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137 pages

English

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Although much has been said and written about coincidences, there is a marked absence when it comes to the development of a comprehensive model that incorporates the many different ways in which they can be understood and explained. One reason for this omission is undoubtedly the sharp divide that exists between those who find coincidences meaningful and those who do not, with the result that the conclusions of the many books and articles on the subject have tended to fall into distinct camps. The Many Faces of Coincidence attempts to remedy this impasse by proposing an inclusive categorisation for coincidences of all shapes and sizes. At the same time, some of the implications arising from the various explanations are explored, including the possibility of an underlying unity of mind and matter constituting the ground of being.

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Philosophie et théologie

Philosophy of mind

Social

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Publié par	Andrews UK
Date de parution	10 novembre 2017
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781845409524
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0550€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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The Many Faces of Coincidence
Laurence Browne
imprint-academic.com

2017 digital version converted and published by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
Copyright © Laurence Browne, 2017
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted.
No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without permission, except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism and discussion.
Imprint Academic, PO Box 200, Exeter EX5 5YX, UK

For my daughters,
Sally and Eloise

Acknowledgements
I would like particularly to thank Phil Dowe for his encouragement and guidance with my PhD thesis, from which this book has evolved; also my wife Tianyan for putting up with my long hours and late nights in the back room of our house. Many others have supported me along the way and provided important feedback on various chapters, including Lance Storm, Michelle Boulos Walker, Dominic Hyde, Victor Marsh, Carole Ramsey, Adam Williams, John Stanley, Dieter Graf, Garnet Brose, Colin Biggs, and Michael Muirhead. In addition, I would like to express my appreciation to the Australian Government Department of Education and Training for the grant of an APA research scholarship, without which it is unlikely this project would have come to fruition.
Permission for the following figures and illustrations was kindly given by Nick Harding (Fig. 1), Kevin Kelly (Fig. 2), Phil Disley (Fig. 3), Fred Kuttner (Fig. 6), The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (Fig. 18), Inner City Books (Fig. 20). Permission for the following quotes and poetry was kindly given by Taylor and Francis (C.G. Jung, Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle ), Faber and Faber (T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets ), Penguin (D.C. Lau, Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching ), Harper Collins (Stephen Mitchell, Tao Te Ching: An Illustrated Journey ), Jessica Kingsley (Chung Chang-yuan, Creativity and Taoism ), Alfred Music (Joni Mitchell, Woodstock ). All reasonable effort was made to obtain permissions for illustrations and excerpts not referred to above, with the exception of those in the public domain.

Preface
A coincidence can be broadly defined as ‘a notable co-occurrence of events’ which may have causal or non-causal origins. Some coincidences have discernible causal connections, though these may be quite subtle and complex. Others are clearly attributable to the random play of chance or luck, while certain ostensibly random coincidences can be distinguished by the numinosity and meaning they hold for the individual involved. C.G. Jung coined the term synchronicity for such coincidences. However, there is currently no generally accepted overarching theoretical framework that deals comprehensively and inclusively with the several disparate categories under which different sorts of coincidences might be appropriately classified. A primary aim of this book is to remedy that omission.
Just as planets and stars appear as points of light in the night sky and are indistinguishable to the untrained eye, so coincidences may seem on the surface to be all of one kind. This, unfortunately, has led to a tendency towards either/or explanations to account for them, a situation exacerbated by the ideological and metaphysical presumptions that have historically been equated with particular explanations. And there is more than a grain of truth to the notion that how we personally interpret coincidences is a reflection of our underlying beliefs about the nature of the universe and whether or not there is more to our existence than meets the eye.
The first chapter begins with a conceptual investigation into synchronicity and also the circumstances through which Jung came to develop the theory. His collaboration with the physicist Wolfgang Pauli is now well known and the subject of a number of scholarly and popular studies. However, it may well be that this association was not as important for Jung’s conceptualisation of synchronicity as his friendship with the sinologist Richard Wilhelm during the 1920s. Wilhelm bequeathed to Jung an intuitive understanding of the Chinese concept of tao , which was to become for Jung very much associated with the meaning in meaningful coincidences.
In the second chapter probability theory, with all its power and ammunition against unwarranted subjectivity in the analysis of coincidences, is introduced. This sets the scene for an attempt at an overall categorisation of the various types of coincidence, including those that potentially have causal explanations. An example of the latter is the simultaneous development of the radio during the late nineteenth century, which led to acrimonious disputes over who actually invented it: was it Nikola Tesla or Guglielmo Marconi, or was it perhaps the Kentucky farmer Nathan Stubblefield, who eventually died of starvation as a reclusive pauper? [1] Whoever it was, it would certainly not have been possible for any of them to come up with the idea of transmitting radio waves had not the scientific and technological groundwork already been in place though the prior inventions of the telegraph and telephone.
In the third chapter another set of coincidences is examined: those behind the apparent fine-tuning of the universe, without which there would be no stars, no planets and no possibility of sentient life. This is an extremely rich field for coincidences and some of the parameters are so mind-blowingly precise that it is difficult not to wonder whether perhaps the whole thing really is some kind of ‘put-up job’, as the astronomer Fred Hoyle conjectured in his amazement at certain of the processes that had to have occurred for life as we know it to come into being. [2] Alongside these remarkable measurements are the rather odd anomalies and coincidences associated with quantum physics. These are discussed in the fourth chapter, as are some of their fascinating and perhaps unnerving implications.
The fifth chapter provides a summary of the various coincidence categories, as well as some examples as to how particular coincidences might be analysed. And because the whole concept of synchronicity is a fairly tricky one, it is revisited here with certain caveats as well as indications as to how meaningful coincidences might profitably be incorporated into the fabric of our everyday lives. It was Jung’s conjecture that synchronistic events point to an underlying psychophysical unity, which he called the unus mundus . This was a view also shared by Pauli, and is one that appears to sit comfortably with certain interpretations of quantum physics.
The main focus of the sixth and final chapter is on the Chinese notion or principle of tao , as already mentioned a key concept for Jung as regards the underpinnings of synchronicity. An important question that naturally arises, particularly given its ubiquity in Chinese thought, is whether or not the tao has any sort of genuine objective reality in addition to its being a philosophical principle. If it does, it may provide a significant boost for the proposition that synchronicity is an authentic phenomenon in its own right and not just a subjective projection onto naturally occurring chance circumstances or causal mechanisms of one sort or another.

1 Rhoades, ‘Just Who Invented Radio and Which Was the First Station?’

2 Hoyle, ‘The Universe: Past and Present Reflections’.

‘You never enjoy the world aright,
till the sea itself floweth in your veins,
till you are clothed with the heavens
and crowned with the stars...
till you are intimately acquainted
with the shady nothing
out of which the world was made.’
Thomas Traherne (17 th C)

Chapter One: The Composition of Synchronicity
While there are a number of possible approaches to the whole question of coincidences, this work begins with an attempt to understand the concept of ‘synchronicity’, the term coined by C.G. Jung to refer to the phenomenon of meaningful coincidences. One might reasonably ask why he thought it necessary to present to the public a new word for a familiar notion. For Jung, however, synchronicity was much more than simply a synonym for meaningful coincidences: it was certainly that, but he also conceived of it as an acausal connecting principle for all types of phenomena that could not be fully explained by standard notions of causality, including ESP and the anomalies of quantum physics. In addition, and no doubt partly because of this wider conception, Jung seems to have had considerable difficulty in articulating a consistent and readily accessible definition for the term. [1] Not that this was necessarily a bad thing, and in his defence his associate Marie-Louise von Franz makes the point that for Jung synchronicity was essentially a working hypothesis rather than a definitive conception. [2]
It is only rarely that new words introduced into the public arena by a particular author are readily accepted as part of general discourse, and it is highly doubtful that Jung himself could have predicted how popular his invented term would become. An internet search for ‘synchronicity’ brings up numerous offerings, from serious philosophical proposals in regard to the ground of being to New Age miracle solutions and dismissive remarks by sceptics. For the theistically inclined, meaningful coincidences are readily interpreted as messages or signs from the divine, while for those from the opposite end of the spectrum, coincidences of any stripe tend to be viewed as interesting anomalies explainable by the laws of probability. The gap between these two viewpoints has long appeared all but unbridgeable, which is one reason why Jung, with his theory of synchronicity, was interested in developing an explanatory model that would be a