No one dismisses predictive analytics as woo-woo.
But psychic ability, being able to predict future outcomes through fortune-telling or
divination, now that’s preposterous.
By predictive analytics I mean the mathematical learning models that uses historical data,
somehow instantly analyzes it, or captures key trends and can map out periodic cycles,
therefore can map out timing, and uses all this to predict future events.
With great accuracy.
You’re taking raw big data, inputting a dump of it into a predictive analytic algorithm,
and the output is “clean data,” something that can predict a future event.
An algorithm, by the way, is a sequence of instructions to help you perform a computation,
to help you process data and problem-solve.
At its most fundamental level, it’s a flow-chart of if-then statements.
This got me wondering…maybe psychic ability and what we call “fortune-telling” or
divination isn’t so woo-woo.
Let’s start with the tarot.
Whether tarot readers are self-conscious of it or not, when you learn the assigned meaning
of cards and follow a divination process with a spread of cards, you’re applying predictive
analytics.
You’re using an algorithm and your mind is processing a flow-chart of if-then statements.
The more experience you gain as a tarot reader, using this system, you’re advancing your
learning with this algorithm.
Machine learning.
You’ve just learned how to leverage raw data to compute and predict complex possibilities.
I Ching divination, same concept, same theoretical application.
People often talk about the eerie accuracy of timing that the I Ching can offer.
But it makes sense.
The I Ching is premised on natural cycles.
It follows seasonal, solar, stellar, and also human life cycles.
It has the benefit of thousands of years of “machine learning” and observing how governments,
how power rises and falls.
So if X is happening right now, and W happened in the most recent past, then Y is about to
happen, and Z is going to be the end result of this trajectory.
And if it all plays out exactly as I Ching divination predicted, we think, omigosh, fortune-telling
is real.
Psychic ability is real.
Or maybe it’s just predictive analytics and can be explained in a similar rational
way as we explain why AI can predict future outcomes.
If “artificial” just means produced by human beings rather than being naturally occurring,
then these divinatory tools, such as the I Ching, were the first AI.
Think about what predictive analytics and machine learning is doing in society right
now.
You can input someone’s resume data, writing style, word usage, hobbies, and background
details into a set model and predict whether an individual will be a good cultural fit
at a business organization and whether that person will succeed or fail at your organization.
Based on your history and pathway of clicks across the Internet, predictive analytics
can know, with fairly good accuracy, what you desire, what you are lacking in life,
and your insecurities, and thus what it is you want to buy.
Even as science, does the machine always get the predictions right?
No.
They don’t.
Just like psychics and fortune-tellers seem to be able to tap into something unexplainable
and mysterious, but they, too, get it wrong.
When I present a problem for a systematic divinatory tool to solve, an issue for which
I’d like this tool to predict a future outcome, I am running it through a step by step process
that’s remarkably similar to four core steps of predictive analytics.
First and foremost, what do you often hear from experienced diviners?
Framing the question matters.
A lot.
Likewise, the first stage in the process of predictive analysis, and the most vital, is
to clearly define the problem, with specificity, and to start by fully understanding what it
is you actually want to know.
Step two: collecting raw data.
There are a couple of ways this plays out in the divinatory spheres.
So first, I think the line between bad actor fraudulent psychics who cold read and good
faith deeply intuitive people who just get a sense from things is a very, very fine line.
Because I do believe part of accurate prediction is to get as much of a sense for the person’s
history and behavioral patterns as possible, on a deeper level beyond what ordinary people
are capable of perceiving.
Back in 2015 I shared a little PDF something about tarot and social inductive reasoning,
and how NLP, neuro-linguistic programming plays in to social intuition.
I’ll link it again in the video description box.
I think it’s worth your while to read.
Some of it is hard to explain rationally, but by observing patterns of human behavior,
seem to hold true.
Like the letters in your given name and how that affects your personality.
How people dress, the colors they choose to wear lets you know whether they like to stand
out and be seen, like the attention, or they prefer solitude, are more introverted, shy,
and don’t want attention.
Face reading, like people with wider set eyes tend to have yin personalities, but eyes closer
together, brows slanted tend to have yang personalities.
People born in the fall and winter tend to have more yin personalities while those born
in the spring and summer tend to be yang.
Those with a wood face shape, wider forehead, pointy chin, tend to be more intellectual
and organized, while those with a narrow forehead and wider jawline, a fire face shape, tend
to be more assertive, outgoing, charismatic, but arrogant.
This data collection also includes the tarot cards being drawn, or the I Ching hexagram
results.
What has this particular tarot card in the deck of 78, or this particular hexagram of
the 64 historically meant?
Both tarot readers and I Ching practitioners talk about how the systems are cyclic, meaning
they follow a very specific sequential order that eventually forms a unit circle, repeating
itself into infinity.
So a really good tarot reader, a really good psychic using these divination tools is, on
some subconscious level, instantly analyzing where in the sequential order of things this
card or this hexagram falls, and you’re accounting for that big picture cycle as part
of how you predict what will happen next based on this specific tarot card or hexagram showing
up.
This psychic equivalent to “raw data collection” in a predictive analytics model goes beyond
the reader, diviner, or fortune-teller “downloading” the answer to the question.
I wonder if it’s also this instant download, an instant intuitive knowing of a whole lot
of past and present conditions and insight into the person that’s being accounted for
in the subconscious or unconscious data analysis that’s going on.
It’s bringing in all the learned and experiential knowledge the psychic might have.
So it’s totally not woo-woo at all.
It’s psychology, cognitive behavioral therapy, understanding human nature, understanding
human history, understanding philosophy.
I also think this is where the skill of a psychic or reader-practitioner comes in to
play.
Not only do you need to frame the question competently, but then how well does the psychic
set the parameters around exactly what quantity and quality of data to “assess.”
Funny enough, that’s the third step of core predictive analytics—exploratory data analysis.
EDA.
Figuring out how to understand and process that raw data input.
Within this core step, EDA, you need to be able to (1) calculate, and (2) visualize.
Data visualization.
If I’m to tie this in to the divinatory systems I work with, I think of I Ching divination
as more reliant on numerical calculation in the EDA process while tarot card reading is
more reliant on data visualization techniques.
So I speculate to be a sage, to truly possess precognition, you want to actively pursue
knowledge and learning.
You need to be in a constant, consistent state of machine learning.
Gathering as much data about this world and human nature as possible, and also knowing
how to discern that data, how to “clean it up” so that it’s actually useful.
The fourth and final step, model building.
This is the card spread you’re using in a tarot reading, the divination process, and
when it comes to the I Ching, it’s the divination process of casting the six-line hexagram.
So in light of these considerations, I wonder if the I Ching is some form of ancient AI,
artificial intelligence.
Because the I Ching architecture, its programmed code, is a data structure that allows the
AI of the I Ching to solve complex tasks, like answer divinatory questions, in the same
way AI today predicts future outcomes or diagnoses conditions.
The I Ching itself, then, is knowledge-representation.
KRR.
It’s a computing representation that memorializes information and data about the world, which
can then be used for problem-solving.
And with the I Ching, as early as the founding of computer science and developing a binary
system of 1s and 0s we’ve seen the connection between the Oracle and computing machines,
AI.
If we attribute the traditional astrological binary of masculine-feminine or active-passive
signs to the tarot, then on some fundamental level, even the tarot is based on a binary
computing system of 1s and 0s, not unlike yin and yang.
When AI generates an output to predict a situation or offer the solution to a problem, it appears
to happen instantaneously.
But we understand that a massive amount of data and a fine-tuned algorithm on the back
end is the basis of a sound logical process.
It seems like psychic predictions are similar, in that they appear to be an instant download
of insight, or foresight, but then actually this massive amount of computing has happened
for the AI, funny enough in this case, the psychic-fortune-teller, to give that output.
Now in terms of families of psychics, because this is a concept prevalent in so many diverse
cultures—
Just like how certain models of AI or machines are built, I wonder if what makes someone
more naturally able to be psychic is perhaps an inherited genetic neurological condition.
It’s a hereditary neuropathy.
But also, it doesn’t have to be.
So even if it’s not part of your family history, you could very well have been born
with it anyway.
I also believe it can be learned, and developed.
So even if you were born about as psychic as a doormat, if you put in the effort to
learn the process, you can and will be “psychic.”
Because you’ve learned and mastered the predictive analytics model.
To conclude, I want to make it clear that I’m not asserting any of this as a matter
of fact.
It’s just something I’ve been wondering about, and I thought I might share.