Synchronicity

Synchronicity () is a concept, first introduced by analytical psychologist Carl Jung, which holds that events are "meaningful coincidences" if they occur with no causal relationship yet seem to be meaningfully related.  During his career, Jung furnished several different definitions of it.  Jung defined synchronicity as an "acausal connecting (togetherness) principle," "meaningful coincidence", and "acausal parallelism."  He introduced the concept as early as the 1920s but gave a full statement of it only in 1951 in an Eranos lecture. 

In 1952 Jung published a paper "Synchronizität als ein Prinzip akausaler Zusammenhänge" (Synchronicity – An Acausal Connecting Principle) in a volume which also contained a related study by the physicist and Nobel laureate Wolfgang Pauli, who was sometimes critical of Jung's ideas.  Jung's belief was that, just as events may be connected by causality, they may also be connected by meaning.  Events connected by meaning need not have an explanation in terms of causality, which does not generally contradict the Axiom of Causality but in specific cases can lead to prematurely giving up causal explanation. 

Jung used the concept in arguing for the existence of the paranormal.  A believer in the paranormal, Arthur Koestler wrote extensively on synchronicity in his 1972 book The Roots of Coincidence. 

Mainstream science explains synchronicities as mere coincidences or spurious correlations which can be described by laws of statistics (for instance, by the law of truly large numbers) and confirmation biases  

Synchronicity is considered pseudoscience because it is neither testable nor falsifiable. 

Plenitude of certain meaningful coincidences is essential in early stages of delusion formation,  Jung stated that classifying which of synchronicities are morbid is based on meaning interpretation. 

Description

Jung coined the word "synchronicity" to describe "temporally coincident occurrences of acausal events."  In his book Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle, Jung wrote:

In the introduction to his book, Jung on Synchronicity and the Paranormal, Roderick Main wrote:

In his book Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle, Jung wrote:

Synchronicity was a principle which, Jung felt, had explanatory power for his concepts of archetypes and the collective unconscious.  It described a governing dynamic which underlies the whole of human experience and history — social, emotional, psychological, and spiritual.  The emergence of the synchronistic paradigm was a significant move away from Cartesian dualism towards an underlying philosophy of double-aspect theory.  Some argue this shift was essential to bringing theoretical coherence to Jung's earlier work. 

Even at Jung's presentation of his work on synchronicity in 1951 at an Eranos lecture, his ideas on synchronicity were evolving.   On Feb. 25, 1953, in a letter to Carl Seelig, the Swiss author and journalist who wrote a biography of Albert Einstein, Jung wrote, "Professor Einstein was my guest on several occasions at dinner. . .  These were very early days when Einstein was developing his first theory of relativity [and] It was he who first started me on thinking about a possible relativity of time as well as space, and their psychic conditionality.  More than 30 years later the stimulus led to my relation with the physicist professor W. Pauli and to my thesis of psychic synchronicity." 

Jung believed life was not a series of random events but rather an expression of a deeper order, which he and Pauli referred to as Unus mundus.  This deeper order led to the insights that a person was both embedded in a universal wholeness and that the realisation of this was more than just an intellectual exercise, but also had elements of a spiritual awakening.  From the religious perspective, synchronicity shares similar characteristics of an "intervention of grace".  Jung also believed that in a person's life, synchronicity served a role similar to that of dreams, with the purpose of shifting a person's egocentric conscious thinking to greater wholeness. 

Forms
The occurrence of a meaningful coincidence in time can take three forms:

Examples

In his book Synchronicity Jung tells the following story as an example of a synchronistic event:

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 Fontgibu.  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 Fontgibu.  Many years later, in 1832, Deschamps was at a dinner and once again ordered plum pudding.  He recalled the earlier incident and told his friends that only de Fontgibu was missing to make the setting complete – and in the same instant, the now-senile de Fontgibu entered the room, having got the wrong address. 

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." 

In his book Thirty Years That Shook Physics – The Story of Quantum Theory (1966), George Gamow writes about Wolfgang Pauli, who was apparently considered a person particularly associated with synchronicity events.  Gamow whimsically refers to the "Pauli effect", a mysterious phenomenon which is not understood on a purely materialistic basis, and probably never will be.  The following anecdote is told:

Relationship with causality
Causality, when defined expansively (as for instance in the "mystic psychology" book The Kybalion, or in the platonic Kant-style Axiom of Causality), states that "nothing can happen without being caused."  Such an understanding of causality may be incompatible with synchronicity.  Other definitions of causality (for example, the neo-Humean definition) are concerned only with the relation of cause to effect.  As such, they are compatible with synchronicity.  There are also opinions which hold that, where there is no external observable cause, the cause can be internal. 

It is also pointed out that, since Jung took into consideration only the narrow definition of causality – only the efficient cause – his notion of "acausality" is also narrow and so is not applicable to final and formal causes as understood in Aristotelian or Thomist systems.  The final causality is inherent in synchronicity (because it leads to individuation) or synchronicity can be a kind of replacement for final causality; however, such finalism or teleology is considered to be outside the domain of modern science. 

Explanations
Jung's theory of synchronicity is nowadays regarded as pseudoscientific, as it is not based on experimental evidence, and its explananda are easily accounted for by our current understanding of probability theory and human psychology. 

Probability theory

Mainstream mathematics argues that statistics and probability theory (exemplified in, e.g., Littlewood's law or the law of truly large numbers) suffice to explain any purported synchronistic events as mere coincidences.  The law of truly large numbers, for instance, states that in large enough populations, any strange event is arbitrarily likely to happen by mere chance.  However, some proponents of synchronicity question whether it is even sensible in principle to try to evaluate synchronicity statistically.  Jung himself and von Franz argued that statistics work precisely by ignoring what is unique about the individual case, whereas synchronicity tries to investigate that uniqueness. 

Psychology

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. 

Likewise, in psychology and sociology, the term apophenia is used for the mistaken detection of a pattern or meaning in random or meaningless data.  Skeptics, such as Robert Todd Carroll of the Skeptic's Dictionary, argue that the perception of synchronicity is better explained as apophenia.  Primates use pattern detection in their form of intelligence, and this can lead to erroneous identification of non-existent patterns.  A famous example of this is the fact that human face recognition is so robust, and based on such a basic archetype (essentially two dots and a line contained in a circle), that human beings are very prone to identify faces in random data all through their environment, like the "man in the moon", or faces in wood grain, an example of the visual form of apophenia known as pareidolia. 

Charles Tart sees danger in synchronistic thinking: 'This danger is the temptation to mental laziness. [...]  it would be very tempting to say, "Well, it's synchronistic, it's forever beyond my understanding," and so (prematurely) give up trying to find a causal explanation.' 

Even when it came out, Jung's works, such as The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche, were received as problematic by his fellow psychologists.  Fritz Levi, in his 1952 review in Neue Schweizer Rundschau (New Swiss Observations), critiqued Jung's theory of synchronicity as vague in determinability of synchronistic events, saying that Jung never specifically explained his rejection of "magic causality" to which such an acausal principle as synchronicity would be related.  He also questioned the theory's usefulness. 

Mathematics
Jung and his followers (e.g., Marie-Louise von Franz) share in common the belief that numbers are the archetypes of order, and the major participants in synchronicity creation.  This hypothesis has implications that are relevant to some of the “chaotic” phenomena in nonlinear dynamics.  Dynamical systems theory has provided a new context from which to speculate about synchronicity because it gives predictions about the transitions between emergent states of order and nonlocality.  This view, however, is not part of mainstream mathematical thought. 

Religion

Many people  believe that the Universe, angels, other spirits, or God cause synchronicity.  Among the general public, divine intervention is the most widely accepted explanation for these meaningful coincidences.  Even some scientists see spiritual or mystical forces behind synchronicities and are asking if it has anything in common with pathology. 

Publications

 Also included in his Collected Works volume 8. 

Wilson, Robert Anton (1988) Coincidance: A Head Test

See also

References

Bibliography

 

 Roth, Remo, F., Return of the World Soul, Wolfgang Pauli, C.G. Jung and the Challenge of Psychophysical Reality [unus mundus].  Pari Publishing, 2011

External links

Carl Jung and Synchronicity

 
Category:Carl Jung
Category:Analytical psychology
Category:Concepts in metaphysics
Category:Concepts in the philosophy of mind
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Category:Mind–body problem
Category:Open problems
Category:Paranormal
Category:Philosophical concepts
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Category:Philosophical theories
Category:Philosophy of mind
Category:Philosophy of physics
Category:Spirituality