wandelaar

How are you going to decide whether the hexagram produced by an inquiry accurately represents the situation asked about? For instance are you also going to test whether other hexagrams would have represented the situation just as well or even better? Today I heard someone say she found it surprising that she was born under the Chinese sign of the horse, because she liked horses when she was young. I asked whether she had also looked at the other signs whether they would have been any less surprising. But no - she hadn't because she wasn't interested in any other signs than hers. That's how it goes. There is a will to believe in those things, and other suggested approaches that might conceivably deliver results that could weaken the belief are simply ignored. Of course you are free to test the I Ching as it is commonly used, and I consider it highly likely that you will find surprising results (as I have found them myself when I tried the I Ching). But does that have anything to do with the credibility that the hexagram produced by an inquiry accurately represents the situation asked about? Don't think so - the hexagrams are much to multi-interpretable for that. But the system "I Ching + I Ching user" might fare better.

Taoism and Stoicism have much in common, but there are some fundamental differences. See this appendix:

A willow sprouting out one's elbow can be understood as that the recycling of the matter of Nuncle Slippery's body has already started even before he was buried. As the text goes: However there is a problem in all this: it may be natural that life and death alternate as day and night, but it also seems natural that one resents the degeneration of ones own body before one dies. So that makes the acceptance of death and particularly of ones bodily degeneration somewhat forced. Unless one identifies with the whole universe or with Tao, because that what we were will not completely disappear but merely transform into other forms of life. But who can identify with the whole universe or with Tao without being enlightened?

@ OldDog But what do want to see proven? The (reasonable) sceptics don't deny that the I Ching could work, they only explain its working differently. Eating more pudding will not solve this issue. Proving that the I Ching involves paranormal processes will have to be done scientifically. For instance the program written by Lost in Translation could be used if only it were very much faster to measure deviations of the probabilities of the hexagrams. See the topic: Perhaps letting the lines of the hexagrams be determined directly through real random numbers in their appropriate probabilities will do the trick? Or you could take the opposite road of trying to prove that paranormal influences are completely unnecessary to explain the working of the I Ching by using the binary digits of pi as a way of throwing the I Ching and seeing whether or not your results are less accurate than when you used coins or yarrow stalks. See: Probably some other approaches are also possible. I will be happy to see some experiments done.

It depends on what you are interested in. From a purely practical viewpoint it doesn't matter. But I am not an active I Ching user myself, and to make matters worse I am not a practical guy either. I am mainly interested in the question of whether or not paranormal processes are involved. But that's another topic.

Could be that you already unconsciously suspected something of the kind on the basis of unconscious observations, and that then one aspect of the multi-interpretable result of the divination helped your concern to surface. That's how a sceptic could explain the case. And that's also what makes it so incredibly difficult to isolate what is still normal and what is paranormal for the events that happen in daily life. But admittedly, as regards the practical use of the I Ching it doesn't matter much how it works, as long as it does.

@ Michael Sternbach Just out of interest, have you studied the sceptical position on the paranormal? In particular concerning personal experiences and anecdotal evidence?

The yarrow stalk method of throwing the I Ching has different probabilities for the hexagrams than the coin method. This leads to the following two different but nevertheless related questions: 1. Are the results of using the yarrow-method for consulting the I Ching better than the results of using the coin-method? 2. Do the hexagrams found by using the yarrow-method give a generally better representation of reality than the hexagrams found by using the coin-method?

Found it: https://translate.google.nl/#nl/en/De stengels van deze plant worden al eeuwen gebruikt bij het raadplegen van het orakelboek de I Ching. 50 rechte stengels van gelijke lengte vallen als mikadostokjes en men kiest er een hexagram uit. Uit dit hexagram is dan weer te lezen welke veranderingen in de toekomst te verwachten zijn. Source: https://plazilla.com/page/4295039402/duizendblad-uit-het-medicijnkastje-van-oma Not exactly an academic citation, I admit. Nevertheless the idea that the yarrow stalks are used as a kind of oracular Mikado seems to float around here and there..

@ Michael Sternbach Both positions (paranormal phenomena exist and paranormal phenomena don't exist) can be defended. What made me appreciate the sceptical position was Rob Nanninga's Dutch book Parariteiten. Also very good is: https://www.amazon.com/Foundations-Parapsychology-Exploring-Boundaries-Capability/dp/0710208057 The last one is not a book by sceptics but a book about parapsychology that makes abundantly clear how easy ones naive observations and anecdotal evidence can mislead one into believing in the paranormal when actually nothing of the sort happened. Most people who claim to have witnessed paranormal events don't know and very often don't want to know how to properly investigate the paranormal to rule out fraud, (self)deception, etc. So my current position on this is that one has to study the arguments of both sides in the debate before taking a stand, and when one has done that one might very well end up like myself: in a state of indecision. I wrote this post not to start another war about are there or are there not paranormal phenomena, but to share my own position. I have nothing to defend and consequently won't participate in any further debates on this question. Those kind of debates are completely useless because the currently available evidence isn't strong enough to solve the issue one way or another.

Here it is called "shuffling the yarrow-stalks": https://books.google.nl/books?id=eRBXJThEuJsC&pg=PA21&lpg=PA21&dq=book+monkey+yarrow+stalks&source=bl&ots=sxhAz6ILfZ&sig=P5FWikBKUbabgoFynZ0Pwc8Nu6Y&hl=nl&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwic8u3X2I_cAhULJ1AKHdq_CLsQ6AEIVzAI#v=onepage&q=book monkey yarrow stalks&f=false

In Dutch, but here it is said that the yarrow stalks are literally thrown on the ground: https://books.google.nl/books?id=X2GnCgAAQBAJ&pg=PT18&lpg=PT18&dq=gooien+duizendblad&source=bl&ots=ZXEDOGfweo&sig=MS2z1tQk1I2XyIaCEHpjeWphMLI&hl=nl&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj02_r9yI_cAhWRNOwKHRsMC1Y4ChDoAQgtMAA#v=onepage&q=gooien duizendblad&f=false

There is an easy Taoist answer to all those questions: keep it simple! Thinking is all right as a tool, but tools become useless without goals. The goals cannot be provided by the tools themselves. Actually no conceivable goal can be rationally defended as correct. Ethics didn't achieve any substantial results in more than two thousand years of study. When you don't feel some goals yourself, than for you there are no goals. This was also the case before you started to question everything, and it has nothing to do even with meditating on emptiness. It is our fundamental modern human predicament. There are no excuses: everyone has to invent and/or choose his own way of life.

I don't buy it. There are perfectly natural explanations for most of the paradoxes in the Tao Te Ching that don't have anything to do with nonduality, but rather with not overdoing things and acknowledging the dynamic and often cyclic nature of phenomena. Explaining all paradoxes away by nonduality kills off most of the richness of the book.

Suppose it were possible to ask for some quite extraordinary things or abilities, than there is the problem of whether you can oversee all the (possibly unwanted) consequences of getting what you asked for.

In this topic I want to calculate the theoretical probabilities of the hexagrams when the yarrow stalk method is used. Now the manner of division of the heap of stalks will differ slightly from person to person: some people will strife to divide the heap nearly in half while others will be more nonchalant about it. That means that the probabilities for the possible divisions will also differ slightly from person to person, and as a further consequence the probabilities of obtaining the different line-types will differ slightly from person to person. I have considered different ways to tackle this problem, but have decided that the simplest approach is taking the probabilities of obtaining the different line-types as free parameters in the calculation. When someone wants to use the formulae of this topic he will have to plug in the probabilities of obtaining the different line-types as they are when that person throws the I Ching by the yarrow stalk method without actual consultation. Determining those personal probabilities will then be an empirical matter.

Yes - that has to be so, because the lines are thrown independently. Why should that be a problem?

What factor do you mean?

A hexagram is build up from the lowest line upwards. Now when somebody throws hexagrams (without consultation!) a great many times (let's say N times) we may expect that the relative frequencies of the hexagrams found approximate the probabilities of those hexagrams on the basis of pure chance. Those probabilities are the person-specific numbers p6, p7, p8 and p9 . Let's look at the specific hexagram represented by (f,e,d,c,b,a) = (8,9,7,6,7,8). For this hexagram to turn up the following has to happen: 1. Line 1 has to be of the type represented by 8. This happens with an approximate relative frequency of p8 . 2. Line 2 has to be of the type represented by 7. This happens with an approximate relative frequency of p7 . 3. Line 3 has to be of the type represented by 6. This happens with an approximate relative frequency of p6 . 4. Line 4 has to be of the type represented by 7. This happens with an approximate relative frequency of p7 . 5. Line 5 has to be of the type represented by 9. This happens with an approximate relative frequency of p9 . 6. Line 6 has to be of the type represented by 8. This happens with an approximate relative frequency of p8 . So we expect line 1 of a thrown hexagram to be correct approximately p8 * N times; we expect both line 1 and line 2 of a thrown hexagram to be correct approximately p7 * (p8 * N) times; we expect all of the lines 1, 2 and 3 of the hexagram to be correct approximately p6 * ( p7 * (p8 * N)) times; and so on. Thus we expect approximately { p8 * p9 * p7 * p6 * p7 * p8 } * N of the thrown N hexagrams to be the hexagram represented by (f,e,d,c,b,a) = (8,9,7,6,7,8). The relative frequency of the hexagram of our example is thus expected to approximate: [{ p8 * p9 * p7 * p6 * p7 * p8 } * N]/N = p8 * p9 * p7 * p6 * p7 * p8 . And this expected approximation can be made as precise an one wants it by taking N large enough. So the probability of finding the hexagram represented by (f,e,d,c,b,a) = (8,9,7,6,7,8) is p8 * p9 * p7 * p6 * p7 * p8 . Generalising the above reasoning we get the following simple formula for the probability P(f,e,d,c,b,a) of throwing the hexagram represented by (f,e,d,c,b,a) : P(f,e,d,c,b,a) = pf * pe * pd * pc * pb * pa (This is the product referred to by Lost in Translation in his previous post.)

We can represent all hexagrams by means of a row vector H = (f,e,d,c,b,a) where the numbers a, b, c, d, e and f can take on all of the values 6, 7, 8 and 9 representing the different line-types in the usual manner. The number a represents the lowest line in the hexagram and the number f represents the highest line of the hexagram. Example:

We will use the following symbols: p6 = probability of throwing a moving yin line p7 = probability of throwing a static yang line p8 = probability of throwing a static yin line p9 = probability of throwing a moving yang line The numbers 6, 7, 8 and 9 are chosen so as to correspond to the usual numerical representations of the line-types in the I Ching. The actual probabilities depend on the person throwing the I Ching and have to be empirically estimated by letting the person throw the I Ching a large number of times (but without posing questions or consulting the I Ching) and calculating the relative frequencies of the line-types.

OK - thank you. In that case I plan to follow a different approach in my theoretical calculation of the probabilities. And I will start a new topic about that. To much different things going on in one topic will only lead to unnecessary confusion.

I like to start a new topic suggested by these posts from another topic: Wandelaar: Michael Sternbach: Wandelaar: Michael Sternbach: The purpose of this topic is exploring ways to test whether or not working with the I Ching shows patterns in the found hexagrams that are impossible to explain when the hexagrams that turn up are purely random. This topic is expressly not about belief or disbelief or anecdotal evidence! So please don't spam this topic to death as happened with previous topics of mine. If you are not interested in exploring systematic ways to test the I Ching than please leave us alone.

Yes - that's how I understood it. Now I also thought that in your program all integer values of Right that fall between the 10% and 50% boundaries are equally likely to occur. That's why I drew a flat line for their probability of occurring. Is that incorrect?

So "Right" in your program can become greater than Stack/2 ?