How Systems Thinking Can Map You::Astrology::Computational Models
Astrology as your system's parameter tuning? What?
You as a System (YaaS)
We are all just computational models.
Inputs are experiences, outputs are behavior and choices, and hidden layers are the psyche, emotions, and memories.
Oh Great, Another Cyborg Enthusiast
Hello! Welcome back to how my quirky mind finds connections in everything that nobody asks for. 😺
This week, we’re looking into how you can view yourself as a computational system that can be “optimized” by implementing a silly framework, such as astrology (feel free to use whatever framework you’d like).
How in the world did I come to this conclusion?
I was going through some statistics to 1) collapse a distribution and 2) calculate some traces in a system space. And what is statistics but the underlying process of computational models?
These days, the most well-known example is large language models, so that is what I’ll refer to. And what are LLMs if not machines that predict tokens based on billions of parameters?
We are all just our own large language model with billions of parameters running statistical processes in the background. (Yes, I know, I’m so poetic thank you).
You can be DeepSeek, I’ll be ChatGPT (sorry, dibs).
What Even Is Systems Thinking?
If you’ve ever created a mind map to study or to visualize how concepts connect, you’ve already done systems thinking. It’s an approach that allows you to see how everything connects and interacts with each other.
A graph. A network. An entire constellation.
(A maybe-not-so-subtle nod to graph theory and neural networks).
You can consider yourself as a biological system interacting with other biological systems, inside socio-economic and cultural systems. (A nested for loop).
Basically, instead of asking, “How am I doing”, systems thinking pulls you out of that self-indulgent mindset to ask, “How are others around me doing, and how does it affect me”. Really humbles you, honestly.
But let’s get back to you, because that’s what we really care about. Not because we’re self-centered (okay maybe slightly), but in order to understand other systems you have to understand your own system first (ah, there she goes trying to sound wise again).
Now, if systems thinking allows us to zoom out to see ourselves as an entire system, astrology is the quirky framework that zooms in on the parameters. Whether it’s astrology, personality quizzes, philosophy (or maybe let’s actually implement our therapist’s notes?), each gives us a way to map the parameters in your human model.
Reader: Choose your framework.
If LLMs have weight matrices and billions of parameters, then so do we.
Astrology (or insert-other-framework-here) gives us a way to work with those parameters. Your birth chart is your system’s initial weight matrix. Our quirks, our temperaments, our patterns of thought, and so on.
But the real magic? It’s optimization. ✨
In human terms, the optimizer is how you use the framework: action, practice, journaling, rituals, new habits. It’s the algorithm you implement to reduce error and retrain the system.
Similarly, frameworks like PyTorch or JAX set the stage, but it’s the optimizer (Adam or AdamW for LLMs) that actually updates the weights. How you want the model to learn and perform determines the optimizer and settings you choose.
Astrology ~ PyTorch
Human Systems ~ Computational Models
Astrology isn’t deterministic. It’s a way to view yourself as a system. It provides the form.
Just like how we would tune a computational model with optimizers, we “tune ourselves” with awareness and choice. Astrology was never about fate. It’s about parameter awareness. It’s agency.
The point? We’re all running on parameter spaces we can optimize once we become aware of them.
Frameworks give us a way to map our parameters and understand the initial landscape. But optimizers are how we improve model performance.
A Bit of a Radical Relation, Don’t You Think?
Yes, it is radical, quirky, and very different from technical, methodological explanations. If you wanted rigorous definitions you can Google them and thousands of excellent blogs, videos, and resources will pop up.
But radical and weird is what sticks in your brain.
In order to “quantum leap” into another timeline, it requires you to do something out-of-the-ordinary in the current timeline. And what that means is, if you don’t know much about computational systems, the most effective leap would be to learn them in an unconventionally radical way.
So, if you want strict definitions and technical rigor? Sorry, that’s not what I’m trying to do.
What am I trying to do? Clearly, to promote cyborgism (kidding… maybe).
It’s to make you understand concepts in a way that you can connect with. To disrupt your default perspective.
You don’t need more tutorials and technical explanations, you need to embody the concepts intuitively.
To Recap
If you start to view everything as a system and use it to zoom in and out of concepts, you’ll start to see how it all connects as a whole.
In English? Your birth chart gives you a starting template the same way a coding framework provides structure. The way you decide to work with it (change, therapy, Adam, AdamW) is the optimizing step that builds an efficient system. Together, they shape how you learn and grow.
So if you can see yourself as DeepSeek — parameters, frameworks, optimizers and all — you can start to understand how computational models work. And inadvertently, my research:
Humans and models mirror each other.
They’re not of the same parts, but each informs us about the other.
