Synchronicity August 12, 2005 – Posted in: Aberrant Normalcy
No, I’m not talking about the Police album. I’m talking about meaningful coincidences. Carl Jung described synchronicity as an “acausal connecting principle,” i.e. there is no obvious explanation for such coincidences to occur, and yet they do. For example, two weeks ago I was going to the beach with my cousin and he told me our mutual friend, Cognac Wellerlane was recently hired to be in a music video. “Which band?” I said. “I forgot,” my cousin said. “But you probably would know the name of them.” So we headed out to the beach while my mp3 player blared music from his car stereo. Then, yesterday, Cognac calls me to chat and I asked her the name of the band. She tells me it was for the band Franz Ferdinand and their new album. I just happened to buy their CD a few months ago, and we had been listening to their songs in the car on the way out to the beach, unbeknownst to us that this was the very same band. It’s funny sometimes how the universe works. And for those skeptics who think this is just a random coincidence, you may be right, however, I prefer to believe the middle ground: that coincidences like this are not necessarily acausal (i.e. without cause and random) but have a causal factor that we can not obviously see. For example, if we all lived on a two dimensional world, like a piece of paper, and the paper was in reality curled into a tube, we as 2D citizens wouldn’t know this. Then, if along comes a three dimensional pencil and pierces the tube, we, as 2D beings, would see two distict yellow circles that would appear at first glance to be independent of one another but have a strange interconnecting factor which we couldn’t quite see. In other words, the causal factors of synchronicity may be outside of our perceptual abilities.
If you are a stargazer like myself, you might want to go outside tonight on this near new moon to watch the Perseid Meteor Shower. According to one source there will be approximately one meteor per minute. You have to be up at 2am though, but this may not be hard on a friday night. One time, while in upstate NY, I saw a green meteor, which might imply it had chunks of frozen oxygen ionizing as it burned through the atmosphere. The meteor had lit up the darkened night to brighter than the moon for about two or three seconds. It was quite a sight. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to see the Perseid’s from the light polluted city of Hoboken, but I’ll try.
Finally, I heard they’re making a sequel to Batman Begins called–you guessed it–Batman Begins 2. Um, isn’t that a kind of oxymoron? How about “Batman Graduates?” Or even better, “The Dark Night.” I hope this name is just a place holder.
3 Comments
Mercurio D. Rivera August 13, 2005 - 23:21
You ALMOST had me convinced, Kressel. Then I clicked on the link to the Skeptic’s Dictionary. That explains it all, thank you very much.
Lauren McLaughlin August 15, 2005 - 04:11
Do you think a multi-dimensional universe such as string theory suggests, neccessitates causal relationships among the dimensions? Just curious.
I’ve always been quite fond of coincidence. Random crap happens all the time but occasionally, we notice some particularly interesting confluence of events and think–Wow! There must be something more at work here!–when really the statistical odds of these things happening once in a while are quite likely.
Do you think causal factors are perhaps an after-the-fact narrative we construct in order to create meaning out chaos?
How’s the writing going?
Matthew Kressel August 15, 2005 - 09:45
I think it’s a confluence of both. My take on it is that we’re beings with free will and therefore we alter our future path by actions both subconscious and conscious. Sometimes, when meaningful coincidences occur that seem to have no causal relationship, this may only be because we are not conscious of their root somewhere in our past. Secondly, quantum mechanics clearly states that the observer and the observed are inseperable, that is, the oberserver cannot observe an object without altering it. Some have taken this as far, including myself, to believe that the observer and the observed are really two aspects of the same underlying framework, which if you really think about it, is also the basis of many eastern traditions. In their faith, the universe is one inseparable whole and it is only by our frailty of perception that we perceive separation. Therefore, in a universe where everything is connected, it’s not hard for me to see how “meaningful coincidences” sometimes occur. Since we are inseparable from our reality, of course it will react and change with us. In other words, I have a hard time accepting the Newtonian clockwork universe, where everything grinds on, as Lovecraft said, “from nothing to something and from something back to nothing again, neither heeding nor knowing the wishes or existence of the minds that flicker for a second now and then in the darkness.” I believe the universe is much more responsive and fluid. We do add “meaning” to these coincidences, but only because we “caused” them in the first place, though their causes are out of our linear perception. Make sense? I thought not.