Also, also, as noted on another thread:
“It turns out that roughly 68% of the universe is dark energy. Dark matter makes up about 27%. The rest - everything on Earth, everything ever observed with all of our instruments, all normal matter - adds up to less than 5% of the universe.” NASA
Where does astrology fit into all of this? Given that 95% of the universe is not even “normal matter”?
Also, also, also, are we going to do this or not? 
Astrology Critics Don’t Even Know What They’re Criticizing
The urge to cry ‘pseudoscience!’ may be about something else entirely
Stephanie Georgopulos
Nov 15, 2019
No getting around this of course. Natural cycles explain many things. From the four seasons weatherwise here in Baltimore to the wet and the dry seasons in other parts of the world. Sunspots on the Sun, the shifts in Earth’s magnetic field, ice ages. And so many more: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cycles
And they impact on human interactions in many profound ways. They precipitate consequences that can be both predicted and measured. We can prepare for them.
The question here then is how are the cycles embedded in things that astrologers predict and measure able to be demonstrated as in fact something that all rational men and women are obligated to defend.
Ah, but my “thing” with astrology – as with philosophy, science and religion – shifts the discussion instead to the world of identity, conflicting value judgments and political economy. What can astrologers tell me about the existential interaction between the celestial bodies and the behaviors that I choose on this side of the grave as that becomes embedded in the fate of “I” on the other side of the grave?
Given a particular set of circumstances that the astrologers themselves would be familiar with.
Astrology Critics Don’t Even Know What They’re Criticizing
The urge to cry ‘pseudoscience!’ may be about something else entirely
Stephanie Georgopulos
Nov 15, 2019
Really, I challenge anyone here who subscribes to astrology on any level to intertwine these points into actual experiences from their own lives.
You have acquired this “fluency” in regard to the “language of energy”. How then are the constructed words applicable to behaviors you choose in the either/or world? And, of more importance to me, to the reactions of others who criticize the behaviors that you choose in regard to conflicting goods in the is/ought world.
Note how through astrology in these contexts, you have in fact achieved an “expanded awareness”. Of what exactly? How specifically do the celestial bodies facilitate your acquiring a “clearer picture of who you are”.
And in regard to a particular context in which human behaviors do come into conflict over moral and political value judgments, how might the celestial bodies allow one to acquire a more perfect understanding not only of why we behave as we do but how perhaps we ought to behave as well.
Astrology Critics Don’t Even Know What They’re Criticizing
The urge to cry ‘pseudoscience!’ may be about something else entirely
Stephanie Georgopulos
Nov 15, 2019
Yes, that is one way to put it. I don’t pretend to have a sophisticated understanding of astrology. And I wouldn’t doubt at all that many of my assumptions about it are flawed.
But let those who do claim to have a sophisticated, unflawed understanding of it, take their assumptions out into the world of human interactions and note the manner in which astrology is able to react in a sophisticated and unflawed manner given the existential juncture that is of most interest to me: identity, value judgments and political economy.
And then this part: astrotalk.com/astrology-blog/li … gy-behind/
Sure, that’s a reasonable set of assumptions as well. So, let astronomers and astrologers focus in on a particular aspect of the universe and give their own explanations for why the celestial bodies behave as they do. But not many astronomers then take that leap from celestial bodies to the bodies that we ourselves make the trek in from the cradle to the grave. Bodies out in a world that encompasses acquiring a sense of self, an “I” that often comes into conflict morally and politically with others who sense themselves to be very, very different. It is here that astrology is of most interest to me.
Okay, okay. But in regard to astrology given a specific “situation” that we might find ourselves in, what is it rational to believe? And how is this belief then reasonably demonstrated?
hey people only stopped “believing” astrology when there tsjurttsj wes saying ok we burn u if you don’t quit teaching it.
When science overtook the tschurch in the late 1800s astrology rose up right along with it and will keep rizering …
people people don’t want it to be true like truth is so many times a bully.
Astro bully.
Notice how he uses the word ‘sophisticated’ which the writer of the article did not use. The writer of the article talks about flawed assumptions. The OP of this thread is a dismissal, which includes mind reading of people who believe in astrology. That’s someone who feels confident dismissing something he now admits he doesn’t know much about. That’s what the article is talking about.
He is trolling. He could ask for justifications from astrologers in his OP, with dismissing and mind reading first. What he is doing is starting off with a charged post intended to trigger defensiveness and off balance responses. If he was interested, and knows little, he could just ask for information. But he does not do this. He is not interested. He wants something else.
And here suddenly astrology must be unflawed? And note the bizzare language: Let those who claim to have a sophisticated…etc. As if they bear some onus.
And then this part: astrotalk.com/astrology-blog/li … gy-behind/
And here he slides from social scientists to astronomers, and he doesn’t seem to understand that astrology does not weigh in on why celestial bodies behave as they do.
Every time what he considers an objectivism is approached it is done with a mass of assumptions on his part. When this is pointed out, none of that matters. He is allowed to use his belief system to make claims about the internal motivations and experiences of all the people in a group, but other people must demonstrate to all rational people whatever they believe. He has no onus, for some reason. He regularly and systematically slides the points made by others into ones convenient to him: straw men, red herrings, weaker versions of their positions and more fallacies.
At the same time his litmus test for what all rational people should be convinced by is whether he is convinced by something. Someone who uses fallacies and feels no need to justify his positions and judgments and mind reading is perhaps not the best first litmus test of rationality.
Sure, if this is what you believe. And, in believing it, that more or less becomes all the “demonstration” needed to make it true. In your head.
But it doesn’t have much to do with the points I raise about astrology above.
It doesn’t bring astrology out into the world of human interactions revolving the things that interest me: identity, value judgments and political economy.
It doesn’t delve into how astrologers assess the existence of “I” on the other side of the grave.
And you never have responded to my post above:
Uh-oh. The thread is no longer about astrology. It’s about Curly insisting that once again, with or without a nudge from the stars, I’m the problem here. I’m “trolling”.
No context of course. Just another caustic intellectual contraption. A thumping…by way of fulmination.
Okay, I challenge him to bring these accusations to a new thread. Either in the philosophy forum or in the rant room. We can explore each other’s point of view intelligently and civilly…really making an effort to understand what the other is trying to say in regard to particular contexts. Or we can reconfigure that into an all out polemical brawl.
I’m good either way.
One further point I was going to make.
Astrology is yet another set of systems, not one thing. IOW it is followed by a lot of different people with a lot of different values. You cannot generate values, certainly no objective ones based astrology. It is not objectivist in this sense at all. Once you have your values, objectivist or not, you can certainly apply them to readings or make judgements of other people in some astrological context, but you cannot say doing X is immoral and justifiy this with astrology. Someone probably does this, somewhere, but there really is no basis for it. Identity is also subject to the metaphysics of the user. I would say most sophisticated astrologers would see tendencies to certain qualities in birth charts and that individual qualities DO change over time due to experiences (there is a whole set of ways of charting this). So, what one is like is not fixed and even given birth chart X rather different people could arise, given their economic class, the presence of other siblings, the culture they were born in and how this would interact (fit) with their personality tendencies…and so on. At an abstract level two people born at the same time and place could be described similarly, would have similarities, but a lot would be contingent. Political economy would be part of that, though many astrologers probably don’t think about that so much, unless that is a large part of their individual viewpoint. Just like a lot of psychologists, certainly in the past, tended not to mull so much over on that wing of human experience and the role it might be playing in current psychological issues. Just as they did not think much about cross-cultural issues.
But if we look at this ‘interest’ and then compare it to the OP, I see someone either going about a search for knowledge about something he knows little about in an extremely poor manner - just throwing his assumptions out as if they are correct enough to justify rudeness and mindreading - or that the presented goal is not the real goal. Often people can lie to themselves about this kind of thing.
‘I was just…’
Seems highly unlikely. The OP has all the earmarks of trolling. It probably seemed safer, giver the way astrology is viewed by many. So on this topic, rather than others where he is expressing his ‘interest’ he was more honest up front. He’s not interested. And he might get to frustrate or annoy some people who believe in something he does not.
Debunking Astrology – The Planets Just Aren’t That Into You
At the A Science Enthusiast website
Okay, the first thing that pops into my head when I hear the word “predict”, is the manner in which it seems [somehow] to subsume the future into the present [somehow] subsumed in the past.
If over and again you predict the future and over and again the prediction comes true, how, in an autonomous world, to explain that other than in suggesting that the future is only what it could ever be.
Now, with astrologers, I’m presuming that they embrace some measure of human autonomy. After all, if not, then the predictions themselves would become but necessary manifestations of the laws of matter. They would predict only that which they could never not predict.
So, free will in place, the prediction is based on the position of the celestial bodies preconfiguring one set of human interactions instead of another.
But: How exactly? And isn’t it true that to the extent the celestial bodies are embedded in what the future must be, that can only detract from our own free will?
Okay, is there anyone here who connects the dots between the present and the future by way of daily horoscopes? Or, if you just read them for fun and marveled at their accuracy, cite some specific examples. How detailed were they?
I will Google my own horoscope [as an Aries] and check out the first site: astrology.com/horoscope/daily/aries.html
AUG 29, 2020: Some magic could happen to you today, but you’ll have to slow down in order to truly experience it. Specific details are what makes a day special, and if you whisk through things too quickly, you will never notice them! When someone gives you a compliment, will it go unnoticed because you’re too busy checking your phone? Don’t let that happen. Look up, look out at the world, and engage. Your life is not as harried as you’re making it out to be.
Almost nothing of this is applicable to me. But it is vague enough that dots can be connected to some things, sure.
And though astrology is a lot more complicated than daily horoscopes, 1/12th of the world’s population are Aries. So, is this then “generally” applicable to all of them?
Debunking Astrology – The Planets Just Aren’t That Into You
At the A Science Enthusiast website
And that’s before – way before – we get to the part that is of interest to me: discussing with those who do have a sophisticated understanding of astrology how the celestial bodies factor into our moral and political prejudices on this side of grave and the fate of “I” on the other side of it. Are they “prejudices” because they are necessarily impacted on by the stars and the planets and the moons? Does that make them at least up to a point, beyond our autonomous control? And, in astrology, is there the equivalent of reincarnation or Heaven or Nirvana on the other side?
How does this “up there”/“out there” work?
Again, forget about how all of this propels you into the future in regard to the things you think, feel, say and do. My interest lies in astrology’s role insofar as these things are reacted to by others in such a way that conflicting goods become embedded in human interactions. Do the celestial bodies favor one rather than another moral and political prejudice? How does that work?
Here’s the thing. While astrologers may not be able to explain definitively why and how this is the case, those who scoff at astrology are not able to argue definitively that while celestial bodies do have some impact on the lives we live this does not include the stuff embedded in horoscopes and more sophisticated assessments. We just don’t anything at all about these relationships definitively. It would be like establishing definitively that God does not exist. So, from my frame of mind, the obligation lies far more with those making the claims for something rather than against it.
I am a Pisces but astrology is evil, but I still look like Pisces and I am also emotional. (like Pisces)
How can we ignore it. To get to heaven we have to stay pure.
I don’t believe in any of it, but it can be uncannily descriptive. But that may be just some kind of cognitive fallacy at work.
From the Lord Saturn thread:
Outward mask? What is that supposed to mean?
My interest in astrology revolves entirely around my interest in philosophy itself. And that revolves around probing the question, “how ought one to live?”
More specifically, how ought one to live rationally and morally on this side of the grave in order to attain that which one imagines the fate of “I” to be on the other side of the grave.
And then the part where someone is willing to at least make an attempt to connect the dots between what they believe about astrology “in their head” and what they are able to demonstrate is in fact true about it. Objectively. For all of us.
As for the soul, let’s put off what you know about mine, and explore more substantively what you claim to know about your own. And how you would go about demonstrating that it does in fact exist.
If, however, that has little or nothing to do with your own interest in astrology just move on to others.
Or, sure, turn it all into a “clever” jest?
On the other hand, if a woman is pregnant and is agonizing over whether or not to have an abortion, what can an astrologist provide to her in the way of information and options?
Also, something else you often provide us with here: gibberish:
Unless of course it is not gibberish at all.
Perhaps you might be willing to note how in fact all of this is pertinent given your own quest to answer the question, “how ought one to live?” Given particular sets of circumstances.
Then connect the dots between that and VO and…Nietzsche?
_
…as we now approach that time in the moon’s phase again…
ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop … 4&t=196656 ; )
On the other hand…
scientificamerican.com/arti … full-moon/
[b]Water at Work?
Following Aristotle and Pliny the Elder, some contemporary authors, such as Miami psychiatrist Arnold Lieber, have conjectured that the full moon’s supposed effects on behavior arise from its influence on water. The human body, after all, is about 80 percent water, so perhaps the moon works its mischievous magic by somehow disrupting the alignment of water molecules in the nervous system.
But there are at least three reasons why this explanation doesn’t “hold water,” pardon the pun. First, the gravitational effects of the moon are far too minuscule to generate any meaningful effects on brain activity, let alone behavior. As the late astronomer George Abell of the University of California, Los Angeles, noted, a mosquito sitting on our arm exerts a more powerful gravitational pull on us than the moon does. Yet to the best of our knowledge, there have been no reports of a “mosquito lunacy effect.” Second, the moon’s gravitational force affects only open bodies of water, such as oceans and lakes, but not contained sources of water, such as the human brain. Third, the gravitational effect of the moon is just as potent during new moons—when the moon is invisible to us—as it is during full moons.
There is a more serious problem for fervent believers in the lunar lunacy effect: no evidence that it exists. Florida International University psychologist James Rotton, Colorado State University astronomer Roger Culver and University of Saskatchewan psychologist Ivan W. Kelly have searched far and wide for any consistent behavioral effects of the full moon. In all cases, they have come up empty-handed. By combining the results of multiple studies and treating them as though they were one huge study—a statistical procedure called meta-analysis—they have found that full moons are entirely unrelated to a host of events, including crimes, suicides, psychiatric problems and crisis center calls. In their 1985 review of 37 studies entitled “Much Ado about the Full Moon,” which appeared in one of psychology’s premier journals, Psychological Bulletin, Rotton and Kelly humorously bid adieu to the full-moon effect and concluded that further research on it was unnecessary.
Persistent critics have disagreed with this conclusion, pointing to a few positive findings that emerge in scattered studies. Still, even the handful of research claims that seem to support full-moon effects have collapsed on closer investigation. In one study published in 1982 an author team reported that traffic accidents were more frequent on full-moon nights than on other nights. Yet a fatal flaw marred these findings: in the period under consideration, full moons were more common on weekends, when more people drive. When the authors reanalyzed their data to eliminate this confounding factor, the lunar effect vanished.[/b]
Of course Donald Trump was always warning us about those science guys.
On the other hand, Saturn is a lot bigger than the Moon.
Hello forum, here’s something to consider. One of my hobbies used to be figuring out the secret behind Astrology, it’s a fun intellectual exercise, and is slightly relevant to the philosophy of human consciousness (it says something about the inescapability of the human brain / human mind identity, which is consistent with my nondualist philosophy).
From what I’ve seen, there are generally two kinds of people, the irrational ones who beleve in all those charts and our fate being written in the stars, and are incapable of critically examining their beliefs. And the irrational ones who are fairly convinced that there’s nothing to Astrology, consider themselves to be rational, and adopt this smarter-than-thou attitude. Very little middle ground between the two camps, imo it’s a good indicator of how most people can’t think outside the box.
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 at the Equator though, it’s mostly a thing in places with 4 rather different seasons, and a great variance in the amount of sunlight. That’s why Astrology is such a big thing in Europe, the US and China. Remember humans migrated from Africa, evolved under pretty much constant summer for millions of years before that, so this whole seasons business is still somewhat alien to our physiology. Now I may be wrong on this one, but from I’ve seen, 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 a great taboo of course in a culture where we pretend that everyone is equal psychologically. I think there were some statistical studies that shoved that the birthday does correlate with things like career choices and suceptibility to various health issues, but they didn’t dare to 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. 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.
This is the start of the investigation into the ‘real’ Astrology. It gets somewhat complicated beyond this, over the years I seem to have discovered a hidden double-pattern: we get two major influences hardwired at 6 months (I guess when the brain more or less gets finalized) and at 9 months (at birth), the other influences appear to be much lesser than this. Trying to find the exact mechanisms how the various Sun signs are created is pretty fun, I think I’ve identified some of the seasonal influences by now, won’t go into detail. It’s all pretty muddy and uncertain.
This kind of psychological knowledge is unbeliavably useful in everyday life though, it helps understand the odd behaviours of so many people, where most others just scratch their heads. It works at a more basic level than for example the MBTI, but one can combine them. I can also guess someone’s Sun sign with like 30% accuracy where random chance should be some 8-10%.
A lot of people who get into astrology tho don’t take it that seriously, they just have fun with it, I wouldn’t call those people objectivists, they think it’s pretty, or entirely subjective.
_
The Smartest Zodiac Sign
Whether you’re an authoritative Aries or a caring Cancer, every zodiac sign has its attractive traits. These astrological measurements can even predict everything from your romantic compatibility to your health. But when it comes to intelligence, which sign has the most brains?
The smartest zodiac sign is actually a tie between Aquarius and Scorpio, astrologists say—but they share the top spot for two very different reasons. Those born under the Aquarius sign have the highest levels of analytical intelligence, which is measured by cognitive ability and IQ. Scorpios, on the other hand, have more perceptive smarts; they are best at realistically assessing and understanding the world at large.
That’s not to say that other zodiac signs aren’t intelligent in their own ways. In fact, Geminis and Libras have plenty of mental smarts too, according to Neil Crabtree, an astrologist at the Mayo School of Astrology. Cancer and Pisces are the most emotionally intelligent; in other words, they are excel at recognizing and reasoning with their own and others’ feelings.
On the other hand, the earth signs—Taurus, Virgo, and Capricorn—demonstrate practical intelligence. And the fire signs (Aries, Leo, and Sagittarius) tend to be the most intuitive, making them more inclined to take risks and fill leadership positions.
I’m Sagittarius born in the Chinese year of the red dragon.
Whatever the fuck that means.