Thread: sychronicities

This is related to the shared dreaming topic, as I'll explain....

Today at lunch I read an article that involved a guy named Norimoto Yoda (The Mystery of Go, the Ancient Game That Computers Still Can’t Win | Enterprise | WIRED). This afternoon I looked up why some people write their logic statements backwards in software, and in the discussion I found they're referred to as "Yoda Conditionals". This seems to me to be pretty much a classic 'sychronicity' type situation, and it has several obvious possible explanations:

1. Every day hundreds of things happen, so its natural that a few of them seem remarkably coincidental. (This is like the 'birthdays' problem, where if you have 23 people the probability is 50% that two share a birthday.) Furthermore we tend to notice these kinds of coincidences, because recognizing patterns is core to learning.
2. When I saw the backwards logic in some code I was working on, I subconsciously recognized the similarity with the backwardness of Yoda's speech, and that feeling of relevance is part of what induced me to look into it further.
3. Yoda appeared in both discussions because both writers were responding to other prior stimuli that reminded them of Yoda.

All three of those dynamics are indisputably real, and involved here.

I don't feel like arguing about this now, but based on other experiences, I'm pretty sure that these and other similar explanations are not completely adequate to explain all of these types of experiences, even though they appear adequate for this particular one. So I'll just say it as an unsupported assertion, that there's an element of precognition, telepathy or providence involved also, and you can follow along if you already agree. (Or if you're interested anyway.) I see the quasi-shared dreaming that we discuss to be one form of this, not really different from the other forms.

If the Yoda experience is due to some element of providence or subconscious manipulation of events, one thing notable to me is the apparent pointlessness of it. Why even bother? Sometimes it makes sense as a demonstration of what's possible. Here's another idea: The part of the mind that causes this sort of thing to happen recognizes similarities of images without really understanding content. Synchronicities in general are beneficial to learning, so there's a subconscious part of the mind that has some supernatural influence over events which busies itself cranking out synchronicities. But it doesn't completely recognize how worthwhile any particular synchronicity will prove to be, even though it has some vague sense of that, so it generates a lot of these mostly meaningless ones too. Even this Yoda example has other layers to it. For instance, the use of the semi-random look-ahead algorithm that revolutionized go software, and which was discussed in the first Yoda article, is analogous in some way to how and why this synchronicity-producing fate works. This is in a way a stronger and more meaningful synchronicity than the Yoda name coincidence. And although we have almost no understanding of how it works, its key to all our premonitions and 'parallel worlds' type experiences also.

I guess I'm out of time. If you got this far I hope that made some sense and was worth reading.