On Astrology and the Making of Sense
By: Martin Rezny
Tags: Science, Time, Philosophy, Astrology, Meaning

Also, introducing my upcoming book and a new science that I invented

By MARTIN REZNY

I completely understand your position, and many scientific skeptics share it with you, but in order to respond properly to it, I’m afraid I will have to refer you to a book that I’m actually quite close to finishing as we speak. I intend to call it Everything You Never Wanted to Know About Astrology. Basically, it will contain about 15 years-worth of my criticisms of what both astrologers and skeptics have been doing wrong all along.

Amusingly, this is an interesting coincidence in the astrological fashion, since of course this is the one thing that you right now feel that you need to respond to out of the whole article which is predominantly about other beliefs. I’ll take it as a sign to move up my timetable.

The main problem with a position like this is that it doesn’t respond to what astrology actually is, precisely because people of science don’t put much effort into studying astrology, and this has been a great frustration of mine for years — you can’t have a fruitful discussion when no one is actually informed. And it’s the reason why I feel that it’s time for me to explain myself fully. It’s not like I have any reputation to damage, so why not, I guess.

While there are many self-proclaimed “astrologers” who you can quote as believing that astrology is anything or can do anything, after years of studying it myself, the most logical explanation of its mechanism, which is not a particular stretch or mystery, appears to be about the qualitative dynamics of time, not the physical objects themselves, and definitely not about the four fundamental forces mechanistically determining behaviors.

It’s not about expecting the tug of Jupiter to cause you to do things, Jupiter’s motions are just part of a celestial clock. It’s about how in a world which is a simulation, you cannot rely on sheer random chance to generate a meaningful world. You can try it and see for yourself, analyzing the games that we have already made, and in that, there’s a practical application of astrology that I have recently finally formulated in my mind and gave it a name.

I decided to call it kaironics, after Kairos, the least known of the three ancient Greek gods of time. You have your basic Chronos, or linear time where each moment is equal and determined only by its length; then you have Aion, or eternal, unchanging time; and finally you have Kairos, or opportune time, where different moments have different qualities and are not equally good or bad for accomplishing any particular goal. If you’re interested in learning what that includes from astrology and beyond, check out my new website:

For now, I think it only makes sense to clarify what I mean by fractals and how they connect different levels of existence. Fractals do mean that these different levels share structural similarities, not that there are causal interactions between them in the way that forces work, that’s true. But assuming the world is a mathematical simulation, a fractal can be an indication that there’s a common underlying pattern to all of reality.

This would mean that even though the different levels don’t interact, they don’t have to, because all of them are shaped by the same random function. You can see something like that when using a random function in a game you create — the more crude it is, the more obvious is the shared pattern. What’s important to note is that random functions a) aren’t truly random and b) while they’re supposed to give the illusion of chaos, their main goal in a game with players is to organize actions and events into meaningful configurations.

What astrology has always been implying by the “as above, so below” maxim is precisely that you can find correlations, or synchronocities, between levels that don’t conventionally interact. That you can draw surprisingly accurate analogies between the dynamics of celestial bodies and the dynamics of things we do, like relationships. Astrology, if anything, is an attempt at the physics of meaning, and with that come levels of nuance for which most skeptics are too impatient to even understand what there is to be debunked.

But as I said, the complete explanation has to take up a whole book, as entire levels of misconceptions have to be deconstructed before we can even start having a fruitful discussion about it. Astrology doesn’t have to be right and no one certainly managed to prove it yet in a rigorous scientific fashion, but sneering at a straw man of it also accomplishes nothing. I promise I’ll get back to you with the rest of my answer, about two or three months from now.

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