What is behind Astrology, and how this is relevant to philosophy
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What is behind Astrology, and how this is relevant to philosophy
The effect varies from being small to non-existent from person to person. Yet often it happens that someone reads their general Sun sign description and says: how the hell does this description know that I have THAT odd personality trait of all possible traits, even though it's rather rare?
It's pretty simple, Astrology has been around for thousands of years and still won't go away, because it also has to do with a very mundane yearly cycle of nature, it has to do with seasonal biology. During gestation and shortly after birth, as the human brain is forming, it's fairly susceptible to whatever conditions are typical for the seasons. The amount of sunlight, the temperatures, the human body's hormonal reactions to all the conditions, etc. Depending on which roughly 12 months were the first 12 months of our lives including gestation, slight variances get hard-wired into our brains and remain permanently. Even as adult we can slightly experience the influences of the seasons on us if we pay attention, apparently the newborn brain is that much more sensible to them.
This doesn't work closer to the Equator though, and closer to the poles. It's mostly a thing in places with 4 rather different seasons, and a great variance in the amount of sunlight. As we approach the latitudes with the maximum variance between the 4 season, the effect gets stronger and stronger.
That's why Astrology is such a big thing in Europe, the US and China, they are on the right latitudes. Remember, humans migrated from Africa, evolved under pretty much constant summer for millions of years before that, so this whole 4 seasons business is still somewhat alien to our physiology. Now I may be wrong on this one, but from I've seen and read, this seasonal biology affects Afro-Americans even more, which is obviously because they just recently got moved to a place with 4 seasons.
So yes, the date of birth does matter. This is sort of a taboo of course in a culture where we pretend that everyone is born to be the same neurologically, psychologically, and it's only a matter of free will what kind of person we want to become. I think there were some statistical studies that shoved that the birthday does correlate with things like career choices and susceptibility to various health issues, but they didn't investigate beyond that.
The arbitrary 12 Sun signs are a reflection of this yearly cycle. People born in the middle of a Sun sign are more likely to have typical traits of that sign. People born on cusps are a mixture of the two signs. It's more accurate to divide the year into 30-40 parts imo (decan astrology). The rest of Astrology: the other kinds of signs like rising signs for example, the planets, the elements, the charts, the fate etc. are all nonsense, but as long as we base them on the Sun signs, there will always be a grain of truth to them. Planets don't have magical effects on our personality, don't signify our fate, don't signify some underlying mechanism, don't predict the future. Only the Sun and the Moon have major effects on us, but in completely different ways.
This is the start of the investigation into the 'real' Astrology. I've been looking into this thing on and off for a few years, seems to me that we get two major imprinting events, one roughly 3 months before birth (when the nervous system sort of gets finalized) and one right after birth (first direct exposure to the outside world). Sun signs might actually be seen to be the result of these two major seasonal imprinting effects, and a less important continuous general seasonal impinting throughout the rest of gestation. The effects are SMALL, sometimes negligable, but biology can't be pretended away, so the effect is non-zero.
This kind of psychological insight can be very useful in everyday life btw, at least in my country. It works at a more basic, more fundamental level than for example the MBTI, it causes anomalies in our basic wiring. MBTI works on a less deep and more active level, I'd say combining the two approaches to try to explain the odd behaviour of others seems to work often, and with some practice one can learn to guess the Sun signs of others with a success rate that's at least double of that of random chance. Even the outside appearance can slightly vary from sign to sign, on average. There are a few signs that are easier to recognize than the other signs. Again: on AVERAGE.
All this can even be seen as the yearly cycle of personality anomaly, or personality pathology, but it does create a lot of different personalities on said latitudes, which makes life much more fun imo. Even if some signs may objectively be better than other signs, on average.
I once spent a few months on an Astrology forum by the way, where people from the same signs came together (at that time, I was trying to figure out how the hell the Aquarius emotion switch works, because I ran into it a few times in my life, then I decided to stay a little), and it was sort of hilarious to see how people with the same oddities came together and their oddities got amplified.
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So when it comes to philosophy, this again only confirms what we already learned from neuroscience and modern psychology in the last 100-200 years: that the brain-mind are either identical / one and the same thing, or at least perfectly correlated. Actually this may be even more true than how some people would like it: what they thought were their own individual personality quirks, may have actually been sort of predetermined by a yearly cycle before they were even born.
I think I won't reply to this topic, but feel free to discuss, just felt like typing it down. This is a very difficult subject with tons of conjecture and some of the above may be wrong, but I think by and large it stands true.
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Re: What is behind Astrology, and how this is relevant to philosophy
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Re: What is behind Astrology, and how this is relevant to philosophy
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Re: What is behind Astrology, and how this is relevant to philosophy
My own experience is, that even if a predicted family harmony turns out to be a quarrel , one shouldn't bother too much about it.
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Re: What is behind Astrology, and how this is relevant to philosophy
It survives wholy by the gullible taking notice of confirmational bias, and fake conincidence.
This is and can be zero basis for it. You are better off reading the entrails of dead sheep.
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Re: What is behind Astrology, and how this is relevant to philosophy
― Marcus Tullius Cicero
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Re: What is behind Astrology, and how this is relevant to philosophy
Instead I'll focus on what astrologers hoped to achieve before gamers entered the arena. Humans like to classify. We notice and label the differrences in everything, with taxonomy of life forms being rather a fine (and occasionally, dark) art.
So, putting aside idealistic denials, we cannot help but to notice differences between people, that there are types. People with relatively similar traits and predispositions.
There has long been deep scepticism about classifying people. As Atla noted, there's a narrative that claims that we are all the same, that there are no types of people, that humans are too complex and special to be classified. This narrative is not aligned with reality.
There are definitely variant personality and character types, but the number of different possible trait bundles presents challenges. So personality tests like Meyer-Briggs and Big Five are routinely used in industry because, when it's a matter of money rather than ideals, facts must be faced. Types exist. These tests have many limits and no doubt better models will appear. Still they are an improvement and refinement of old classification models like astrology and Jungian archetypes.
I think a similar approach to taxonomy (sans the forbidding Latin naming conventions) would be the best approach to this. You would start with major subgroups, just as there's mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, molluscs, insects, crustaceans and so forth. These phyla and classes are broken into order, family, genus and species. Nature is vastly more complex than a human mind, so classification of humans should not be terribly difficult for specialists to achieve.
However, there is much political pushback against strictly classifying people, and not just because humans can change personality, while organisms can't change species. Humans naturally fear of being as objectified as we objectify other animals; we know well what happens to those who are objectified.
The historical precedents don't help. The Indian caste system. Apartheid and segregation. Religions discriminating against others. Geez, today we even fight about gender, as though being born with certain organs was an achievement. The Chinese social credit system effectively classifies people into good, intermediate and bad. Societal attempts to classify people tend to focus on function rather than form - how functional a person is in society rather than the kind of personality they are, which results in gross simplifications.
So the intellectual challenge of reliably classifying humans remains. Astrology was a solid start but there's obviously been scope creep since the idea first appeared, with the scene littered with fakes.
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Re: What is behind Astrology, and how this is relevant to philosophy
- There are reasonable natural explanations behind the concurrence of natural events and historical events, as well as behind people's tendency to classify humans by personality types.
- Modern and ancient astrology classified humans by personality types determined by the position of stars at the date of birth and linked historical events to them, too.
- Therefore, determining personality types and explaining historical events by the position of stars at the date of birth (astrology) is justifiable TODAY as a reasonable natural explanation.
― Marcus Tullius Cicero
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Re: What is behind Astrology, and how this is relevant to philosophy
However, that political angle is, with all due respect, baloney. So let's examine the above posts without an eye jaundiced by today's culture wars.
Posts above treat the general idea of astrology as interesting, considering how the time of year you were born can make a difference to one's life. There was no suggestion by anyone that astrology practitioners were legit, so you misrepresented several people at once with your political angle. That the field is full of fakers is not the point.
The idea that the initial state of a process can have a profound effect on what happens afterwards is logically fine, as per chaos theory / the butterfly effect. Also, as per chaos theory, working out how future changes may play out as a result of early formative states requires more than intuitions. As Steve pointed out, subsequent conditioning seems much more influential than the time of year one is born.
What of temperature and in utero development? After all, we know that temperature can change the pre-hatching gender of animals like turtles. So one would expect impacts on humans too https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/full/10.1289/EHP6221
With climates warming, the effect of hot weather on foetuses may become an important issue as the world's temperature rises.Several epidemiological studies over the past five years have reported associations between high temperatures and adverse pregnancy outcomes, including preterm birth, stillbirth, and low birth weight (LBW),3,4 as well as congenital heart defects.5 (At least two studies have also examined ambient temperature in relation to neural tube defects.6,7) Each study has its strengths, weaknesses, and caveats, but experts point toward the consistent and concerning signal that’s starting to materialize in the literature.
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Re: What is behind Astrology, and how this is relevant to philosophy
Astrology doesn't work whatsoever in Panama.
(By the way I read somewhere that in China, some managers tend to be rather unwilling to hire people from certain signs, Virgo for example.)
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Re: What is behind Astrology, and how this is relevant to philosophy
I'd say the established tribal division on the subject of astrology is more between people who regard themselves as rationally or scientifically minded (and who see the humanities types as woolly headed) and people who regard themselves as more humanities-oriented (and see those sciencey types as cold and calculating killjoys). I've heard various sciencey types, like Carl Sagan, going a tad unnecessarily over the top (in my view) in saying what nonsense astrology is. Typical Scorpio!Sy Borg wrote:Count, I appreciate that there is a culture war going on, where astrology is seen as being on the side of the theocratic radical right, whose believers might wear Viking horns while storming the Capitol...
I suspect some people on the theocratic radical right might actually be against astrology because of perceived links to paganism or something daft like that. Like the those people who refuse to let their kids read Harry Potter books.
Perhaps they should all lighten up and read their horoscope, and if it says something like:
"There are opportunities for achievement, so stay open to new energy coming your way, Scorpio. If you don't turn at these fortuitous junctions, you may never find this spot in the road again. What comes your way may not be a pot of gold, but it will certainly be the rainbow that leads you to it. If nothing else, you'll find opportunities that strengthen your spirit, preparing you for adversity later."
as mine did when I googled it just now, say "Oh good, that's nice! I will definitely be staying open to new energy and rainbows and stuff" and then forget it and get on with the rest of the day.
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Re: What is behind Astrology, and how this is relevant to philosophy
Most likely, Argentinian and Australian horoscope writers are just trying to sell newspapers.
Just as an anecdote, without implying it amounts to evidence, I knew one horoscope writer. He was a regular journalist who one day was assigned the new horoscope section. And so he took the task with tireless determination: he came up with a nice Indian-sounding pseudonym, made-up tales of trips to the East and learning from the true masters. Of course, as easy as it is, all of his horoscopes were all made up and he became very popular, also taking money from people and manipulating them to do things for him. As I got all the insights from a person in the newspaper staff, I remember being upset at the shameless conning behavior of this man, but then some years later I realized: wait, that's more or less what all astrologers do around the world.
― Marcus Tullius Cicero
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Re: What is behind Astrology, and how this is relevant to philosophy
I didn't see, neither did I mention anything about cultural wars in the OP. I didn't give any political angle in my response and if I gave any, I would like to know what it was, because I don't recognize it myself. My point was straightforward: the discipline of astrology is a scam. I could have said the same about homeopathy, chiropractic, spiritism, ESP, and so on. That means there's no unspoiled entry level of astrology that then gets contaminated. Astrology cannot be rectified, as the old saying goes: tree that grows crooked, never its trunk straightens.Sy Borg wrote: ↑September 2nd, 2021, 1:48 am Count, I appreciate that there is a culture war going on, where astrology is seen as being on the side of the theocratic radical right, whose believers might wear Viking horns while storming the Capitol.
However, that political angle is, with all due respect, baloney. So let's examine the above posts without an eye jaundiced by today's culture wars.
Posts above treat the general idea of astrology as interesting, considering how the time of year you were born can make a difference to one's life. There was no suggestion by anyone that astrology practitioners were legit, so you misrepresented several people at once with your political angle. That the field is full of fakers is not the point.
That's fine as far as non-predeterministic or non-deterministic systems go. It has very little to do with what astrology typically claims, which is predeterministic.Sy Borg wrote: ↑September 2nd, 2021, 1:48 am The idea that the initial state of a process can have a profound effect on what happens afterwards is logically fine, as per chaos theory / the butterfly effect. Also, as per chaos theory, working out how future changes may play out as a result of early formative states requires more than intuitions. As Steve pointed out, subsequent conditioning seems much more influential than the time of year one is born.
What of temperature and in utero development? After all, we know that temperature can change the pre-hatching gender of animals like turtles. So one would expect impacts on humans too https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/full/10.1289/EHP6221
Again, that's fine, but nothing related to the claims coming from astrology.
― Marcus Tullius Cicero
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Re: What is behind Astrology, and how this is relevant to philosophy
History shows it's been a long trip in travelling from imagination to reality and that which veritably underpins it. Obviously, we haven't yet reached destination.
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Re: What is behind Astrology, and how this is relevant to philosophy
Astrology as most westerners know it started out with the ancient Egyptians. Until around the 17th century, astrology was orthodoxy.
https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2011/02/15 ... astrology/The Renaissance belief in astrology was based on the micro-cosmos macro-cosmos theory or as above so below. This theory said that the world of the heaven or celestial sphere is reflected in the normal world or terrestrial sphere and that the ability to read the one enabled predictions in the other. This philosophy was inherited from Greek philosophy and was also present in the interpretation of Aristotle that dominated mediaeval philosophy. As Aristotle was replaced as the foundation of natural philosophy by the new scientific philosophy of the 17th century and disappeared out of the academic realm, the micro-cosmos macro-cosmos theory also lost its foothold in academia and, with it, astrology. Although this process was general throughout Europe, it would appear that the reasons for the final loss of respectability for astrology varied from country to country. This has been researched in some countries, such as Britain, but not in others, such as Germany.
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