25/02/2025
THE TRUTH ABOUT ASTROLOGY, INTUITION, AND WHETHER AI CAN REPLACE ASTROLOGERS
(This article was originally published in Dr. Soham D. Bhaduri's blog on The Times of India)
Before we discuss the main topic of this piece, let’s have a quick look at the context that we have in hand. The world we inhabit, as I’ve covered in one of my previous blogs, is the grandest complex system there is. A complex system is one comprised of innumerable elements and processes interacting with one another in ways that are largely unpredictable. Given this inherently unpredictability, the best one can do is, frankly put, to make the best estimates and guesses about how things might turn out, keep an open mind, be ready to embrace change, and espouse a healthy amount of flexibility. If that sounds unscientific, let me tell you that the complex systems paradigm has been used exhaustively across both the hard and soft sciences to gain unprecedented insights into how everything from human physiology to corporate organizations operate. And even if we let all of these aside, isn’t that how life itself works?
When I speak of astrology as embedded in the science of complex systems, what I really suggest is that astrology is a system that can help us navigate part of the complex and unpredictable world that we live in by indicating the probabilities that are likely to manifest in our lives. As you would have understood by now, that’s how all complex systems are meant to be navigated. And the world that we live in being arguably the most complex system out there, any probabilities so indicated have smaller odds of coming true than, say, when the complex system in question is a corporate organization instead. But this is often precisely where the apostles of science lose it.
Not even a microscopic fraction of the over two-hundred-thousand-year-old history of modern humans has been spent in the luxury of having hard scientific evidence to back crucial day-to-day decisions. The primeval human foraging in the harsh savannahs had little more than educated guesswork at their disposal when faced with uncertain situations, and the fact that their lineage thrives to this day is proof that many of those educated guesses indeed worked as expected. Ever since the dawn of scientific cockiness, the term “intuition” has been so passionately mocked that the very meaning of the term has been lost on people. And intuition has been so widely misunderstood that many of us conflate it with stuff like supernatural faculties and oracular divination. Intuition is none of that.
At bottom, intuition is the ability, innate to all humans in varying degrees, to make fairly accurate guesses in view of the limited information that is available in situations where black and white truths remain elusive. Everything else, where accurate guesses appear out of nowhere and in the absence of even the minimum amount of information, can be termed divination. It should be obvious by now that the more complex the system, the more unpredictable it is likely to be – and the stronger the intuition that it calls for. And when this happens, intuition increasingly starts to seem like unscientific divination. But the truth remains that it isn’t.
Astrology deals with arguably the most complex system that there is. There are canonical rules for prediction that are enshrined in astrological texts, evolved over years of keen observation, which continue to be bolstered by scanty yet existent research. But given the unfathomable complexity of the system in question, it’s a bit rich to expect that these fixed, canonical rules can tell it all, all the time. In fact, more often than not, a simple and straightforward application of these rules for predictions leads the astrologer awry. With the kind of contextualization, relevance-making, and keen emotional intelligence that it calls for, a strong and sharp intuition often becomes the astrologer’s most powerful predictive tool.
And this is where the debate on whether artificial intelligence (AI) can replace astrologers enters the picture. AI has done wonders that could have easily been dismissed as far-fetched fantasies less than a couple of decades ago. There remains no doubt that a lot of astrology can be and has been automated. But as far as replacing astrologers is concerned, if anything, astrology can give AI a much harder time than, say, replacing medical doctors for diagnosing illnesses or software experts for all the abstruse stuff that they do – unless we succeed in creating AI systems that can replicate human intuition to perfection. This, however, is only so far as we are speaking of authentic, deep, and personalized astrology.
