Jung’s Synchronicity & Coincidence

A coincidence, or co-incidents, as we have discussed, is the joining together of two or more events that stick in your mind and call out for a causal connection. Here “co-” usually means “two”, but in practice is expanded to any number of incidents for coincidences. These events or incidents would not even be considered co-incidents unless there was some cry, however faint or negative, to recognize a causal connection between them.

Consider at any time a near infinite of incidents are occurring, most of which spend little time in your awareness. These do not often become co-incidents, because you accept a known or suspect an efficient cause for most events of which you take notice, and are satisfied there is no overarching cause or common impetus tying them together. It is only when it seems there is or ought to be something, who knows what, or even undiscoverable, directing the course of the incidents that they become coincidences. This is so even if you think of nothing more than to dismiss the tie. The idea of common impetus must appear however briefly for incidents to become co-incidents.

Here is a ripe example, well attested:

A set of twins from Ohio who were separated at birth grew up without any knowledge of each other’s existence. They lives did however share a number of strange similarities. They were both named James on their adoptions, they both grew up to be police officers, and both of them married women named Linda. But that’s not all. Each had a son, one named James Allan and the other one named James Alan, and each also had a dog named Toy. Both brothers later got divorced, and both ended up remarrying women named Betty! 

Doubtless you will begin to posit explanations, which is to say causes, for each of the incidents in this list of co-incidents. And if it seems there should be a common impetus, an underlying cause of causes, perhaps for some or perhaps for all of the incidents.

No good detective, as the movies always teach us, “believes in coincidences” in the sense of lack of a causal tie. Succinctly, then, there are two types of coincidences: those with no underlying causal relation, and those with an underlying causal relation. All coincidences at least provide the suspicion, even negatively, an underlying cause is present. They would, as I say, never become coincidences unless that suspicion were there. Our task is thus always to discover, to the extent we can, whether the underlying cause is real or only apparent.

Here, hot from the pen of old Jung is his definition of synchronicity:

Here I would like to call attention to a possible misunderstanding which may be occasioned by the term “synchronicity.” I chose this term because the simultaneous occurrence of two meaningfully but not causally connected events seemed to me an essential criterion. I am therefore using the general concept of synchronicity in the special sense of a coincidence in time of two or more causally unrelated events which have the same or a similar meaning, in contrast to “synchronism,” which simply means the simultaneous occurrence of two events.

Synchronicity therefore means the simultaneous occurrence of a certain psychic state with one or more external events which appear as meaningful parallels to the momentary subjective state- and, in certain cases, vice versa. My two examples illustrate this in different ways. In the case of the scarab the simultaneity is immediately obvious, but not in the second example.

The famous beetle example came from the co-incidents of a patient telling him of a dream of an Egyptian beetle while, or just after, a beetle with a similar Latin tag appeared at his study window. The second example described birds settling on a house shortly before a man walked out of it and dropped dead of a presumed heart attack. Jung emphasizes this with similar tales of pre-death flocking.

Jung sometimes means synchronicity is the first sense of coincidence, where is no overarching causal tie, but where there seems to be one. He uses the word acausal to describe these situations. This is a fine enough word, but it does not get at the emotional part of co-incidents. Which is why he came up with synchronicity. Yet most uses of that word now have definite causal, and no acausal, uses. It has become in the minds of most (and even Jung frequently) something like a guiding force; which is to say, causal and nothing like acausal. As we’ll see this is because of Jung’s mistaken thinking about cause.

So again the real question is whether the overarching cause is present or not. If not, then the feeling that one might or should be present has to be some kind of error. If the cause is present, then we have discerned correctly if we suspected it was present, or we fail if we dismissed it.

It’s here Jung, like many, gets things backwards. He describes the early work in ESP (a shorthand term) by JB Rhine and others, and points to a telepathy experiment in which a man “once guessed all 25 cards correctly, which gives a probability of 1 :298,023,223,876,953,125”. That improbability (if such it is) and other curious details of these experiments lead him to say:

We must give up at the outset all explanations [of these results] in terms of energy, which amounts to saying that events of this kind cannot be considered from the point of view of causality, for causality presupposes the existence of space and time in so far as all observations are ultimately based upon bodies in motion…

Rhine’s experiments confront us with the fact that there are events which are related to one another experimentally, and in this case meaningfully, without there being any possibility of proving that this relation is a causal one, since the “transmission” exhibits none of the known properties of energy. There is therefore good reason to doubt whether it is a question of transmission at all…Therefore it cannot be a question of
cause and effect, but of a falling together in time, a kind of simultaneity. Because of this quality of simultaneity, I have picked on the term “synchronicity” to designate a hypothetical factor equal in rank to causality as a principle of explanation.

This is wrong, and conditioned on a narrow meaning of cause. Jung wrote in 1930 by which time cause came to mean in science, more or less, efficient cause alone, with perhaps material conditions considered. He said, “discoveries of modern physics have, as we know, brought about a significant change in our scientific picture of the world, in that they have shattered the absolute validity of natural law and made it relative.”

This “relativity” isn’t the case (and recall I argue there are no “laws” in this sense), and the definition of cause too narrow. Consider that if the man in the ESP experiment did in fact possess telepathic powers, then part of the cause of the experiment is teleological or the final cause of the man willingly participating in the experiment, added to whatever powers he brought to bear, even if these cannot be measured except by effect.

A vogue in physics was only then developing, and is still current today, that said quantum events were acausal, a judgment conditioned on the same reason Jung used that because quantum events could not manipulated completely they were acausal. Even today you will hear some scientists say quantum events happen “for no reason“.

This is bizarre, because once you allow some thing happen “for no reason”, you will never know which things happen for a reason and which not. Even supposing you discovered a principle to tell the situations apart, you have posited that nothing has become a cause, and it is impossible the absence of anything can become causal.

This brings us to two common failings: to mistake the ontological for the epistemological and vice versa, to mix up what the world is from our knowledge of the world. Not knowing the reason for a thing, or not being able to know the reason, is not a reason there is no reason! There is always a reason for any and every thing, even if you never learn it, or can never learn it. This error is forcing science down a dead alley, at the end of which they will meet Jung.

In any case, Jung thought about the problem backward. Pointing to the improbability of an event (like getting 25 out of 25 card correctly) says nothing directly about the probability of any cause behind the event. Mixing up these two things up is the central error in science. We might call this The Mistake. (Those following the Class know this well. I go through next Thursday, the 24th, the mathematics of an example in detail in context of whether someone has ESP.)

Improbability does not demonstrate a causal connection. Improbability is in your mind, not in things. A thing is rare or likely only depending on what information you consider. It does not matter in the least whether you and however many others agree on that information. The chance of the event is then in all your minds. It is never in things themselves.

Birds land on houses. People die. Perhaps birds flock when death is near. You may not be able to see why, or again you may not be able to see why not. You may forget those times when birds flocked with no deaths. Regardless, there is a cause connecting these incidents or not. It is easy to suggest causes for the twins examples. Even sharing a liking of the name “Betty” back when it was common. If you say no, then that is because you do not have the information I have, which is that my late uncle, God rest his soul, had two wives named Sylvia, back when that name was common.

The problem with these examples is that they suggest repetitions are easy to come by, and so can be judged by frequency and its rarity, which leads to The Mistake. Birds on houses is a commonplace, as are deaths, and their co-occurrences can be tallied. And there are lots of twins that can be tracked along many dimensions. Here Jung was better. He recognized this won’t do, for there many co-incidents for which there are no frequencies.

The experimental method of inquiry aims at establishing regular events which can be repeated. Consequently, unique or rare events are ruled out of account. Moreover, the experiment imposes limiting conditions on nature, for its aim is to force her to give answers to questions devised by man. Every answer of nature is therefore more or less influenced by the kind of questions asked, and the result is always a hybrid product. The so- called “scientific view of the world” based on this can hardly be anything more than a psychologically biased partial view which misses out all those by no means unimportant aspects that cannot be grasped statistically.

The seeds of this are proof that frequency is not a property of Nature, but cause is. Substances exercising powers in certain conditions, perhaps according to their will (if they have it). Frequency is the artifact of cause. Experimentation arranges the conditions, and limits consideration only to those powers imagined. If the imagination is wrong, so are the conclusions about cause. But the resulting model may still be of use. The Mistake is to suppose the frequency is the cause.

In any case, in many coincidences, there is no unique embedding of its incidents in an (infinite) sequence. These therefore cannot be judged by frequency. And, of course, none can. We are always left searching outside the incidents for the supposed overarching causal connection.

Jung reports a person in Europe had a dream about a friend dying, which “was confirmed next morning by
telegram”. The death occurred about an hour before the dream, though the dreamer did not learn of it until the telegram. Another man in Crimea dreamed of a horrific volcanic eruption, also after the incident, but before he learned about it days later via the newspaper (the eruption was in Martinique, which killed 40,000; this was in 1902 and news still traveled slow).

Now these kinds of events happen often enough that all have heard of one, or even experienced one, but there is only a vague sense the frequency the incidents has any bearing on whether some exterior cause gave the visions, or whether the visions were the result of some high level of interest in the topic (of friends, of disasters, etc.). Any experimentation must rely on observation and no manipulation. For instance, having a group record every dream of mass death via volcano, and seeing how often these matched actual events. Suppose two or three out of however many matched. Is that proof, either way, of a cause or a lack? We are left with uncertainty or faith.

Any number of incidents of which you take no special notice may themselves have an overarching cause. These never reach the level of coincidence because they do not swim before your awareness. This is a logical point, and not a demonstration of any particular cause. But it can be verified: some co-incidents only later after the cause is revealed become coincidences. Take your sudden awareness when your friends jump out and yell “Surprise!” for your birthday, where the shock in genuine, and at that moment you piece together the breaks from routine of your family and friends because they were planning your surprise.

The moral of the story (which we shall continue) is: finding cause is hard.

Incidentally, I am always on the look out for strange and curious coincidences, which you have figured out or haven’t.

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