Synchronicity

Synchronicity is the experience of two or more events which occur in a meaningful manner, but which are causally un-related. In order to be synchronous, the events must be related to one another conceptually, and the chance that they would occur together by random chance must be very small.

Description

The idea of synchronicity is that the conceptual relationship of minds, defined by the relationship between ideas, is intricately structured in its own logical way and gives rise to relationships which have nothing to do with causal relationships in which a cause precedes an effect. Instead, causal relationships are understood as simultaneous — that is, the cause and effect occur at the same time.

Synchronous events reveal an underlying pattern, a conceptual framework which encompasses, but is larger than, any of the systems which display the synchronicity. The suggestion of a larger framework is essential in order to satisfy the definition of synchronicity as originally developed by Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung.[citation needed]

Jung coined the word to describe what he called "temporally coincident occurrences of acausal events." Jung variously described synchronicity as an "'acausal connecting principle'" (i.e., a pattern of connection that cannot be explained by conventional, efficient causality), "meaningful coincidence" and "acausal parallelism". Jung introduced the concept as early as the 1920s but only gave a full statement of it in 1951 in an Eranos lecture, then in 1952 published a paper "Synchronicity — An Acausal Connecting Principle" in a volume with a related study by the physicist (and Nobel winner) Wolfgang Pauli.[1]

It was a principle that Jung felt gave conclusive evidence for his concepts of archetypes? and the collective unconscious? [2], in that it was descriptive of a governing dynamic that underlay the whole of human experience and history — social, emotional, psychological, and spiritual. Events that happen which appear at first to be coincidence, but are later found to be causally related are termed as "incoincident".

Jung believed that many experiences perceived as coincidence were not merely due to chance but, instead, suggested the manifestation of parallel events or circumstances reflecting this governing dynamic. [3]

One of Jung's favourite quotes on synchronicity was from Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll, in which the White Queen says to Alice: "It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards". [4]

According to Occam's razor? , positing an underlying mechanism for meaningfully interpreted correlations is an unsupported explanation for a "meaningful coincidence" which may be explained by simple coincidence. The amount of meaningful coincidence which one expects by random chance is higher than most people's intuition would lead them to believe, an observation known as Littlewood's Law. Jung and followers believe that synchronous events such as simultaneous discovery happen far more often than random chance would allow, even after accounting for the sampling bias inherent in the fact that meaningful coincidences are noticeable while meaningless coincidences are not.

In psychology and cognitive science, confirmation bias is the tendency to search for or interpret new information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions and avoids information and interpretations which contradict prior beliefs [5]. Many critics believe that any evidence for synchronicity is due to confirmation bias, and nothing else.

Wolfgang Pauli, a scientist who in his professional life was severely critical of confirmation bias, lent his scientific credibility to support the theory, coauthoring a paper with Jung on the subject. Some of the evidence that Pauli cited was that ideas which occurred in his dreams would have synchronous analogs in later correspondence with distant collaborators [6].

Notes

1. ^ Roderick Main (2000). Religion, Science, and Synchronicity. Harvest: Journal for Jungian Studies.
2. ^ Jung defined the collective unconscious as akin to instincts in Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious.
3. ^ In Synchronicity in the final two pages of the Conclusion, Jung stated that not all coincidences are meaningful and further explained the creative causes of this phenomenon.
4. ^ Through the Looking-Glass, by Lewis Carroll, Ch. 5, Wool and Water.
   'It's very good jam,' said the Queen.
   'Well, I don't want any TO-DAY, at any rate.'
   'You couldn't have it if you DID want it,' the Queen said. 'The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday--but never jam to-day.'
   'It MUST come sometimes to "jam to-day,"' Alice objected.
   'No, it can't,' said the Queen. 'It's jam every OTHER day: to-day isn't any OTHER day, you know.'
   'I don't understand you,' said Alice. 'It's dreadfully confusing!'
   'That's the effect of living backwards,' the Queen said kindly: 'it always makes one a little giddy at first--'
   'Living backwards!' Alice repeated in great astonishment. 'I never heard of such a thing!'
   '--but there's one great advantage in it, that one's memory works both ways.'
   'I'm sure MINE only works one way,' Alice remarked. 'I can't remember things before they happen.'
   'It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,' the Queen remarked.
5. ^ Tim van Gelder, "Heads I win, tails you lose": A Foray Into the Psychology of Philosophy
6. ^ http://realityshifters.com/pages/articles/synchronicity.html

-- GeirThomasAndersen - 05 Feb 2008