the outside. It’s an inclusive but demanding tone you get more in the world of forteana than astrology, and I welcome it here.

[Ray_Murphy]

John wrote:

I agree with Bruce that we have to separate astrology that can be investigated by current and still-in-development scientific tools from its ultimate religious or philosophical side or implications, which are beyond such exploration, or we won’t get to first base. I say that despite having come to the area through an early spiritual search and resultant life-changing vision that science and religion are simply branches of the same tree and do not conflict, ultimately, at all. Both sides need to reopen their own windows so they can see each other again as witnesses to a larger, inclusive reality. Just find the closest window and begin.

If we had an alternative to science for assessing the value of things that are used in astrology, we wouldn't have a problem with it, but while we remain a situation where physical causes need to be put forward, we'll always have a problem with science. In the final analysis, science is no good for "proving" anything in astrology, because proof that something works at a certain level can only come from demonstrations.

Some astrologers say that we have done more than enough demonstrations already, but have we really? Some astrologers and dabblers also say that they have proved the value of it to themselves and that's all that matters. Then we have people saying things like "I started in astrology when Uranus was exactly conjunct my Ascendant, so that proves astrology is valid". Sometimes I imagine that it's like listening to a bunch of people in one of those old fashioned mental asylums, where people say the most absurd things, and the others just keep nodding studiously.

And, that said, I’m delighted with Ray’s posts (on several threads here, and on the time discussion separately, q.v.) on some new approaches to looking at data that haven’t been used by astrologers before. For a discipline that has so little discipline, astrology can be very hidebound, indeed, and Ray’s approaches are a breath of fresh air. He’s been accused of everything from being a genius to a troll elsewhere in the past, not just in astrology, and his attempts to revisualize what we’re up to both climb out of the box and then inspect the box from the outside. It’s an inclusive but demanding tone you get more in the world of forteana than astrology, and I welcome it here.

Yes, enthusiasm can be mistaken for trolling, but dedicated astrologers should easily be able to see where any given poster is coming from after a short time. I've actually been surprised on a few other groups, why some astrologers even bother pretending, when they know their colleagues can plainly see their characters. It's not just me is it -- we CAN all see each other's basic motives can't we?

[Robert_Schmidt]

In my opinion, science and astrology are not presently on a convergent course, nor are they likely to be in the near future. I have not given up all hope that a physical basis for astrology may be found, but I hardly think that the known forces of modern physics are the place to look for it—at least not in the usual manner in which they are studied. I furthermore think that the postulation of hitherto undiscovered forces to account for astrology is a fruitless endeavor and ultimately an act of desperation. Nor do I see how hitching our wagon to the new non-linear dynamics or recent developments in quantum theory (the confirmation of Bell’s theorem) would help at all; in fact, I would argue that such bases would actually end up making it impossible to do astrology at all.

Without yet going into any detail about the reasons for these statements, or addressing one scientific approach which in my view holds out some ray of hope for finding a physical basis, let me first explain what I believe is a real stumbling block to this entire endeavor. It has to do with the origins of Western astrology in the Hellenistic period. Having been engaged in studying and translating these Hellenistic sources for the past 18 years, I have come to the following conclusions: 1) Hellenistic Astrology was not developed to account for existing empirical observations correlating celestial phenomena to human events. 2) It could not have resulted from researchers “trying things out” until various reliable correlations were discovered. 3) The original founders of Hellenistic Astrology did not have any kind of efficient planetary causality in mind when they developed their system; this would not come on the scene until Ptolemy. 4) Hellenistic Astrology was an inspired and highly systematic rational construct based on certain “metaphysical” considerations (which I will not go into here).

Here is my problem. Nearly all the concepts and techniques used in modern astrology were introduced during the Hellenistic era. These include aspects, rulerships, houses, transits, secondary progressions, directive procedures, etc. I maintain that the motive for their introduction had nothing at all to do with a scientific model in the modern sense of the word. Why should we expect that they can be accounted for with modern scientific thinking?

[John_Townley]

Great to see you here, Bob, was hoping you’d chime in on this subject – birthmate PK and myself could use the extra elucidation! I think you’re perfectly right to wonder why the earlier Classical thinkers got it right (or, at least, formulated our current structure) on theory alone, without either the time and data organization to come to empirical conclusions or the tools to observe micro or macrocosmic phenomena. I do believe they were simply extrapolating from their much more technically-limited but nonetheless evolutionarily-structured way in which we still view the world ourselves. Based on what was observed, and what wasn’t (but felt so right then as well as now), they came up with the same set of general observations about universal structure that other societies did then and which we still do. They saw it correctly, in their own scale, and the scale works as you reduce and enlarge it, as it should. And the worse for us, they generally did it more skillfully then than now, as any attempt to read Aristotle should reveal.

I think our fundamental view of our reality structure is so evolutionarily-based that we forget that our every word and ability to express it through language itself is imbued with it. Not to get into arguments for or against Chomsky, but it may be that what’s obvious is obvious, in the very structure of what we can communicate, simply because we came from it and can only observe what we ourselves can articulate, based on what we were able to see through articulation, etc., etc. Ideally, Dr. Doolittle could have spoken to an amoeba, in principle. And, the rhythms of the planets being a constant reset at every level from early on (I think gravity only is needed here, though maybe some revised time structure, q.v. at the “qualities of time” discussion area in ACT) developed what we have, and so what we have is reducible to it, it being a fundamental set of proportions in time and space, hence astrology. None of this is antithetical to the current direction of science, although it has occasionally been so in the recent past. Modern scientific thinking is a subset of the previous, not the other way around.

I agree it is incredibly myopic to get on the bandwagon of one or another scaling set (like quantum physics or theories of cosmology, or subsets of the social sciences), since you restrict and thus lose the balance. Astrologers tend to cling to other people’s rafts in hope of legitimacy here, and that is reprehensible. Everybody should be looking for shared principles here, not looking for an exclusive byline. The idea was always for anyone at any moment to have a really good window on the same big picture, at any level.

[Bruce_Scofield]

Robert said - "In my opinion, science and astrology are not presently on a convergent course, nor are they likely to be in the near future. I have not given up all hope that a physical basis for astrology may be found, but I hardly think that the known forces of modern physics are the place to look for it—at least not in the usual manner in which they are studied. Nor do I see how hitching our wagon to the new non-linear dynamics ...."

For a few years now I have been mining meteorological databases and have found significant correlations between specific planetary alignments and units used to measure weather. Further, it appears that gravity in the form of atmospheric tides is the force, particularly at the poles where tropopause altitude is modulated, and that the process is best understood in the context of a systems model. (Astrology as a mapping technique for dynamical systems.) I'll see if I can get my work published in Nature or Science.

That being said, I suppose what I'm studying scientifically could be considered pre-Hellenistic astrology or almanac astrology. As for the astrology of people, I did outline a possible physical/energy model earlier, but it needs fleshing out and testing, and would probably not account for all the bizarre complexities of Hellenistic or Classical astrology - but you have to start somewhere and correlation is just not enough. Still, I am becoming increasingly confident that the mysteries of astrology will be slowly unraveled, though it may take centuries - and probably very little will be done in our lifetimes. What is of real concern (and the same thing could, and has been, said of things like atomic energy and bio-engineering) is what we do with the knowledge.

[Robert_Schmidt]

I don’t doubt that that the planets can have physical effects on the earth via known physical forces, both direct effects of the kind that Bruce has described, and indirect effects of the sort that Landscheidt studied (the planetary regulation of the movement of the Sun around the barycenter). I believe that science will learn much more about these effects in the future. I can also accept the possibility that effects of this kind on our environment can have some local influence on individuals by altering our states of mind, and this could have some minimally predictable bearing on our actions. However, before the 20th century at least, astrology sought to account for and render intelligible the lives of human beings in all their complexity: whether one would marry or have children or travel, and when such events would occur. I maintain that it is over this “astrology of people” that virtually every causal model must founder—at least causal models involving forces and fields acting according to laws describable in the language of mathematics.

[John_Townley]

If, indeed, astrology actually does explain all that its every practitioner has ever said it does, all reasonable explanations of any sort would founder, along with reason itself. But, I think, it doesn’t, any more than a weather forecast foretells a given gust of wind, though the forecast may be generally windy, and sometimes misses even that. The user fills in entirely too much of the rest himself to fit past or even current versions of practice (science too often does the same). And, on the other side, our ability to measure the quantity and quality of any information in the environment (wherever exactly it comes from) is also not up to the task yet (both practically and theoretically). I would refer back to my charlatan comments from the past…we not only kid others, but also ourselves, entirely too much, but that doesn’t mean something workable isn’t actually going on in the middle. And I’m entirely with Bruce on the practical approach side – if you just speculate and don’t sit down and start writing some code, no program will emerge…

[Robert_Schmidt]

Hi John, good to be interacting again. The gust of wind in a prevailing weather pattern is the perfect metaphor, and perhaps even more than a metaphor in the context of the present discussion. But is that not just the point? Going way back to Ptolemy and before, the weather motif was the main argument for the possibility of astrology. If the celestial bodies can affect something as global as the weather, than all the more so they can affect the lives of individual human beings. However, there are quite a few presuppositions in that little phrase “all the more so”. Are we not talking about the relationship between universal or mundane astrology and natal astrology here? In his second book, Ptolemy mentions that the persons most affected by some universal event affecting large populations will be those who have natal chart contacts with the chart of the universal event (such as an eclipse). And for him the universal always overrules the particular in such cases. These events could not be seen simply in the individual’s natal chart. But the tradition would also hold (rightly or wrongly) that many other events not subject to such overruling causes could be seen through the principles of natal astrology. In other words, the principles operating at the local level are different from those operating at the global level, and not simply scaled down versions of them. To be sure, it is true that during its long development the tradition tended to borrow natal principles and try to fit them into the universal context (the Aries ingress chart) and vice versa. I must say that this blurring of distinctions disturbs me.

The real point of my previous post was to question whether the scientific model of studying forces and fields according to laws describable in the language of mathematics was the best way to go even in the study of universal astrology—whether the “book of nature of nature is ultimately writ in mathematical terms”, to borrow a phrase from Galileo. You no doubt remember that our mutual friend PK questioned whether the laws operative in the context of large complexes of bodies and intricate constellations of forces could be described in mathematical terms at all.

By the way, when are you going to let PK out of the closet? I have some questions to address to him.

[John_Townley]

In the area of mundane vs. natal, these are problems that in astrology need addressing (much less resolving), in a similar way that one addresses other enveloping scaling, where the operations of a larger, macrocosmic, scale (such as where relativity reigns) don’t apply but yet contain a smaller, mesocosmic scale (where Newton reigns, for lack of better nomenclature), to the microcosmic (where quantum, if such there be, reigns). And they are scales not just of size but time and (for us) observation. Worse, in any one of them, local weather trumps trends (the global warming debate being a major showcase, big snow down South, must be global warming, etc.), and then the individual experiences some subset of that. A bit of an actuarial problem, for those in the insurance biz, a biz where astrology yet awaits its profits. This is pretty well accepted and grappled with in general life (especially in environmental science), but very little of that in astrology, yet, I think. It’s the first thing I explain to clients, that only some of this seeps up or down to them (or sideways), and selectively, not always by what’s in the chart (though enough to make it worth looking at).

(Only vaguely apropos, but interesting and worth a glance, an astrology-as-environment piece just came up elsewhere, I linked it on AstroCocktail’s newspage, but worth looking at directly at http://www.pej.org/html/modules.php?op= ... =0&thold=0 – don’t know who the author “emile” is, does anyone?)

Concerning math as an appropriate language, I didn’t meand to suggest that there was any known math that can yet describe all this properly, wherein I agree with PK. But, some of what PK was talking about only 50 years later was described by chaos theory, so perhaps there’s hope. What I really was trying to say is that our written and spoken languages change so much over only a few hundred years (as any translator knows) that it’s hard to keep meaning consistent that way (without a higher language, maybe math), especially when dealing with very broad and complex subjects with lots of modular, built-in implications. A century’s change in a few pivotal meanings can capsize the whole affair and you almost have to start again from scratch, as happened in the Renaissance with a lot of things Classical. In this way, astrology is very closely, if dangerously, related to language (being used as a generalized, proto-language in itself). But because the nature of language structure may in part arise though evolution (hence my apologies to Chomsky), which itself is driven by the larger and longer planetary rhythms, perhaps it recreates itself quite self-similarly each time, fractally (sort of).

And as for PK himself, he tells me he’s staying firmly in the closet until that book a couple of guys wrote about him somehow gets out to the public, along with his own English translation. Like, who speaks German anymore, discounting Germans and Austrians? He thinks he’s done enough, but might give some extra hints along the way (like Deep Throat) if they appear to be on the right track…as I recall, astrologer Professor Seward actually did that for me once, some time back…q.v. for fun at http://www.astrococktail.com/articles/seward.html