Synchronicity is coincidence right?
Here’s how Wikipedia defines the concept:
“Synchronicity is a concept, first explained by psychiatrist Carl Jung, which holds that events are “meaningful coincidences” if they occur with no causal relationship, yet seem to be meaningfully related.”
Since meaning is in the eye of the beholder, I suppose you get to decide if a coincidence is an example of synchronicity or not.
But from a mainstream scientific perspective, synchronicity is criticized for pretty solid reasons. Here are some Wikipedia excerpts again:
“Critics assert that standard science, causality, physics, statistics, and probability (for instance, Littlewood’s law or the law of truly large numbers) suffice to explain alleged (in Jung definition) “synchronistic” events, it doesn’t mean that similar events can not exist (see for instance: mathematical coincidence) but the explanation as synchronicity is criticized, so the term coincidences is used instead.”
[…]
“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 that contradict prior beliefs. It is a type of cognitive bias and represents an error of inductive inference, or is 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 that challenges a preconceived idea, but not to evidence that supports it.”
And now for some wild sci-fi speculation!
Even though the concept of synchronicity is best considered non-scientific, it’s still fun to play around with. I like to link it with a science fiction concept from a strange and funny Philip K. Dick book called VALIS. Here’s how it’s defined:
“VALIS (acronym of Vast Active Living Intelligence System from an American film): A perturbation in the reality field in which a spontaneous self-monitoring negentropic vortex is formed, tending progressively to subsume and incorporate its environment into arrangements of information. Characterized by quasi-consciousness, purpose, intelligence, growth and an armillary coherence.”
I’ve thought a lot about what this mysterious-sounding sci-fi definition might mean. I think it bridges the gap between objective meaning and subjective confirmation bias. If you take coincidences (“perturbations in the reality field”?) and start to read meaning into them, you can start to view the world differently. Armed with a different view (“arrangements of information”?), you act differently and change the world in accordance with your weird new set of ideas, leading to “quasi-consciousness, purpose, intelligence, growth and an armillary coherence”.
So you might choose to think differently about a person because of a series of fluky coincidences. Then in retrospect the coincidences become part of a narrative that changes your behavior and enhances the probability of confirmation bias, by making you more sensitive to certain aspects of the environment.
A cult (or a tribe of conspiracy theorists) might emerge as a result of coincidences that caught a few people’s attention. The group cooks up a loony theory, and then becomes highly sensitive to anything in the world that agrees with their theory. Then they create institutions that essentially encourage self-hypnosis, changing their own little corner of the world so it more closely resembles their theory. Eventually their own society serves as evidence for the theory!
More positively, a social reform movement might start in a similar way, from a “seed” of illusory nonsense! 🙂
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This post originally appeared in 2016 as an answer to a Quora question: Is synchronicity real?
Image: an armillary sphere (from Wikipedia)
