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geoman.com
Jim Fournier
Spring 1997PAR 667
David Ulansey
Introduction
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certainly was not) the subject at hand should be the actual realm of
phenomena, not one person's thoughts about this realm. To allow
the discussion to degenerate into a debate about Jung's views on
the topic (which were hopelessly contradictory anyway) is only to
insure that the entire field of inquiry will never gain any credibility in
the larger world of ideas.
Definitions
Without going into Jung's various definitions of synchronicity for the
moment, if you asked most people, and some dictionaries, the
simple definition of synchronicity would be: a "meaningful
coincidence." These two words raise many questions. First, what is
a coincidence, meaningful or otherwise? The most obvious answer
is that two (or more) events appear to coincide (in time) but there is
no obvious causal connection between them. It might be more
accurate to say that it is our experience of two events which
somehow seems to coincide. Another way to say this would be to
say that we recognize an associative connection or discern a pattern
in events, but can see no mechanism to account for the apparent
connection between them. To a rational reductionist the term "just a
coincidence" is as unitary as "damn Yankee" was in the old South.
The rational implication being that any apparent connection is only
an illusion brought about by the inherent ability of our minds (brains)
to see pattern even where none "actually" exists.
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and troubling, but it does not call physics into question. Two ideas
arising together in the mind is far from unusual, but is instead
merely regarded as normal thought. From the psychologized
Jungian viewpoint most definitions of synchronicity have built into
them the idea that half of the pattern always originates in an entirely
interior experience, most often in a dream, which is then confirmed,
mirrored or reflected by some event or experience in the exterior
material world of consensus reality. It is not surprising that a
psychotherapist obsessed with analyzing dreams would first
encounter synchronicity in this context, but what is odd is that
definitions of the term synchronicity which include this as a
necessary condition would continue to be parroted without question
over half a century later.
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too late. The cat is out of the bag. Synchronicity has a functional
definition in popular culture which is not about to be constrained by
Mansfield or any Jungian apologist even if they did make sense.
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The tack taken by Pauli and Jung seems more productive. Though
Jung's attempt to make a perfectly valid linear dichotomy into a four
fold system seems forced and unconvincing. Pauli and Jung point
out that causality and what the Chinese regarded as "the tendency
of things to arise together" might be seen as two complimentary
aspects of reality. This complementarity might be seen as a parallel
to the wave particle paradox wherein the result one gets is
dependent upon how one asks the question and designs the
experiment. Thus, as Von Franz points out, an act of divination
designed to take a reading of the particularity of a situation might be
seen as the exact reciprocal complement to a statistical program of
many measurements designed to determine what is most invariant.
One can in a sense know one or the other, but not both from any
particular experiment. Thus, divination might be seen as being to
particularity what probability is to predictability.
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systematically excluded from causality. Jung for the most part paid
homage to this keystone of rational reductionism in the realm of
causality, asserting that in all questions of synchronicity
consciousness apriori is not causal. For the most part it has
consistently been shown not to be in statistical investigations. Yet,
Jung may have been too quick to concede the point in the realm of
the particular. We will return to this point later. Jung did however
make a significant contribution to modern thought with his
(re)introduction of the idea of a Unus Mundus, a deeper unified
realm underlying both mind and matter. This idea is in many ways
similar to David Bohm's idea of the implicate order, a rigorous
interpretation of the mathematics of modern science which has been
criticized by other physicists for not leading to any new testable
hypotheses. In a sense they are correct, but then the same criticism
should apply to the Copenhagen, and all of the other, interpretations
of quantum mechanics. Yet, the implicate order provide the most
effective bridge so far advanced for integrating the troubling
phenomena of consciousness which most other scientists are still
trying to ignore. However, precisely because it is largely an
interpretation of existing mathematical physics, even Bohm's
concept still lacks a rigorous link between consciousness and
physics, and thus between synchronicity and science.
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[ I just paused to figure out what to say next and noticed that this
was line 23.]
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Scientific Speculation
For the most part the most interesting speculative models seem to
have been given short shrift in the major popular works on
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synchronicity. David Peat touches on, but does not elaborate on, the
flatland metaphor originally articulated in the classic work by Edwin
Abbot. The core of this idea is essentially that a being who
understood only a two dimensional reality would encounter points
which would seem totally disconnected, much as columns appear in
an architectural floor plan. But seen from a higher dimension these
would be seen to be part of a coherent integrated structure. We can
elaborate this idea in at least two or three different ways. First we
might simply posit space as a higher dimensional manifold. If super
string theory currently requires a twenty six dimensional model, then
one could in some sense infer twenty three enfolded dimensions in
which to embed hidden interconnectedness. This numerical
example is far too literal and simple minded and is only meant to
illustrate the concept. The next step would be to infer that
dimensionality might somehow refer to the conceptual space of
consciousness interpenetrating with spatial reality such that not only
spatial dimensions, but also virtual dimensions of consciousness
were somehow inter-enfolded. I am not sure exactly what this
implies, but it is an interesting model for potential thought
experiments.
The final extension of flatland is the one I find most interesting. It has
frequently been stated that we live in three space dimensions plus
time, or in a four dimensional space-time continuum. But this is not
in fact the case. We understand time as having only one direction
and therefore one sign. Thus, it is really only half of a dimension. If
you wanted to say something to someone in flatland to make them
realize that they in fact live in a larger and more interconnected
reality you would say, "hey look up." "Up" would be in the direction
of the next higher dimensionality. But we don't have to go a whole
dimension higher, only half a dimension. If we actually live in a three
and a half dimensional space time continuum, "up" to us would be
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into the future to meet that other half a dimension coming backward
toward us. This suggests that the direction a higher level of
interconnectedness might come toward us would appear to be from
out of the future. This bears a startling similarity to many (but by no
means all) synchronicity phenomena, which appear to us to be
violations of our conventional view of temporal causality.
This idea becomes more rigorous in the form of work done by John
Wheeler and Richard Feynman in the nineteen forties and recently
extended into quantum mechanics by John Cramer. This work
essentially points out that the most consistent interpretation of the
mathematics underlying quantum mechanics is to interpret certain
lines in the Feynman diagrams as illustrating virtual particles
moving backward in time. As Cramer points out, in his transactional
interpretation of quantum mechanics, one may essentially trade
acausality for negative temporality. That is to say, if one is willing to
accept virtual particles moving backward in time, one may avoid the
conventional quantum paradoxes. Perhaps this may also be true of
the paradox of synchronicity.
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