Is a tarot app as good as picking a card?

trzes

A divinity that's capable of acting on a physical deck of cards but not on a computer program is not much of a divinity.

Well, a divinity of that sort would be at least one that respects the laws of physics. As far as I understand most of those people who do believe in devine entities would argue that divinity acts beyond our scientific knowledge (because science is assumed to be unable to detect the devinity's actions). But most of those people would admit, that even the devine doesn't plainly contradict scientific knowledge. Everyone is free to believe what they want though.

The Fool's Dog did a tremendous amount of work on the randomization function of their apps. I don't have the technical background to explain it (a mathematician probably could) but one of my takeaways was that often a randomizer is making use of a large number of presets sorts; a "true random" sort is very difficult to achieve but the Fool's Dog managed it for their apps.

FWIW, the act of shuffling is no more indeterminate than a computer random number generator. Rather, both of them rely on the kind of "indeterminacy" that rises out of "this is too complicated to keep track of."

The best pseudo random number generators in a computer are designed to be entirely unpredictable for any human as well as for any other computer. In that respect a well programmed app is surely no less effective than an person shuffling a physical deck.

But at the same time a computer hardware ist designed to be entirely determenistic. Once it has processed all the input everything else if set in stone. That's why its random number generators are called "pseudo". This is different to a human brain's hardware that operates much closer to the atomic level where the only kind of true randomness occurs (quantum fluctuations).

I guess the trick with good tarot apps is to keep processing inputs all the time by checking the state of all the sensors (movement, GPS, mircophone, light, temperature etc). This may further improve the app's unpredictability, but also leaves more backdoors for the influence of the devine (at least for those who believe it exists). So maybe there is no big difference between an app and a human in that technical sense after all.

I still prefer my physical decks.
 

bonebeach

A divinity that's capable of acting on a physical deck of cards but not on a computer program is not much of a divinity.

My feelings exactly.

Nor do I think any laws of physics, or science at all, are violated by the idea of something divine tweaking your in app results. Or rather, there is no scientific principle to uphold my belief in the divine, so why should tech be a dealbreaker when general belief isn't?

Besides, there's a whole subgenre of witchcraft devoted to the idea of magic and tech, which I think is mostly being hashtagged, what, techno witchcraft? Technopaganism, per wikipedia, but on tumblr, definitely techno witchcraft.

Which isn't to say that's the same thing as tarot, and I can read tarot for skeptics just fine and talk purely about psychology and art history. But tarot and various magical/spiritual practices are often discussed together.

I think part of this thread's original question boils down to: do you consider your tech (apps, on line, etc) reality as somehow inherently different or separate from your, say, meat space reality?

And maybe it's a generational thing, or maybe a profession based thing, but I don't. I'm a very physical person and I spend a great amount of time and energy in the gym and outdoors, but fundamentally the interactions I have on line with people are valid, and my on line banking is valid, and I get paid for work that happens entirely from screen to screen, so even if the medium is different, I just don't think that cyberspace/tech/on line is a separate set of reality rules. It's all equally part of my life.

That doesn't mean all things are EQUAL on line and off, but still.
 

trzes

Nor do I think any laws of physics, or science at all, are violated by the idea of something divine tweaking your in app results. Or rather, there is no scientific principle to uphold my belief in the divine, so why should tech be a dealbreaker when general belief isn't?

The devine tweaking a computer program that is fully deterministic from the beginning surely would violate the laws of physics because it would make the whole process indeterministic. And that would be a plain contradiction to things we know pretty much for sure.

The devine tweaking an app that uses new sensor data all the time would only contradict a general scientific mindset of the sort that the idea of something devine wouldn't help us to understand the world.

Slightly off-topic sidenote: Consider an app with two additional features. First the app chooses (pseudo-) randomly with equal chances whether it uses data from a predefined sequence or data from fresh sensor data to draw the cards. Second the user rates how accurate he or she feels each spread was on a score of, say, 0 to 10. The rating and the way of drawing the cards are transferred to a server that calculates the average perceived accuracy of spreads drawn deterministically versus those drawn from data where the devine could, theoretically, interfere.

If (and only if) we could agree that the devine couldn't tweak a fully predetermined process even if the devine existed, but could tweak the user's random movements of the phone, changes of skin temperature and so on, then, voila, we have a perfect setup for a statistical test of possible devine influence on tarot. If the average user rating of spreads that could have been tweaked is (significantly) higher than the rating of the non-tweakable ones, this would be some empirical evidence in favour of divination.

In my book that is what makes tarot apps really fascinating.