Apr 1, 2023 08:11 AM
How should we understand the weird experience of coincidence?
https://aeon.co/essays/how-should-we-und...oincidence
EXCERPT: . . . So, what am I to make of this? Here’s one interpretation. Rose died, and her disembodied spirit felt the need to tell me and found its way into my dream. Perhaps she had first tried to contact Doreen, but for one reason or another – the impenetrable wreckage of a damaged brain? – couldn’t get through. Here’s another interpretation. The whole chain of events occurred by sheer coincidence, a chance concatenation of happenings with no deeper significance. There’s nothing at all supernatural about it.
If you ask me which of those two interpretations I prefer, it would, unequivocally, be the second. But here’s the thing. There is a part of me that, despite myself, wants to entertain the possibility that the world really does have supernatural dimensions. It’s the same part of me that gets spooked by ghost stories, and that would feel uneasy about spending a night alone in a morgue.
I don’t believe the Universe contains supernatural forces, but I feel it might. This is because the human mind has fundamentally irrational elements. I’d go as far as to say that magical thinking forms the basis of selfhood. Our experience of ourselves and other people is essentially an act of imagination that can’t be sustained through wholly rational modes of thought.
We see the light of consciousness in another’s eyes and, irresistibly, imagine some ethereal self behind those eyes, humming with feelings and thoughts, when in fact there’s nothing but the dark and silent substance of the brain. We imagine something similar behind our own eyes. It’s a necessary illusion, rooted deep in our evolutionary history. Coincidence, or rather the experience of coincidence, triggers magical thoughts that are equally deep-rooted.
[...] I have set naturalism and the supernatural in binary opposition but perhaps there is a third way. Let’s call it the supranatural stance. This was the position adopted, in different ways, by Kammerer and by the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung. Koestler’s The Roots of Coincidence (1972) introduced Kammerer’s work to the English-speaking world and was influential in reviving interest in Jung’s ideas. Kammerer began recording coincidences in 1900
Kammerer’s book Das Gesetz der Serie (1919), or ‘The Law of Seriality’, contains 100 samples of coincidences that he classifies in terms of typology, morphology, power and so on, with, as Koestler puts it, ‘the meticulousness of a zoologist devoted to taxonomy’. The second half of the book is devoted to theory. Kammerer’s big idea is that, alongside causality, there is an acausal principle at work in the Universe, somewhat analogous to gravity but, whereas gravity acts universally on mass, this universal acausal force, as Koestler puts it, ‘acts selectively on form and function to bring similar configurations together in space and time; it correlates by affinity.’ Kammerer sums things up as follows: ‘We thus arrive at the image of a world-mosaic or cosmic kaleidoscope, which, in spite of constant shufflings and rearrangements, also takes care of bringing like and like together.’ This seems far-fetched but Albert Einstein, for one, took Kammerer seriously, describing his book as ‘original and by no means absurd’.
The theory of synchronicity, or meaningful coincidence, proposed by Jung follows a similar line. It took shape over several decades through a confluence of ideas streaming in from philosophy, physics, the occult and, not least, from the wellsprings of magical thinking that bubbled in the depths of Jung’s own prodigiously creative and, at times, near-psychotic mind. Certain coincidences, he suggests, are not merely a random coming-together of unrelated events, nor are the events causally linked. They are connected acausally by virtue of their meaning. Synchronicity was the ‘acausal connecting principle’.
According to the physicist and historian of science Arthur I Miller’s book Deciphering the Cosmic Number: The Strange Friendship of Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung (2009), Jung considered this to be one of the best ideas he ever had, and cites Einstein as an influence. In the early years of the 20th century, Einstein was on several occasions a dinner guest at the Jung family home in Zurich, making a strong impression. Jung traces a direct link between those dinners with Einstein and his dialogue, some 30 years later, with the Nobel prize-winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli, a dialogue that brought the concept of synchronicity to fruition.
Jung’s collaboration with Pauli was an unlikely coalition: Jung, the quasi-mystic psychologist, a psychonaut whose deep excursions into his own unconscious mind he deemed the most significant experiences of his life; and Pauli, the hardcore theoretical physicist who was influential in reshaping our understanding of the physical world at its subatomic foundations... (MORE - missing details)
https://aeon.co/essays/how-should-we-und...oincidence
EXCERPT: . . . So, what am I to make of this? Here’s one interpretation. Rose died, and her disembodied spirit felt the need to tell me and found its way into my dream. Perhaps she had first tried to contact Doreen, but for one reason or another – the impenetrable wreckage of a damaged brain? – couldn’t get through. Here’s another interpretation. The whole chain of events occurred by sheer coincidence, a chance concatenation of happenings with no deeper significance. There’s nothing at all supernatural about it.
If you ask me which of those two interpretations I prefer, it would, unequivocally, be the second. But here’s the thing. There is a part of me that, despite myself, wants to entertain the possibility that the world really does have supernatural dimensions. It’s the same part of me that gets spooked by ghost stories, and that would feel uneasy about spending a night alone in a morgue.
I don’t believe the Universe contains supernatural forces, but I feel it might. This is because the human mind has fundamentally irrational elements. I’d go as far as to say that magical thinking forms the basis of selfhood. Our experience of ourselves and other people is essentially an act of imagination that can’t be sustained through wholly rational modes of thought.
We see the light of consciousness in another’s eyes and, irresistibly, imagine some ethereal self behind those eyes, humming with feelings and thoughts, when in fact there’s nothing but the dark and silent substance of the brain. We imagine something similar behind our own eyes. It’s a necessary illusion, rooted deep in our evolutionary history. Coincidence, or rather the experience of coincidence, triggers magical thoughts that are equally deep-rooted.
[...] I have set naturalism and the supernatural in binary opposition but perhaps there is a third way. Let’s call it the supranatural stance. This was the position adopted, in different ways, by Kammerer and by the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung. Koestler’s The Roots of Coincidence (1972) introduced Kammerer’s work to the English-speaking world and was influential in reviving interest in Jung’s ideas. Kammerer began recording coincidences in 1900
Kammerer’s book Das Gesetz der Serie (1919), or ‘The Law of Seriality’, contains 100 samples of coincidences that he classifies in terms of typology, morphology, power and so on, with, as Koestler puts it, ‘the meticulousness of a zoologist devoted to taxonomy’. The second half of the book is devoted to theory. Kammerer’s big idea is that, alongside causality, there is an acausal principle at work in the Universe, somewhat analogous to gravity but, whereas gravity acts universally on mass, this universal acausal force, as Koestler puts it, ‘acts selectively on form and function to bring similar configurations together in space and time; it correlates by affinity.’ Kammerer sums things up as follows: ‘We thus arrive at the image of a world-mosaic or cosmic kaleidoscope, which, in spite of constant shufflings and rearrangements, also takes care of bringing like and like together.’ This seems far-fetched but Albert Einstein, for one, took Kammerer seriously, describing his book as ‘original and by no means absurd’.
The theory of synchronicity, or meaningful coincidence, proposed by Jung follows a similar line. It took shape over several decades through a confluence of ideas streaming in from philosophy, physics, the occult and, not least, from the wellsprings of magical thinking that bubbled in the depths of Jung’s own prodigiously creative and, at times, near-psychotic mind. Certain coincidences, he suggests, are not merely a random coming-together of unrelated events, nor are the events causally linked. They are connected acausally by virtue of their meaning. Synchronicity was the ‘acausal connecting principle’.
According to the physicist and historian of science Arthur I Miller’s book Deciphering the Cosmic Number: The Strange Friendship of Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung (2009), Jung considered this to be one of the best ideas he ever had, and cites Einstein as an influence. In the early years of the 20th century, Einstein was on several occasions a dinner guest at the Jung family home in Zurich, making a strong impression. Jung traces a direct link between those dinners with Einstein and his dialogue, some 30 years later, with the Nobel prize-winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli, a dialogue that brought the concept of synchronicity to fruition.
Jung’s collaboration with Pauli was an unlikely coalition: Jung, the quasi-mystic psychologist, a psychonaut whose deep excursions into his own unconscious mind he deemed the most significant experiences of his life; and Pauli, the hardcore theoretical physicist who was influential in reshaping our understanding of the physical world at its subatomic foundations... (MORE - missing details)
