Prediction, Projection and Confirmation Bias
What is divination anyway? The popular scientific view is that it is pure conjecture with no quantifiable basis; the religious opinion is that it is forbidden by scripture; for the average person it is primarily a subject of idle curiosity. Detractors have coined (or co-opted) the phrase “confirmation bias” (which seems to draw on the earlier concept of “projection”) that causes us to overlay our private hopes, wishes, desires and expectations onto the objective act of trying to foretell upcoming events or situations, then come up with a “self-fulfilling prophecy” that admits only those details that align with our preconceptions. Although our purported illumination is often said by mystics to arrive via contact with some hypothetical form of Higher Consciousness, whether the source is Jung’s impersonal Collective Unconscious or a direct “hotline to God,” it is too often rooted in subjective guesswork of an entirely intuitive kind, in which case the scientists may have a point: we may only be navel-gazing and not actually conversing with the Cosmos.
Other than predictive astrology, for which the proof is self-evident (we either find the lost item or we don’t), our efforts tend to give us a bad name among more fact-based prognosticators due to having no reliable approximation of the scientific method to which we can refer in defending our virtue. When it comes to the more psychic disciplines (of which cartomancy is one) unless we are predicting the outcome of sporting events, stock-market fluctuations or political elections that reveal themselves in due time, our conclusions are largely anecdotal and provisional rather than statistically empirical. Their perceived value can then quickly decay into “for entertainment only” territory when validation of our insights is not forthcoming.
I call it the “feel-good” paradigm: if a prediction makes the querent happy at the time, we judge the reading a success even if we never hear whether it was 100% accurate after the sitter walks away. Someone once asked me why I’m so hung up on accuracy in my own work. For me, if a forecast doesn’t make a concrete difference in our response to life’s circumstances it is hardly worth the effort. We often say “Oh, that’s interesting” and just keep on with what we were doing instead of positioning ourselves — even if only in terms of mental readiness — for future eventualities as envisioned by the reading. But because we as diviners handle so many speculative inanities and trivialities (e.g. “What does he think or feel about me?” “Does she like or love me?”) such veracity may not be of critical importance anyway since it is unlikely to elicit from the seeker even a faint ripple of intent to act in the matter. I like to say that the anonymity of divination has replaced the old “ask a friend-of-a-friend-of a friend” such emotionally-charged questions.
Many practitioners of the esoteric arts shy away from fortune-telling completely, preferring to apply divination only to the more dignified pursuit of psychological self-awareness and self-development. Personally, I find the divinatory process intriguing and stimulating from a philosophical perspective since I employ it to get under the skin of objective reality in order to see what makes the Universe tick. If during my experiments I can help someone else to better comprehend and cope with their personal demons, so much the better, but it’s not the main reason I do this stuff. I’m not in the “empowerment” business, nor do I want to be an “enabler” of irrational attitudes and behaviors, and I certainly wouldn’t want to have to make a living at either one since it presents the risk of turning me into an affirmation-driven “prediction mill” rather than allowing me to remain an unfettered explorer of the Unknown. I think of it as replacing orthodox religion — which in its unctuous priestly fervor never really did anything for me — and theoretical science — which is entirely too abstract and academic — in my own metaphysical worldview. Somewhere between the two lies Aleister Crowley’s sweet spot: “the aim of religion, the method of science” (in which the objective is spiritual but the secular tactics are practical and literal, in line with the unaccredited quote I just came across: “The rhetoric and mythos of science create the comforting image of linear progression toward truth”).
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on January 11, 2023.
