Astrology has been historically regarded as fake science
Quite rightly so, astrology breaks the fundamental pillar of logic:- Correlation doesn’t imply causation. Just because mars was in retrograde motion when your flight was delayed; Doesn’t imply mars causes flight delay.
But you need to understand what astrology truly started with….rather than trying to see it with a scientific lens. Astro (western one atleast) started in Mesopotamia arguing that “sky mirrors the earth and earth mirrors the sky”
They didn’t talk about causations or distinguished b/w astrology and astronomy. Hoards of star-gazers just looked up at the stars and recorded its movements matching it with happenings on Earth.
And they saw correlations:- Mars shining brighter in sky before wars; Eclipses showing crush of the previous regimes and start of new (Battle of Gaugamela, 331 BCE)
Generations recorded the correlations. Slowly it became more formalised, concept of 12 houses was made, first birth charts were made in ~400 BC. Mesopotamia’s Egyptians, Persians, Greek, Islamic astrologies combined. Far away Vedic astrology flourished.
Astrologers even strived to legitimise astrology:- Al-Kindi a polymath from Abbasid dynasty argued about the existence of stellar rays, what will eventually be called ‘energies’.
He argued that heavenly bodies, human actions emit rays and its by interaction of these rays that make “stars mirror the earth, and earth mirror the sky”
What I posit is NOT that Al-Kindi was right with his stellar rays (or energies) theory. I agree astrology isn’t science. BUT only with science’s current definition. Bear with me an example:-
Lets say, you are a scientist who has never seen English, and you have been given a large amount of English text, your task is simple:-
Discover a way to predict the next character….given a set of english text.
Now you can go about in a Million ways, trying to make up laws in predicting the next character, completing an english sentence but you won’t be able to do it. But as any Computer Science Engineer will tell you, there is a way.
Just build a ChatGPT over it. And now any sentence you type, it can complete. i.e give it millions of input-output pairs. And then train it, +ve reward for correct output predictions, -ve reward for wrong predictions.
Ultimately AI learns on predicting the next character. And thus by just seeing input-output pairs (or correlations) it is able to predict the next character and create actual meaningful text. Thus completing your original task as a scientist:- Predict the next character.
But were you a scientist?! In the name of science, I’ll ask, why was “e” chosen after “abcd”, you won’t know the answer. You will tell me, you just saw a lot of correlating data (input-output pairs) and learnt “e” comes after it.
I’ll say “Correlation doesn’t imply causation”
This is what has happened with science. In the spirit of logic, we have reduced science to if-else statements but it truly is an AI model.
Thousands of years ago, our Mesopotamians, Egyptians, Greek, Vedic astrologers while correlating star movements and human activities….and then using it to predict next event. May not be doing science, but were practising AI.