Thread: Synchronicity

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.

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.

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

Originally Posted by 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

There are relations to the number 5...

I just don't know how.

Have faith.

WTF is the law of fives?

Originally Posted by Man of Shred

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.

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

Originally Posted by Xei

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!

This thread makes me happy

~

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.