Everything about Synchronicity totally explained
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 'synchronistic', the events must be related to one another temporally, and the
chance that they'd 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.
Jung coined the word to describe what he called "temporally coincident occurrences of acausal events." Jung variously described synchronicity as an "'acausal connecting principle'" (for example, a pattern of connection that can't 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.
It was a principle that Jung felt gave conclusive evidence for his concepts of
archetypes and the
collective unconscious, 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.
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".
Scientific reasoning
According to
Occam's razor, positing an underlying mechanism for meaningfully interpreted correlations is an unsupported explanation for a "meaningful coincidence" if the correlations may alternatively 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 . 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 .
Examples
Jung claims that in 1805, the French writer
Émile Deschamps was treated to some
plum pudding by a stranger named Monsieur de Forgebeau. 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 the last dish had already been served to another customer, who turned out to be de Forgebeau. 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 Forgebeau was missing to make the setting complete — and in the same instant, the now senile de Forgebeau entered the room.
In fact, Deschamps gives the name as "de Fontgibu", and also describes him as a Marquis and Colonel who fought against
Napoleon under
Louis Joseph de Bourbon, prince de Condé - "Oeuvres complètes de Émile Deschamps, 1873" and "Echoes from the Harp of France" a collection of works by G.S. Trebutien - since no de Fontgibu appears in French history, this is most likely an invented name and could easily be a purely fictional character.
In popular culture
Film
In the 1976 film
The Eagle Has Landed, the character Max Radl (
Robert Duvall) asks a subordinate if he's familiar with the works of Jung, and then explains the theory of Synchronicity. In the 1980s film
Repo Man Miller's "Plate 'o' Shrimp" theory outlines the idea of synchronicity. The Miller character states that while many people see life as a series of unconnected incidents, he believes that there's a "lattice o[f] coincidence that lays on top o[f] everything" which is "part of a cosmic unconsciousness."
In the 2004 film
I ♥ Huckabees, a character hires existential detectives to solve his coincidence. They caution him, "Not all coincidences are meaningful."
The 2007 film
August Rush features a plot built upon several synchronicities, all surrounding a series of unlikely meetings and occurrences that ultimately lead to a reunion between the title character and his two parents.
Other media
In the 1983 release
Synchronicity by
The Police (
A&M Records), bassist
Sting is reading a copy of Jung's
Synchronicity on the front cover along with a negative/superimposed image of the actual text of the synchronicity hypothesis. A photo on the back cover also shows a close-up but mirrored and upside-down image of the book. There are two songs, titled "Synchronicity I" and "
Synchronicity II" included in the album.
The
Dirk Gently series of books by
Douglas Adams often plays on the synchronicity concept. The main character carries a "pocket
I Ching" that also functions as a calculator, up to a point. In
Philip K. Dick's
The Game-Players of Titan, several characters possessing pre-cognitive abilities cite the acausal principle of synchronicity as an element which hampers their ability to accurately predict certain possible futures.
John Constantine, the main character in the
Vertigo Comics series
Hellblazer, is sometimes seen "riding the synchronicity highway," to meet certain goals or even just to one up those around him. In the
D20 Modern roleplaying game Urban Arcana,
Synchronicity is a
magic spell that subtly rearranges reality, allowing the subject to avoid the minor inconveniences and hassles of everyday life. In the role-playing game, Synchronicity is a low powered
Fate spell that allows the will-worker to glean information from coincidences.
Terence McKenna used the term 'Cosmic giggle' to mean "a randomly roving zone of synchronicity and statistical anomaly. Should you be caught up in it, it'll turn reality on its head. It is objective and subjective, simultaneously 'really there' and yet somehow is sustained by imagination and expectation...." The phenomenon is also explored, though not named, in
The Red Notebook by
Paul Auster, and is considered a major theme of his entire bibliography, appearing in some form in almost every work.
In 2002, manga author Itagaki Keisuke based one of the story arcs of
Baki The Search Of Our Strongest Hero on the "synchronicity theme," presenting a story in which five death row inmates escaped at the same time, in different countries, each after surviving his own execution. Each inmate went back to Japan at the same time to meet in the same place for the same objective.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Synchronicity'.
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