How do you guys explain really bizarre cases of synchronicity?

[quarky]

Must play devil's advocate briefly:

What good is algebra, compared to astrology, if you happen to be Jeanne Dixon?
Why is predictive value valuable, in most modern lives?
If you didn't know when an eclipse was coming, would it matter?

(Yes, other's that knew could manipulate you and make life miserable)

((Oops. The manipulation goes on, unabated, despite rational thinking.))

What is a meaningful event? 9/11 and some buildings crashing down? People dying?
Was it meaningful in Siberia?
Did it mean much to worms?

Hard-line materialism is not necessarily a survival advantage, nor necessarily a means to a happier existence.

I was raised steeped in science, and naturally repulsed by religion. The chem majors I was one of in college were the dorkiest, nerdiest people on Earth. It was obvious that none of them were ever going to have a date, much less achieve biological significance through reproduction. I experienced a drift, reinforced through chemistry, oddly enough, and some novel compounds that nerds were able to synthesize.

This was a collision course between hard science and soft subjectivity. Subjectivity clearly had the edge in terms of pragmatic value. The nerds went on to develop dumber hair conditioners and smarter bombs; the novel compounds were made illegal while I watched sunsets with naked hippie chicks.

Mistakes were made.

And we go on defending our positions, as if we are privy to greater understanding, happiness, and biological significance because of our hard convictions.
Meanwhile, we find refuge in a great guitar solo, not bothering to examine the belief system of the player.

I keep up with science and still hate lies and fraud. Still, the world becomes more mystical everyday. We die, for one thing. We know almost nothing.

Quantum physicists, from what I've seen, are seriously to the weird side of the skepticism and surety that is continually expressed here.

If we went back in time, and Einstein was posting here, he'd be considered rather 'woo'.

 

[cyborg]

The fact that we cannot predict how a mind or a society will unfold in a given circumstance...

But we CAN and DO predict these things. We do infact look for the underlying causal mechanisms. And, as I said before, complexity is not necessary when simplicity on a large scale is sufficient.

 

[Rodney]

But it is first necessary to demonstrate that there is a pattern.

What kind of demonstration are you looking for?

 

[cyborg]

What kind of demonstration are you looking for?

Not the kind where you connect the dots you want and put the numbers on afterwards.

 

[Teapots Happen]

Hard-line materialism is not necessarily a survival advantage, nor necessarily a means to a happier existence.

I was raised steeped in science, and naturally repulsed by religion. The chem majors I was one of in college were the dorkiest, nerdiest people on Earth. It was obvious that none of them were ever going to have a date, much less achieve biological significance through reproduction. I experienced a drift, reinforced through chemistry, oddly enough, and some novel compounds that nerds were able to synthesize.

This was a collision course between hard science and soft subjectivity. Subjectivity clearly had the edge in terms of pragmatic value. The nerds went on to develop dumber hair conditioners and smarter bombs; the novel compounds were made illegal while I watched sunsets with naked hippie chicks.

Mistakes were made.

And we go on defending our positions, as if we are privy to greater understanding, happiness, and biological significance because of our hard convictions.
Meanwhile, we find refuge in a great guitar solo, not bothering to examine the belief system of the player.

I keep up with science and still hate lies and fraud. Still, the world becomes more mystical everyday. We die, for one thing. We know almost nothing.

Quantum physicists, from what I've seen, are seriously to the weird side of the skepticism and surety that is continually expressed here.

If we went back in time, and Einstein was posting here, he'd be considered rather 'woo'.

Wow.

Brilliant AND hilarious post, throughout.

Thanks for the refreshing perspective.

 

[paximperium]

Hard-line materialism is not necessarily a survival advantage, nor necessarily a means to a happier existence.

But it is the best tool we have to determine truth, so what is your point?

I keep up with science and still hate lies and fraud. Still, the world becomes more mystical everyday. We die, for one thing. We know almost nothing.

Yeah...and?

Quantum physicists, from what I've seen, are seriously to the weird side of the skepticism and surety that is continually expressed here.

Really? Do tell. Their claims match the math and evidence. Where does any of this nonsense and magical thinking fit Quantum Physics? Where is their math or evidence?

If we went back in time, and Einstein was posting here, he'd be considered rather 'woo'.

And you'd be wrong. He supported his claims with actual math and evidence.

 

[JoeTheJuggler]

What kind of demonstration are you looking for?

This has been explained.

Any outcome you get from tossing an honest coin is a random result, and any perceived pattern is meaningless.

Examples of meaningful patterns are face recognition (of real faces--not clouds, tortilla burn patterns or water stains), finding a causal connection between correlated events, etc.

So again, you said the phenomenon should be investigated. How do you propose to do that?

So far, the only question you asked is, "What are the odds against that happening?" and you rejected the answer (the same as the odds of any other low probability outcome). You know--all that Texas Sharpshooter fallacy stuff. . .

 

[JoeTheJuggler]

What good is algebra, compared to astrology, if you happen to be Jeanne Dixon?

I can cite a great many creature comforts in any person's modern lifestyle (including Jeanne Dixon's) that rely on algebra. Astrology only makes her money the same way any other con game does. It does nothing to help one discern any truth about the universe.

Why is predictive value valuable, in most modern lives?

When we turn on a light switch, it's sometimes very important that the light come on. Even more important when the switch controls some life saving technology in the O.R. for example.

In a more mundane way, every time I drive my car over a bridge, the engineers' predictions that the bridge can support the load is of huge importance to my life.

f you didn't know when an eclipse was coming, would it matter?

Yes. If humans didn't understand eclipses, we would doubtless still be subject to one or another type of theocracy and the tyranny that accompanies it.

(Yes, other's that knew could manipulate you and make life miserable)

I see you answered your own question. Why doesn't this count?

Did it mean much to worms?

Meaning and significance is something that depends on relatively advanced neurological structures. I believe some of this function overlaps with language (again, which is why we have the capability and tendency to see things as significant or symbolic). I'm confident worms do not have such anatomy, so nothing is meaningful to worms.

Hard-line materialism is not necessarily a survival advantage, nor necessarily a means to a happier existence.

Isn't that very much like saying that we evolved with the tendency to make Type I errors in thinking (pattern matching, semiotics) since Type II errors are strongly selected against? If so, I agree, and I wish I'd said it first.

However, if the question is what the question is at the beginning of this thread, it's asking for an explanation. As such, rational thought is the best way to discern most such things.

I keep up with science and still hate lies and fraud. Still, the world becomes more mystical everyday. We die, for one thing. We know almost nothing.

So does "mystical" mean the same thing as "beyond our current understanding"? If so, I think you've got the trend backwards. The world is becoming less and less "mystical" everyday. We can explain more and more of what used to be inexplicable.

Quantum physicists, from what I've seen, are seriously to the weird side of the skepticism and surety that is continually expressed here.

Quantum physics represents an increase in understanding of how the world works. It does not represent an increase in ignorance.

If we went back in time, and Einstein was posting here, he'd be considered rather 'woo'.

I disagree. Even if you were right (and you're not), so what? Are you making some kind of argument from authority? Did Einstein believe in "synchronicity"? I'm pretty sure he actually rejected ideas like that anyway.

 

[Belz...]

Gee, another poster who doesn't get quantum mechanics and therefore brands it as "weird".

 

[quarky]

QM is weird. Truth is weird. Reality is fantasticly odd.

Ignorance; not so much.

I'm on science's side, btw. My spat of devil's advocacy is over for now.

 

[JoeTheJuggler]

In that case, I'll try to be the devil's advocate now--at least a little.

I was just reading in Carl Sagan's Dragons of Eden about the left brain/right brain or intuitive/rational-verbal dichotomy stuff. (Remember, Sagan admits neuroscience is not his field, and this was written back in the '70s.)

However, he makes a good point on our subject. He observes that humans are very good at facial recognition. He points out that standard Identikits used by police can produce more than 10 billion different faces and humans can distinguish among them.

Yet consider how incapable we are of describing verbally faces that we are perfectly capable of recognizing. Witnesses commonly exhibit a total failure in verbal description of an individual previously encountered, but a high accuracy in recognizing the same individual again. . . . Consider how easily we can pick, from a vast crowd of faces, a "celebrity"; or how in a dense non-ordered list our own name leaps out at us.

This seems to be saying that there is such a thing as intuition. That sometimes our ability to perceive a pattern outstrips our ability to verbalize or explain that pattern.

Unfortunately, the only way we can tell these cases are actually recognizing a real and meaningful pattern is if we have other ways of rationally verifying it. In a show down between physical evidence and an eyewitness ID, courts will go with the physical evidence. As great as our ability to perceive patterns is, we know it's fallible, and we know it's particularly prone to Type I errors.

The claim of "synchronicity" is a claim that even though we have a legitimate rational explanation for an outcome (or coincidence of events) and no good reason to think the outcome is significant or meaningful, that it somehow is nonetheless significant and meaningful.

Back to the coin tossing thought experiment--even when there is a perceivable pattern to the outcome, if we know the coin is honest and the result is not significant, we know that even a discernible pattern (one we can even verbalize, such as every other toss is a head, or every 3 result is a tail) is without meaning or significance.

Hunting for messages in "Bible codes" is another good example. Even though you can find words that way, they are without meaning or significance. No one put them there. It is simply a matter of our tendency to infer meaning and intention even where it doesn't exist.

 

[Prometheus]

Coincidentally, my local NPR affiliate is broadcasting this podcast right now.

 

[dlorde]

With respect to intuition - the way I see it, our minds are receiving and processing large amounts of data all the time, and the great majority of this is below conscious awareness. Intuition is a way of describing how significant results of this processing unexpectedly become available to conscious awareness.

In my experience, intuition is certainly useful. I use it all the time at work, as I expect most people do. When one gains a degree of expertise and/or experience in a field, much of the mental work associated becomes 'second-nature', it is internalised to some extent, requiring minimal conscious effort. As a software developer, I can often look at a design or a piece of code and 'sense' it has problems without making a conscious analysis. Sometimes I can't put my finger on the cause of my unease until sometime later, but my hunch or intuition is usually good. It's just my subconscious recognising some deviation from the 'known-good' patterns of experience. You can almost define expertise in terms of the level of internalisation of knowledge in the field, where assessments can be made without conscious effort.

In everyday life, after a lifetime of practice, we are expert at identifying faces - we don't need to compare features point by point, we can effortlessly distinguish them. When asked to describe the differences, we have to resort to a clumsy conscious analysis - which may be considerably less assured.

Everyday instances of this kind generally pass unnoticed - we may refer to minor unexplained feelings of knowledge as 'hunches' and 'intuition' seems to be reserved for more unexpected and/or striking instances.

It seems to me that there are good evolutionary reasons for such a mechanism to exist. We don't have the conscious capacity to process all the data we receive for significance, but if it can be processed in the 'background' and we can be made aware of significant patterns in that data, there is a clear survival advantage.

The difficulties with intuition are that we are not (by definition) consciously aware of the reasons for it, so we don't have an immediate explanation for it. Also, because it is not the result of a rational process, it is not always reliable, although it is generally more reliable when we have a large 'database' of experience for it to work with.

The real point I'm making is that it can only work with the information that is available to you at the time (conscious or subconscious). If you really had a hunch or intuition that you should buy a particular teapot, then - assuming it was not entirely random - it must have triggered in you some recognition of significance in the information available to you at the time. Who knows what - colour, shape, an unconscious memory of having seen one before... could be many things. However, it could not be a result of something you had not experienced or imagined, i.e. information that was not available to you at that time. A reasonable conclusion on subsequently discovering an identical teapot in unusual circumstances, is that either you had some prior knowledge of that teapot that contributed to your intuition, or it was a coincidence. The idea that you could have had some knowledge of the second teapot, despite there being no possible route for that knowledge to reach you, implies violations of fundamental physical principles (causality, locality, etc) - although it doesn't rule out possible routes that you are/were unaware of. In the absence of useful evidence, Occam's Razor suggests it was coincidence.

Finally, memory is surprisingly labile and open to auto-reinforcement - is it possible that the more you pondered on the circumstances and the 'story', the more you repeated it and described it, the stronger you remembered the intuition to be, and the more unlikely the coincidence seemed? Something to consider - I know from experience that retelling interesting group experiences over time can cause the stories of individual members to diverge unexpectedly quickly.

 

[quarky]

I had an intuition about intuition one time. I'm prone to creative impulses, and have been since early childhood. I'm one of those types that can be picking apples or laying bricks and suddenly have an entire song or story appear in my mind, seemingly out of nowhere, and utterly unrelated to what I was doing. This happened as recently as last night, when I was watching a movie (Alexander) and suddenly had a vision of a child's toy that was compelling enough to still the movie and make a quick drawing so I wouldn't forget.

Not everyone is like this. Its almost a disease with me, as i have a hard time focussing on the job at hand. If you read interviews of famous songwriters and how it works for them, its anything but hard science. Rather wooish, even.

The science geek in me wants answers and not wooish ones.

The intuition I had about intuition, which happened in a second, got translated in my brain into words that take longer than an instant. Here's a rough translation:

The rational mind works in language comprised of words. Beneath this layer is a functioning mind that works in units of data that are somehow less than a word, or at least preceed the brain of language. Intuition, then, is the tipping effect of a conglomeration of sub-units of data; akin to individual letters of words, that make no rational sense until another part of the brain assembles them into a form that is ready to read in terms of normal language.

The actual "A-Ha!" moment of inspiration is the bell that goes off (so to speak) that tells the language center of the brain that these sub-units of un-readable data are now properly assembled into a form that can be expressed.

 

[JoeTheJuggler]

The rational mind works in language comprised of words. Beneath this layer is a functioning mind that works in units of data that are somehow less than a word, or at least preceed the brain of language. Intuition, then, is the tipping effect of a conglomeration of sub-units of data; akin to individual letters of words, that make no rational sense until another part of the brain assembles them into a form that is ready to read in terms of normal language.

The actual "A-Ha!" moment of inspiration is the bell that goes off (so to speak) that tells the language center of the brain that these sub-units of un-readable data are now properly assembled into a form that can be expressed.

I think neuroscience can give a better explanations of this. We're pretty much conscious of everything that has an input to the cerebral cortex--lingual and non-lingual. (I don't think language centers define the conscious mind. If that were so, we would consider aphasiac patients to be unconscious all the time, but they're not.) The parts of the brain that function "unconsciously" are the deeper structures that are connected to all sorts of cognitive processes. I think intuition is any process where we're not aware of the process (we're not conscious of how we arrived at a thought). But, as you recognize, the thought clearly came from the mind (a function of the brain), and not from somewhere external.

If the idea is valid, though, it stands up to conscious thought and rational analysis. (Unlike the notion that there is something significant about the teapot story or the idea that a witch is causing the crops to fail or there is a face on the mountain or the universe intends one thing or another, etc.)

But intuition is not the same thing as synchronicity. For that matter, many people's idea of intuition is wrong too. (That it's something mystical, or that it the universe or a muse or the planets or something external to your mind intentionally sending an idea to you.)

The neurological explanation of intuition is not the same as saying every time a human perceives a pattern that pattern must be real and significant. We know for sure the human mind tends to see patterns even in random data. We know we're prone to this kind of erroneous thinking.

Synchronicity is a false explanation of perceived patterns and perceived meaning in mere coincidence.

 

[JoeTheJuggler]

I guess this is my overall point wrt intuition: intuition is just as prone to Type I errors as conscious thought.

Skeptics all know how the confirmation bias around this sort of thing works. Someone has a "premonition" or an inexplicable feeling of dread or fear about a certain situation. If nothing happens (which is most often the case), they completely forget about it. If something bad does happen, the story gets repeated and people chalk it down as more evidence of precognition or the powers of intuition or whatever.

In fact, just because something happens at an emotional or unconscious level, doesn't mean it's any less prone to error. I cited above the story of a very paranoid psych patient who had a really feeling of dread thinking the Moon was following him and meant to do him wrong. He was wrong, even if he couldn't explain why he had the feeling in the first place.

Sometimes we get a "bad vibe" about a person or situation. That gut feeling is just as apt to be wrong as any conscious opinion or conclusion.

There's nothing magical or infallible about intuition--and those who claim otherwise are offering a false explanation (same as with the claim of synchronicity).

 

[Rodney]

Sometimes we get a "bad vibe" about a person or situation. That gut feeling is just as apt to be wrong as any conscious opinion or conclusion.

Evidence?

 

[JoeTheJuggler]

There is probably something real about synchronicity.

Evidence?

 

[JoeTheJuggler]

Evidence?

Do you have any evidence that "gut feelings" or premonitions are infallible?

My evidence that they are not is that I and others I know have had them, and they have often proven to be wrong. Even one occurrence of a wrong "premonition" is sufficient to prove that premonitions are not infallible.

ETA: Do you believe that intuition is infallible or less prone to error than reason or conscious judgment? (I noticed you ignored my last question like this--the one where you asked for evidence of how we know a house fly doesn't come with the intention of motivating a person to mow the lawn. If you continue ignoring my questions, I will ignore your silly game playing questions of asking for evidence for things that I'm pretty sure you know there is an abundance of evidence.)

ETA: You can add to that the evidence that self-proclaimed intuitives (such as astrologers and psychics) don't do as they claim. (One example, Sylvia Browne claims the ability to solve missing persons cases at least 80% of the time. Trouble is, there are a great many cases that are known to be failures, but not one single case that she is known to have solved. If you read her claims, her alleged powers surely fall in the category of some sort of "intuitive" power.)

 

[Rodney]

Do you have any evidence that "gut feelings" or premonitions are infallible?

My evidence that they are not is that I and others I know have had them, and they have often proven to be wrong. Even one occurrence of a wrong "premonition" is sufficient to prove that premonitions are not infallible.

Why are you moving the goalposts? Previously, you stated: "Sometimes we get a 'bad vibe' about a person or situation. That gut feeling is just as apt to be wrong as any conscious opinion or conclusion." Now, apparently, you're claiming only that, for you and others you know, gut feelings "have OFTEN proven to be wrong." Even if true, that doesn't support your original claim and is also simply based on your opinion, rather than a study.

ETA: Do you believe that intuition is infallible or less prone to error than reason or conscious judgment? (I noticed you ignored my last question like this--the one where you asked for evidence of how we know a house fly doesn't come with the intention of motivating a person to mow the lawn. If you continue ignoring my questions, I will ignore your silly game playing questions of asking for evidence for things that I'm pretty sure you know there is an abundance of evidence.)

I certainly don't believe that intuition is infallible, but I'm open to the idea that it's correct more than chance would dictate.

ETA: You can add to that the evidence that self-proclaimed intuitives (such as astrologers and psychics) don't do as they claim. (One example, Sylvia Browne claims the ability to solve missing persons cases at least 80% of the time. Trouble is, there are a great many cases that are known to be failures, but not one single case that she is known to have solved. If you read her claims, her alleged powers surely fall in the category of some sort of "intuitive" power.)

This thread isn't about Sylvia Browne. Pretty obviously, however, her 80% claim is on shaky grounds, but she contends that she can solve missing persons' cases without even knowing the missing person. That's different than someone meeting a person, and deciding that there is some undefined thing about the person that indicates trustworthiness or untrustworthiness.