Synchronicity

[DeathCell]

Synchronicity is the experience of two or more events which are causally unrelated occurring together in a meaningful manner. In order to count as synchronicity, the events should be unlikely to occur together by chance. The concept does not question, or compete with, the notion of causality. Instead, it maintains that just as events may be grouped by cause, they may also be grouped by their meaning. Since meaning is a complex mental construction, subject to conscious and subconscious influence, not every correlation in the grouping of events by meaning needs to have an explanation in terms of cause and effect. Contents [hide] * 1 Description * 2 Scientific reasoning * 3 Examples * 4 In popular culture o 4.1 Film o 4.2 Other media * 5 See also * 6 Notes * 7 References and further reading * 8 External links [edit] Description picture of the concept of synchronicity by CG Jung The idea of synchronicity is that the conceptual relationship of minds, defined as the relationship between ideas, is intricately structured in its own logical way and gives rise to relationships that are not causal in nature. These relationships can manifest themselves as simultaneous occurrences that are meaningfully related—the cause and the effect occur together. 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", "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[1] and in 1952, published a paper, Synchronicity — An Acausal Connecting Principle, in a volume with a related study by the physicist (and Nobel laureate) Wolfgang Pauli.[2] It was a principle that Jung felt gave conclusive evidence for his concepts of archetypes and the collective unconscious,[3] in that it was descriptive of a governing dynamic that underlies 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 that are coincidences due to chance in terms of causality suggested the manifestation of parallel events or circumstances in terms of meaning, reflecting this governing dynamic.[4] 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".[citation needed] [5][6] [edit] Scientific reasoning A possible explanation for Jung's perception that the laws of probability seemed to be violated with some coincidences[7] can be seen in Littlewood's law. In psychology and cognitive science, confirmation bias is a 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. It is a type of cognitive bias and represents an error of inductive inference, or as a form of selection bias toward confirmation of the hypothesis under study or disconfirmation of an alternative hypothesis. Confirmation bias is of interest in the teaching of critical thinking, as the skill is misused if rigorous critical scrutiny is applied only to evidence challenging a preconceived idea but not to evidence supporting it.[8] Wolfgang Pauli, a scientist who in his professional life was severely critical of confirmation bias, made some effort to investigate the phenomenon, coauthoring a paper with Jung on the subject.[9] 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.[10] [edit] Examples The French writer Émile Deschamps claims in his memoirs that in 1805, he was treated to some plum pudding by a stranger named Monsieur de Fortgibu. Ten years later, the writer encountered plum pudding on the menu of a Paris restaurant and wanted to order some, but the waiter told him that the last dish had already been served to another customer, who turned out to be de Fortgibu. Many years later, in 1832, Émile Deschamps was at a diner and was once again offered plum pudding. He recalled the earlier incident and told his friends that only de Fortgibu was missing to make the setting complete—and in the same instant, the now senile de Fortgibu entered the room.[11] In his book Synchronicity (1952), Jung tells the following story as an example of a synchronistic event: "A young woman I was treating had, at a critical moment, a dream in which she was given a golden scarab. While she was telling me this dream, I sat with my back to the closed window. Suddenly I heard a noise behind me, like a gentle tapping. I turned round and saw a flying insect knocking against the window-pane from the outside. I opened the window and caught the creature in the air as it flew in. It was the nearest analogy to a golden scarab one finds in our latitudes, a scarabaeud beetle, the common rose-chafer (Cetonia aurata), which contrary to its usual habits had evidently felt the urge to get into a dark room at this particular moment. I must admit that nothing like it ever happened to me before or since." [12] Simultaneous discovery is the creation of the same new idea at causally disconnected places by two persons at approximately the same time. If, for example, an American and a British musician, having never had anything to do with one another, arrived at the same musical concept, chord sequence, feel or lyrics at the same time in different places, this would be an example of synchronicity. The wardrobe department for The Wizard of Oz unknowingly purchased a coat for character Professor Marvel from a second-hand store, which was later verified to have originally been owned by L. Frank Baum, the author of the novel on which the film was based.[13] Jung wrote, after describing some examples, "When coincidences pile up in this way, one cannot help being impressed by them -- for the greater the number of terms in such a series, or the more unusual its character, the more improbable it becomes."[14] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity http://www.carl-jung.net/synchronicity.html http://www.psychovision.ch/synw/synchronicity_jung.htm

[Xei]

And so the thread ends. This has been gone over so many times and is so easily explained rationally, it's not even funny.

[Man of Shred]

And so the thread ends. This has been gone over so many times and is so easily explained rationally, it's not even funny. well, then enlighten us.

[Xei]

People will always remember the 1 in a 1,000,000 chance events which happened to them, but they don't notice the 999,999 1 in a 1,000,000 potential chance events which didn't happen. Get it..? Actually never mind, I just saw that you're into the whole law of fives thing and so are unlikely to be critical about these things... I always wondered though, how are four legged animals related to the law of fives? Or the six-sided hexagons in honeycombs? Or the three consecutive double letters in the word 'bookkeeper'? Or the irrational number e? Or in fact all of the billion other things which have nothing at all to do with the number five? :l Seriously, I'd like to hear.

[grasshoppa]

Xei Xei Xei...Your understanding of the law of fives is very limited. As a Discordian Pope it is my duty enlighten you... You must include the tail! Without the tail the four legs would be useless! The animals would be thrown off balance and break a few bones. You see how this works? The law of fives is always there. You just have to look harder.

[Xei]

And the others..? ¬¬ (Not going into the fact that the majority of animals don't use their tails to balance and many don't even have tails). And some more to try: - a deuterium nucleus - the number 3 - a square - a bacteriophage - fire

[grasshoppa]

And the others..? ¬¬ (Not going into the fact that the majority of animals don't use their tails to balance and many don't even have tails). And some more to try: - a deuterium nucleus - the number 3 - a square - a bacteriophage - fire There are relations to the number 5... I just don't know how. Have faith.

[Man of Shred]

WTF is the law of fives?

[DrunkenArse]

Or the irrational number e? A mere algebraic irrational number could be tied to the law of fives because it could occur as a root of a polynomial equation with rational coeffients including five or of degree five. e is transcendental however and so occurs as the root of no such equation. One of its digits must be five. That's it! It has an infinite amount of fives as digits. Rational thought foiled again!

[O'nus]

This thread makes me happy ~

[DuB]

First I want to say that this wiki article is written extremely poorly. I had to read it several times to sort out exactly what the author was trying to say, but I think I've finally gotten my head around the idea. If I'm understanding the idea of "synchronicity" correctly, then I think the idea has actually been misinterpreted by some people in this thread. The article appears at first glance to be saying that synchronicity is the idea that chance events are somehow more than just chance, but I think the actual idea of synchronicity is quite the opposite: it fully acknowledges that these curious coincidences are typically due to chance rather than some causal relation, and says instead that the very fact that people tend to perceive these coincidences as being significant, probable, and/or causally related reveals something about how concepts in the mind are organized. Jung's big thing was "archetypes," which supposedly are vague, mental representations that are innate in every human. Examples of archetypes would be concepts like mother and father, enemy, friend, weapon, shelter, etc. Apparently the idea behind "synchronicity" is that the human tendency to see events that are related in a meaningful way (meaning that they relate to the same archetypal concept) as being causally related--despite the fact that the two events are related only incidentally--is evidence of the mind being organized according to these archetypal concepts, and thus "wired" to see these relationships as meaningful. An interesting bit of conjecture, but like most aspects of psychoanalytic psychology, largely unfalsifiable. Not to mention lacking in parsimony; the concept of confirmation bias mentioned in the wiki article offers a rigorous explanation for the same phenomena without having to postulate innate archetypes.

[grasshoppa]

WTF is the law of fives? The Law of Fives states simply that: All things happen in fives, or are divisible by or are multiples of five, or are somehow directly or indirectly appropriate to 5 The Law of Fives is never wrong —Malaclypse the Younger, Principia Discordia All jokes aside, I think the law of fives explains synchronicity perfectly. The law of fives is a part of a parody religion called Discordianism, so of course the law of fives must be a parody of other beliefs, ie synchronicity. The law of fives is about seeing what you want to see, in this case the number 5. As you search for things that relate to the number 5 you begin to see more and more while not trying as hard to find them as you did before. This is because you've essentially trained your mind to find them, and now you begin to believe that the law of fives may be true. I've done this experimentally with the infamous number 23, and now of course I'm looking at the clock all the time at 11:23, 5:23...etc. "I find the Law of Fives to be more and more manifest the harder I look."- Lord Omar these curious coincidences are typically due to chance rather than some causal relation Synchronicity as it is casually understood is like a modern version of superstition. Although your explanation is probably much more accurate than what Wikipedia tells us.

[DeathCell]

The other links are bound to be better written than wiki.