How do you guys explain really bizarre cases of synchronicity?

[Belz...]

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.

Which is funny, because it's actually wrong more often than not.

 

[Belz...]

You are not alone. This is a common phenomenon. The fallacy is in thinking that taking notice of something means that the frequency of its occurrence has increased, or that any of this is bizarrely improbable.

Ah, yes. Humans are more prone to notice the "hits" than the "misses". That's one of the reasons why introspection is so horribly useless.

 

[Belz...]

Synchronicity is one of the few things keeping me from accepting an entirely naturalistic worldview.

I offer the reverse: your not-entirely naturalistic worldview is what is making you see synchronicity.

 

[Belz...]

Well, I believed this quasi-magical idea for years, but now I think I understand what was truly happening. First, it must have happened several times to make me notice the coincidence. Thereafter, EVERY time I turned on a light switch the thought would be in the back of my mind "will it blow out like last time?" I'd be expecting it every time so when a bulb blew out I was guaranteed to be thinking it would beforehand. The times it didn't happen I just ignored. (EXACTLY what this thread's about).

Precisely. This is what makes cloud-busters believe they can clear clouds (hey, I was one, I should know; though it was never a strong belief).

 

[Rodney]

Digging up a teapot, or any other sighting of the same or similar teapot under other circumstances would be very much more likely to be made note of.

Your claim was that attention can explain seemingly unlikely coincidences, and you cited you noticing other pregnant women when you were pregnant. But what does this have to do with Teapots Happen's coincidence? According to him, the sequence of events was:

1) He had a mystical experience, which had absolutely nothing to do with teapots.

2) One week later, he felt compelled to buy a particular teapot.

3) One week after buying the teapot, he decided to explore the crawl space beneath the house he had lived in for eight years, and found the same style teapot buried there.

So, again I ask, what does this have to do with your claim?

Oh, did someone present evidence in this thread? I missed it, I guess.

I would agree that making a claim is not evidence, but see my next post.

 

[Rodney]

Which is funny, because it's actually wrong more often than not.

The evidence that Linda has been looking for on this thread!

 

[Belz...]

Not evidence. Fact.

 

[Rodney]

Not evidence. Fact.

Then please document.

 

[Belz...]

Wait, wait. You need me to "document" the fact that intuition is more often wrong than not ? Or at least, not right more often than chance would allow ?

If by "intuition" we agree that we mean the acquisition of knowledge through non-evidential means, then I think I can point to the whole body of "science" as proof enough that other methods have never proven useful.

 

[Moochie]

How does that apply to, for example, Teapots Happen's coincidence?


I would suggest you read some of the threads on this forum a little more carefully, including this one, if you think most people here are re-thinking their worldviews on even an annual basis.

Aye, when presented with compelling evidence, I do sit up and take notice. Perhaps you're oblivious of when people actually do change their worldview. For me, the evidence has to be very compelling, and the subject needs to have some relevance for me. Teapots Happen's experience of a quaint coincidence is, to me, quaint. I think if prodded, most people could come up with odd coincidences that they've experienced but, so what? Why are some people so eager to read more into an experience than the evidence allows?


M.

 

[Moochie]

I had a similar thing with lightbulbs blowing out. For several years (recently) I KNEW every time a bulb was going to blow out, as soon as I touched the switch but before I flicked it on. A spiritual-minded friend said this happened because I was manifesting negative energy.

Well, I believed this quasi-magical idea for years, but now I think I understand what was truly happening. First, it must have happened several times to make me notice the coincidence. Thereafter, EVERY time I turned on a light switch the thought would be in the back of my mind "will it blow out like last time?" I'd be expecting it every time so when a bulb blew out I was guaranteed to be thinking it would beforehand. The times it didn't happen I just ignored. (EXACTLY what this thread's about)

I've been keeping track (kinda keeping track) of when things DON'T happen- such as the oncoming car that's 'always' in just the wrong spot when I go to turn onto the main road from my street and delays me every time; seems to happen every single day- well, months went by with this only happening twice. Every day I'd notice when it DIDN'T happen.

As for the 'negative energy'? Well, that part was true in a sense. I was very pessimistic, believing that the world was cursed. I tried to be more optimistic and realistic, so her mystical statement may actually have helped nudge me towards skepticism and more rational thinking.

Please, please, PLEASE keep humbly de-bunking things like this.

Good point, and it begs the question: what about all the teapots that TH didn't notice?


M.

 

[Prometheus]

....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....

If this were true, then you'd be able to make a living buying lottery tickets.

 

[Rodney]

Wait, wait. You need me to "document" the fact that intuition is more often wrong than not ? Or at least, not right more often than chance would allow ?

If by "intuition" we agree that we mean the acquisition of knowledge through non-evidential means, then I think I can point to the whole body of "science" as proof enough that other methods have never proven useful.

To repeat the context of my request, in post #396 on this thread, JoeTheJuggler 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."

I am asking for evidence that a "'bad vibe' about a person or situation is just as apt to be wrong as any conscious opinion or conclusion." Is there a study you can point me to?

 

[Lusikka]

Thank you for a very interesting and informative discussion about synchronistic phenomena. In my opinion there is one important viewpoint that has been missing here -- it is necessary to see synchronistic phenomena in connection with parapsychological research and psi-phenomena.

It is not possible to make a difference between synchronistic phenomena and positive results in ESP testing. It is always possible that the positive result in a test is only a coincidence -- just as in the case of a possible synchronistic phenomenon. Physical psi-phenomena are of different quality because spoons are not by chance bending themselves and heavy furniture are not moving spontaneously.

Well, macro-PK cannot be explained by coincidence but what can be done to ESP? Fortunately there are at least two things making experimental research in parapsychology reasonable: patterns and "too many" positive results. Sheep are usually guessing better than goats, extroverts are guessing better than introverts, there is the experimenter effect, the psychological situation of the testing is important, different persons may have a different and discernible pattern in their hits, and the form of the record sheet has an influence to the hitting rate inside the runs. And there are definitely too often positive results achieved compared with the number of experimental papers. Although the effect size is most often very small so repeating the tests many times enough usually gives a significant result.

Single parts of the chain in synchronistic phenomena are without common cause but they give an impression that there is a background mechanism binding somehow the single occurrences together. Also psi-processes are happening totally outside the reach of our sense organs and only the results are visible and meaningful. Some synchronistic phenomena are formally like clairvoyance or precognition. I have taken notes of my phenomena during tens of years and have noticed they often happen in New Age connections or in connections important for me. I think selective memory is not the explanation in my case.

 

[fls]

Physical psi-phenomena are of different quality because spoons are not by chance bending themselves and heavy furniture are not moving spontaneously.

Usually "gullibility", rather than "coincidence", is the more obvious explanation.

Well, macro-PK cannot be explained by coincidence but what can be done to ESP? Fortunately there are at least two things making experimental research in parapsychology reasonable: patterns and "too many" positive results. Sheep are usually guessing better than goats, extroverts are guessing better than introverts, there is the experimenter effect, the psychological situation of the testing is important, different persons may have a different and discernible pattern in their hits, and the form of the record sheet has an influence to the hitting rate inside the runs. And there are definitely too often positive results achieved compared with the number of experimental papers. Although the effect size is most often very small so repeating the tests many times enough usually gives a significant result.

Yes. These are the patterns that we expect to see from the effects of chance and bias. Remember that study quality is an indicator of the presence or absence of bias, and remember that bias creates the appearance of an effect when an effect should not be found. The presence of bias in these studies has been well-documented (and is not disputed by parapsychologists). So we really should expect to see exactly what you describe, when there is no effect present.

Linda

 

[JoeTheJuggler]

To repeat the context of my request, in post #396 on this thread, JoeTheJuggler 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."

I am asking for evidence that a "'bad vibe' about a person or situation is just as apt to be wrong as any conscious opinion or conclusion." Is there a study you can point me to?

Rodney, I can't treat your comments very seriously since you've still never answered whether you believe that such intuitions are not as apt to be wrong as rational thought. You also never answered whether you believe flies are sent with the intention of motivating a person to cut the grass.

I'm guessing you're just playing a silly rhetorical game of shifting the burden for outrageous claims to the person who rejects the outrageous claim. (Yes, when I say gut feeling is just as apt to be wrong as any conscious opinion or conclusion, that is rejection of an outrageous claim. No difference is the null hypothesis. What we need evidence for is the claim that intuition is superior somehow.)

 

[JoeTheJuggler]

Physical psi-phenomena are of different quality because spoons are not by chance bending themselves and heavy furniture are not moving spontaneously.

In fact, since those things aren't happening by power of the mind, there's no psi-phenomena either!

Really, if you can demonstrate PK or ESP in controlled conditions, you could easily win the Million Dollar Challenge.

But no one can, because those things don't exist.

I understand your point, though--if they exist, they would be causal rather than acausal as is supposedly the case with synchronicity. In that sense, synchronicity is still a slippery and undefined thing.

If it's acausal in the sense that we don't have an agent intending for a low probability event to happen, then you're faced with the other question that Rodney cannot or will not answer: how do you distinguish an example of synchronicity from mere coincidence?

 

[fls]

Your claim was that attention can explain seemingly unlikely coincidences, and you cited you noticing other pregnant women when you were pregnant. But what does this have to do with Teapots Happen's coincidence? According to him, the sequence of events was:

1) He had a mystical experience, which had absolutely nothing to do with teapots.

2) One week later, he felt compelled to buy a particular teapot.

3) One week after buying the teapot, he decided to explore the crawl space beneath the house he had lived in for eight years, and found the same style teapot buried there.

So, again I ask, what does this have to do with your claim?

Thank you for laying it out so nicely. I think that you would agree that events 2 or 3 would be considered unremarkable by themselves. They become remarkable because they are preceded by the other events. If we walk into a store and find a particular object compelling, we are likely to attribute it to something like its aesthetic quality or its similarity to a favoured object (we may not remember the object, only the emotion associated with the object, as our memory for emotion is stronger than our memory for facts). Finding a teapot buried under a house may make us curious as to who put it there, but it wouldn't otherwise engage us. The compelling sensation in the store was noticed because it was preceded by an event which stimulated TeapotsHappen to take notice of subsequent sensations (at least, that's how he remembers it now). And the teapot under the house was noteworthy only because it had been preceded by the finding of an identical teapot.

If there hadn't been a reason to make note of compelling sensations or teapots with a particular appearance, those events would have been relegated to the bin conaining the hundreds and thousands of other events which we experience which aren't examples of 'synchronicity'.

Linda

 

[Dr H]

Come on, you're missing the point - on purpose? What if there is no way to know if there is or isn't a carrot, as is the case with the reality/validity of perceptions in a mystical state?

That's not the scenario you outlined. You specifically said that your brain was being stimulated to make you think that you were eating a carrot. In that case the carrot is not real, whether you know it or not.

Taken to the next level, if you try to subsist for any length of time by munching on these imaginary carrots, even you will have evidence that they are not real, as you weaken and eventually die from starvation.

Sure, you can just assume that there is no 'carrot,' but that kind of begs the question doesn't it? Even if Persinger could induce mystical states with magnetic fields, it hardly proves or even indicates that mystical perceptions are all illusionary - any more than stimulating a brain into perceiving a carrot means that carrots do not exist.

Nowhere did I assert that carrots do not exist, nor that mystical perceptions were illusory. What I did assert is that labeling something as a "mystical perception" is a subjective interpretation, and not an objective definable state. Persingers work -- among others -- demonstrates that what some people choose to lable "mystical perceptions" can have very mundane origins, indeed.

As I said earlier - you cannot simply presuppose that the dataset (in this case, all unexplained or inexplicable coincidences) is random data

Nor have I done so.

- because that is precisely the question we are trying to examine - can they be meaningful? Don't mistake axioms in your philosophical framework for arguments - just because you do not or can not question them does not mean they are objectively 'givens.'

Axioms are, by definition, "givens". Are you truly asserting that there is no difference between eating a real carrot and having your brain electrically stimulated to give you the sensation of eating a carrot when there is no carrot present? Do you really think actual nutrition can be successfully replaced with the illusion of nutrition?

Disagree, although it's not really relevant that I can see anyway. In all three links you provided, the headset made people feel weird, at best - and none of them reported a "mystical experience" - which IS a term with a meaning. It doesn't just mean any altered state of consciousness.

Persinger has done experiments on more than a thousand subjects at this point. Some of them have reported that the found the experience with his helmet mystical in one way or another. Again, that's just their individual interpretation of sensations that other people merely reported as "weird."

Again, please see the Johns Hopkins studies I linked to for examples of actual mystical experiences which have been induced, if that is what you seek.

I don't seek mystical experiences. I have had a number of experiences that some people would (and some people did) classify as "mystical." I did not find them so, although some of them were otherwise quite interesting, including the one I narrated earlier. "Mystical" is very much in the eye of the beholder.

And since I can link to it now - here is a non-reductionist rationalist's answer to the question, 'can an atheist have a mystical experience?':

Well, the answer to that question is that an atheist can have any kind of experience that any other human being can have. They will simply interpret the experience from their own perspective, as we all do. Like I said: one man's fever dream is another man's satori.

Dr H: You realize that it is possible to be a physical materialist without being a reductionist?

Yes, but what I'm dealing with here is clearly a pack of rabid reductionists.

I think you're rather jumping to a conclusion. Or did you come here with that particular chip on your shoulder?

Dr H: Exactly. My "mystical experience," if you will, came prior to the snakes. It was the feeling of the "rightness of the world," brought on by the chemical in my bloodstream influencing my interaction with the environment. It was that feeling which gave significance to the snakes, both imaginary and real, later encountered.

Perhaps, but you lacked the same kind of connection between the state of mind that you experienced* and the snakes

You can't possibly know that.

- and there was really no connection between the hallucinated snakes and the car snakes - other than that both were snakes. You merely hallucinated snakes while feeling good and tripping, then, much later had an unrelated experience involving snakes.

Exactly so. And yet the car snakes vividly reminded me of the experience with the hallucinated snakes, including a memory of the feeling of "rightness". Had it been otehrwise I might not have removed them from the car so gently.

The experience really is not unlike your own: you had an experience that seemed to you to involve some sort of intuitive understanding, and then you bought a teapot. Later, you had an unrelated experience involving a teapot. The later experience brought memories of the former experience to the fore. You chose to invest your unrelated teapot experiences with more potential meaning than I chose to give to my two unrelated snake experiences.

*(it sounds to me more like you just felt really good, but given your apparent inability to understand the definition of a 'mystical experience' I am going to leave that alone for now)

I understand the definition (actually there are several) of "mystical experience" quite well, thanks.

My mystical experience profoundly shook up the way I viewed reality. The primary lesson I took away from it was "intuition is a useful tool - pay attention to it."

Hope that works out for you.

I babbled about this happily to my GF in the car while still tripping, and tried to make decisions in the aftermath based upon it. I did not make this up - my GF witnessed me doing this, talking about this, and, eventually, fretting about this - as I got further away from the experience and my old fundamentalist 'rationalism' came seeping back and made me think I'd been a magical-thinking fool to even consider intuition potentially valid.

To pursue this further you will really have to define what you mean by "intuition".

Note that there was no initial connection between the mystical experience and a teapot, which you clearly failed to understand when you wrote:

Perhaps not, but your subsequent insistance that finding the second teapot constitutes "synchronicity" places the teapots into the realm of the totality of your mystical experience.

Note that I did not have any initial connection between my particular emotional sensation and snakes, either. The snakes were hallucinated. Had I been staring at a field of gravel I might just as easily have seen grasshoppers or ball-bearings. I have been trying to convey to you that, just as you claim that the teapots were not the crucial element of your overall narrative, neither were the snakes the crucial element of mine.

This belief in intuition was the explicit and direct result of the mystical experience, and it was the explicit and direct reason that I bought the first teapot a week later (not because I was "triggered" by a teapot from the trip.)

Yet you associated the sudden belief in intuition with the teapot.

If that is not what you've been saying, then it's manifestly unclear why you brought up the acid experience at all.

I bought it because of the seemingly-unrelated conceptual content / reality model that I'd experienced and believed in while in the mystical state.

If the purchase of the teapot was "seemingly-unrelated" to you even after your mystical experience, why do you now assume that it is related?

But there was nothing about that particular object that tied it to the mystical experience, the trip, or the idea of intuition I'd found so compelling during the trip - other than that for some reason, I was powerfully, intuitively drawn to it.

Your entire narrative, and all of your subsequent discussion belies that statement. You have tied the teapot to the mystical experience. You do so even in this statement when you say "I was ... intuitively drawn to it."

I chose it - out of a sprawling thrift store packed full of random objects -

Random? Indeed.

for no reason other than an irrational intuition I could not shake, coupled with a fading mystical mindset that had told me that intuition was a legitimate guide to navigating reality.

So I followed intuition, and bought the thing, confused about why I was doing so.

A week later, I found the identical teapot buried under my house, after having lived above it, unknowing, for eight years.

If you cannot understand why this is both different from your snake hallucination and more meaningful to me than merely having found two of the same teapot, there is really nothing I can do for you.

If you cannnot see how strikingly similar the two experiences are, they there's probably not much I can do for you, either, other than to wish you well, and a source of good tea.

We are not all-knowing, and therefore not all actual patterns can be predictive for us. This is a great example of why I call you a reductionist - you rule out as meaningless any pattern that's not simple enough to be completely understood, as measured by its predictive utility.

I have done no such thing. What I have done is point out that there are no "actual" patterns. We impose patterns. The patterns we impose either describe existing relationships, or they do not. If they do, then they will have a useful predictive component. If they do not, then they won't.

You axiomatically rule out patterns we can perceive, but not fully enough to understand or predict. Rule out patterns that we cannot even begin to perceive, yet exist and effect our lives ... and no, I am not saying that any all perceivable patterns are meaningful - just that you cannot assume that they are not, any more that you can assume they are.

Again, you are trying to put words in my mouth, but I spit them out. We do not "perceive patterns;" we impose patterns on our observations. Sometimes the patters we impose reflect reality and are useful, other times they are fanciful, and not so useful.

If scientists and thinkers from the distant past thought like you, civilization would have never progressed,

LoL! If all scientists and thinkers from the distant past thought like me things would likely be very different now, I agree.

Sometimes, randomness looks like pattern. And sometimes, patterns appear random.

You're getting a little closer with that statement.

Certainly we can impose patterns on randomness, and quite often do just that. But the patterns we impose do not make the randomness and "less random."

And sometimes we fail to assign patterns to real relationships -- although persistent natural relationships tend to force themselves on our consciousness, eventually.

We should agree on that, I think - but you also believe that you have rational, objective grounds for dismissing the possibility of my teapots (or any other reported synchronicity) being meaningful, rather than random.

Almost. What I believe is that the concept of "synchronicity" is rather useless since it is so ill-defined. After all, all it really is, is a synonym for "coincidence," and all that means is that some things happen at the same time. That blatantly obvious fact doesn't seem to hold all that much interest.

I am trying to help you see that the basis for your conclusion is not actual reasoning - merely that your framework presupposes that any and all such inexplicable patterns are random, the connections that form them, illusionary.

And I am trying to help you to see that there are no objective "patterns" out in the world that we somehow discover and either explain or not. There are relationships among things and events. "Pattern" is an anthropomorphic concept: it is the way our particular brains evolved to organize the things and events we perceive in useful ways. If a pattern seems to be inexplicable, then it is a good bet that it's because the pattern doesn't codify any actual real-world relationships for us -- as in the case of the repeated "21" in the random series.

Dr H: Not at all. As noted, whether or not a particular pattern is meaningful is testable.

Perhaps, but only if you employ reductionism in order to keep your worldview and filters manageable in the face of a world far more complex than your worldview allows for ...

You certainly have a hangup about "reductionism," since you seem to be seeing it everywhere -- whether it's really there or not. Reductionsim has nothing to do with the testing to which I refer.

Holy Billiard-Ball-Believers Batman!

So your "teapot pattern" lacks any predictive power at all. That would strongly suggest that the pattern you have imposed in this case does not reflect any underlying real relationships.

Guys, not all actual, causal patterns

"Causal patterns"??

It is ridiculously reductionist to reject as random and meaningless all patterns which are not simple enough for you to test, repeat, and use to make accurate predictions.

If they can neither be tested, nor used to make meaningful predicitons, then how are they "meanigful?"

See the outputs of consciousness for an example. Or social groups. Or any complex system at all whatsoever. Or stochastic processes.

The outcome of stochasitic processes can be predicted within certain limits. So can the behavior of social groups.

The fact that we cannot predict how a mind or a society will unfold in a given circumstance in no way discredits the possibility that there are actually causal connections involved in such a process, or that there are reasons that things happened as they did.

I don't see where anyone has suggested otherwise.

But if there are actual causal connections among elements of a system, imposing a pattern which reflects those causal connections is necessarily going to be more meaningful than imposing a pattern which does not take them into account. And it's going to be way more meaningful than imposing a pattern that postulates non-existent causal connections.

In the same way, the fact that we cannot predict anything based on an acceptance that a synchronicity is meaningful (not random) does not mean that synchronicity does not exist as an actual phenomenon.

"Meaning" is not the opposite of "random."

And unless you can show that "synchronistic" means something more than "coincidental" you have failed to demonstrate that it is any sort of separate "phenomenon."

I do not think I know how the teapots happened. I do not expect to be able to make predictions regarding future events. I do not conclude that teapots are more likely to attract people who have been to California and dropped acid.

I simply do not have faith in the belief that it was a meaningless pattern, imagined in randomly-connected events.

IOW, you do not have any idea what the alleged "meaning" in your synchronistic teapots is;
you just have faith that there must be some meaning there. Well, faith is belief without evidence, and that puts you well on the road to magical thinking.

Scientific revolutions happen. I don't care how fast or slow you say they move. Even if you just call it "growth" or "change" instead of a 'paradign change,', it in no way changes the fact that today's fringe data has a habit of becoming foundational to tomorrow's hot new theory on the block. Not all fringe data leads to new accepted theories - but most new accepted theories grow from fringe data, not adequately explained by currently accepted patterns within the paradigm.

That's not really true. Data which cannot be accounted for by present theory is not necessarily "fringe" data. "Fringe" data tends to be of the sort where it's not entirely clear that there is actually any data there at all. The situation in which the change in a clock due to acceleration can't be accounted for by Newtonian laws of motion is very different from the situation in which someone takes a photo that includes classic lens flare, and believes they have evidence for life after death.

Regardless, it IS paradigmatic entrenchment to respond to whatever answer is given to that question with "because I do not believe such patterns can be meaningful, any meaning you find in it is irrational and false."

I have not responded in that way, because you have not yet said what meaining you found in the alleged pattern. Indeed, just a few lines above you state that you have no idea what, if any, meaning is to be found there.

Aaaanyways ... we seem to be doomed to go around in circles at this point, unfortunately, repeating the same things in slightly different words.

I am reminded of a phrase one of my philosophy profs was fond of: "all arguments are basically circular; philosophy is a means by which we assure the circles are as large
as possible."

 

[Dr H]

Must play devil's advocate briefly:

. . .

Meanwhile, we find refuge in a great guitar solo, not bothering to examine the belief system of the player.

There, you see what happens? You listen to the solo without examining the belief system of the player, and the next thing you know you've gone over to the devil.

Shocking I tell you; just shocking.