This week saw the end of the period that a jyotishee told me that I would win a lot of money. It didn't happen. That isn't the surprising bit to me - it's a chance game really, look at the odds of winning the premium bonds or the lottery and divide it between the number of years you are likely to live and the likelihood becomes obvious. But it would have been an interesting demonstration of super powers.
No, the reason I think astrology must be rubbish is that within the promise of me winning there has to be a change in how all future horoscopes are drawn up from my birth chart. For instance, if I suddenly acquired millions of pounds would I live in the same house or buy a yatch and moor it in some secluded harbour in Italy? I think we all know the answer to that, so any future predictions must take into account the sort of lifestyle problems or advances I would have to endure with my many houses and supermodel girlfriends etc. Here's the problem, the future stretches in front of us like a cone of possibilities, today there are several things I could do and tomorrow there are many more options precisely because of the options from today multiply with increased options of thier own tomorrow. And so on exponentially. The trouble for astrology is that winning a lot of money or not will have a large impact on the direction of my future cone of possibilities. It collapses a waveform for my future life that hasn't happened. So if my horoscope continues to make predictions on its apparent assumption that I'm now a multi-millionaire there are going to be discrepancies between prediction and events. For instance, I'm going to buy a new pair of shoes this week, if there was a parallel universe with me as a rich man I would have some made for me, probably at some legendary cobblers in Milan (they probably don't call them that there though). The longer it goes on the worse it gets. If any prediction made by an astrologer fails to come true then at some point you'll be scratching your head when Mystic Meg says that the dinner with royalty would be a good time to show off you new watch when you're sitting at home warming beans over a candle. I know it all sounds like it could be squeezed into mere trends but they do stack up, astrology's only hope at retaining credibility in the long term is to keep it vague enough that all options sound like they were being predicted. This might work with shoes or where to have dinner but what about the choice of kings or presidents, or advances in science or banking? This must be why everyone is always so cagey about specifics. Do we know deep down that future predictions will be seen as clearly malfunctioning if the cone of possibilities predicts a left wing president and someone looks further into the future and sees that the poor are being shovelled into furnaces to heat Wall st? We can't have both realities so maybe that's why no one ever goes on record with anything definite, apart from my guy and because of it I'm going to have to endure inaccurate predictions forever, there really isn't any way it could make sense for me now without someone explaining how they fooled reality. So before a prediction is made - this is a quantum world after all - nothing is set and all future possibilities are equally likely until something happens and the waveform collapses (the chart being drawn is a good example) and decides the future direction of the next set of possibilities. Winning money is a chance event so predicting it decides the outcome only if the predictive technology is a one way street into the future. And it clearly isn't or I'd be on a beach in the eastern mediterranean already. I rest my case...
