Thanks ... but are you saying that you do not see a pattern in these events? That the two teapots were not related, or that my decision to follow intuition didn't lead me to buy the first one? Because I can assure you that was indeed the case ...
I'm saying that the human mind evolved to perceive patterns to such an efficient extent that we tend to see them even where none exist. That is to say, we impose patterns on collections of events which may not be inherent in the events themselves. This has been demonstrated many times with, among other things, series of random numbers. If each digit in a series has a equal probability of appearing in each position, it is entirely possible to end up with a series that looks like 8472195321048213922103521785... etc.
Most people who spend a little time examining that string will notice a "pattern" -- three digits, 21, three digits, 21, etc. If the pattern holds true, it would be reasonable to predict that the next two digits will be 2 1, but if the series has been truly randomly generated there is no particular reason why they should be.
We impose patterns on the world because if a pattern
is really there, then it has predictive value, and being able to predict something in advance, rather than react to it after the fact, can have a good deal of survival value. The problem is that if the pattern we think we see is
not really a property of the collection of events we are looking at, then it has no predictive value -- though we might fool ourselves into believing that it does.
The richer the collection of events we observe, the more material we have to work with to make correlations which we can interpret as patterns, regardless of whether they're there or not. You described a very rich collection of essentially unrelated events, and you made a number of correlations that are interesting because they seem to imply the presence of a pattern where none would ordinarily be expected. But there is really no evidence to indicate that the interest in those correlations is anything more than an artifact of the way our brains happen to work in trying to make sense of the world.
Your response confuses me.
I did not hallucinate the teapots while on LSD
Nor did I hallucinate the snakes in my car.
- I had a 'mystical experience' (not merely a happy one - please look up the term since I cannot add links to posts), which left me with the notion that the world was profoundly interconnected and essentially magical - and that in such a reality, intuition was a useful guide that I should learn to pay attention to.
You had, in fact, a number of experiences upon which you collectively imposed a pattern. You have chosen to interpret your 'discovery' of that pattern as "a mystical experience".
This led directly to me 1) buying the teapot and 2) buying my house. (not on acid in either case)
I'm glad to hear that you didn't buy your house while on acid.
Perhaps I am missing/misunderstanding your point(s) though?
Perhaps so. It is a complex point, in keeping with the complexity of your story. What I attempted to illustrate was:
a) a not uncommon effect of certain hallucinogenic drugs is the apparent perception of
certain correlations/underlying meanings in experiences encountered while under the
influence (e.g., everything is right with the world; god is in everything, etc.)
b) such experiences can be very memorable and even influential on subsequent behavior;
one may vividly remember not only sensory impressions, but also those more esoteric
feelings of "rightness" or "connectedness"
c) such memories can easily be triggered by subsequent encounters with components of the
original experience (in your case, a teapot; in mine, snakes)
d) in the event such a recall is triggered there can be a strong tendency to correlate the
current trigger with the previous event
e) as every Stats 101 prof knows, for most people it's a short step from discovering an
apparent correlation, to assuming that it implies a causal connection
f) Voila! Synchronicity.
In my case it is not so surprising that mowing a lawn with knee-high dandelines might recall a previous (pleasant) experience in which those dandelions seemed to morph into snakes. However, subsequently discovering two live snakes in a car which snakes would not ordinarily have been expected to be able to enter, at a location and under conditions in which one would not ordinarily expect to find snakes, understandibly produced a tendency to correlate the trigger event -- the snakes -- with the recalled experience, rife with its sensations of underlying mystical purpose.
I could have run with that and assumed that the universe was mystically "trying to tell me something." (Indeed, upon hearing my story, my brother's first comment was "So, did you piss off a wizard or what?") Since there were, however, a whole raft of more mundane and more highly plausible explanations for snakes being in my car, I chose not to make that interpretation of events.
You mileage, obviously, varies from mine.
