Blog
Transits, Patterns, and the Collective Unconscious
The Algorithm in the Sky
Everyone knows what it’s like to mention something out loud and then start seeing it everywhere. The car you’re considering shows up in the ads under your morning news. The song you had in your head plays in the coffee shop. The city you were half-thinking about appears in three separate friends’ posts. It’s not surveillance, exactly (though sometimes it is). It’s the algorithm doing what it’s designed to do: aggregating thousands of small signals, detecting patterns you barely noticed you were sending, and shaping what shows up in front of you next.
The felt experience of this is uncanny. Not because it’s mysterious, but because the loop is opaque to us. We provide the input; the algorithm returns something eerily calibrated; we don’t see the middle.
The leap
What if reality has a similar structure, at a scale and across a range of inputs no phone algorithm could touch?
Not “the universe is a simulation.” Not “your thoughts create your reality.” Something more modest and more interesting: every choice, every direction, every small yes or no, every turn of attention feeds into a rolling computation that determines what shows up next. The perceiver isn’t outside the loop looking in. The perceiver is one of the streams feeding it.
This isn’t mysticism. Several serious physicists, neuroscientists, and philosophers of science have been sketching versions of this frame for the better part of a century. What follows is a tour of what they wrote, translated into ordinary language.
The predictive-coding view
Karl Friston is a British neuroscientist at University College London whose work on the free energy principle has become one of the most influential frameworks in cognitive science over the past two decades. His central claim, published in a widely cited 2010 paper in Nature Reviews Neuroscience, is that living systems minimize prediction error. The brain, on this view, is not a passive processor of incoming information. It is constantly generating predictions about what is about to happen and updating them based on what does happen. The framework has drawn its share of critique (some philosophers argue it’s more a mathematical formalism than an empirically testable theory), but it remains one of the most generative research programs in cognitive science.
The interesting move is what happens next. Under Friston’s model, the brain’s outputs (your actions, your attention, your speech) become inputs to the surrounding system, which updates its own predictions, which shapes its outputs, which become inputs back to you. The philosopher and cognitive scientist Andy Clark, in his 2016 book Surfing Uncertainty, extends this: prediction isn’t happening in an isolated brain. It’s happening in a coupled network of predicting systems, some inside skulls and some outside.
Read cosmologically, this suggests something specific. What we experience as “reality” is the ongoing conversation between our predictions and the predictions of every other predicting system we’re entangled with. The universe isn’t broadcasting at us. It’s a feedback loop, and we’re one of the streams.
The participatory universe
John Wheeler was the American physicist who coined the term “black hole” in 1967 and mentored Richard Feynman. Late in his career, he became increasingly convinced that the standard picture of physics (observer-independent reality out there, physicists over here measuring it) was missing something fundamental. His 1989 paper “Information, Physics, Quantum: The Search for Links” articulated a position he called “it from bit”: at the most basic level, physical reality is participatory. Observers don’t just measure a pre-existing world. They’re part of how it gets actualized.
Wheeler’s “delayed choice” thought experiments (later confirmed in laboratory experiments by Jacques et al. in 2007) suggested something uncomfortable to anyone raised on classical physics: what an observer chooses to measure now can retroactively determine what happened earlier. Not “changes the past.” Something subtler: makes the past be a certain way rather than another.
You don’t need to buy the full “it from bit” thesis to notice what Wheeler is doing here. He’s dismantling the assumption that the perceiver stands outside the physical system, taking readings. In his frame, there is no outside.
The implicate order
David Bohm, another physicist, spent decades trying to make sense of quantum nonlocality: the well-verified fact that two particles once in contact remain correlated across arbitrary distances, in ways that don’t fit any local-cause story. His 1980 book Wholeness and the Implicate Order proposed that what looks like separate objects at the everyday scale is an “explicate” surface, and that underneath sits an “implicate” order in which everything is enfolded into everything else. The everyday world unfolds out of the implicate. The correlations physicists keep observing are hints of the underlying connection.
Bohm’s move isn’t a claim that “we are all one” in the pop-spiritual sense. It’s a technical proposal to explain why entangled particles behave the way they do without invoking faster-than-light signaling. But the frame lands somewhere similar to Wheeler’s: separateness is a feature of the surface, not the ground.
Zoom back down
If any of this is even approximately right, the small choices we make throughout a day are not the low-stakes decorations on top of “real life” that they often feel like. They’re signals in the loop.
The right turn instead of the left. The text sent or not sent. The chair you took at the coffee shop, which is the one that put you across from the person you ended up talking to. The 90 seconds you spent staring at a menu, which is the 90 seconds someone you might have missed used to arrive.
None of this is high-drama. None of it makes any single choice load-bearing in a way that induces paralysis. The point isn’t that every decision matters cosmically. It’s the opposite: every decision reorganizes our reality in imperceptible ways, and then it compounds.
Behavioral psychology has been studying the individual side of this for a long time. Wendy Wood, a research psychologist at USC, has spent decades documenting how repeated small actions carve neural and environmental grooves that shape the next action; her 2019 book Good Habits, Bad Habits summarizes what the field has learned. James Clear’s Atomic Habits popularized a related idea: that 1% daily changes accumulate into radically different outcomes over years. The underlying finding is robust. What the cosmic frame adds is that the compounding doesn’t stop at the individual. It extends into the network of predicting systems we’re coupled with.
Which means the felt experience of “things are unfolding” or “something is coming together” isn’t a hallucination reporting on hidden magic. It might be an accurate perception of a real feedback structure that we happen to be inside of.
Where this leaves astrology
Astrology, in this frame, is doing something specific.
The moment of birth is one input into the larger system: a distinctive starting-state for a particular predicting organism. The chart is a description of how that input continues to shape outputs. Transits are real-time updates to the data stream, the sky’s current configuration meeting the individual configuration you started with. The chart doesn’t broadcast instructions. It describes how a particular starting-state keeps interacting with a moving system.
This doesn’t require magic. It requires the same feedback-loop thinking that predictive coding and participatory-universe thinking already assume. The clock has meaningful hands running against a starting configuration that is also meaningful. The interpretation is done with care.
And it puts the choice back in the reader’s court. Every day is a stream of small signals: what you do, what you refuse, what you notice, what you turn toward. Those signals reorganize what happens next, in ways too fine-grained to trace and too slow to feel in the moment. Then they compound.
The universe isn’t in a hurry. Neither, most days, is what’s arranging itself around you.
More from the observatory
Stay in the loop
Collective transits, lunations, and the patterns shaping your inner life. No spam, ever.