Could “synchronicities” be definitively explained? How so?

Question

Synchronicities are almost eerie, uncanny everyday coincidences.

We can assume that they are explainable by confirmation biases. I also like the concept of “cohesion”, where people actually exist in a world that draws similar people or things into it, causing them to encounter each other. I also am interested in the idea that because the phenomena of social reality is so interconnected and pervasively mutually influential, there could be surprised hidden causal phenomena we do not realize leading to things that seem like odd coincides, but they actually aren’t: they are actually explainable. Lastly, someone suggested to me that quantum physics could play a role, and I am absolutely willing to consider that possibility.

This question has interested me for a long time, for its potential to elucidate other related topics that could inform the question. Rather than suggesting possible theories, what would be a definitive way to study and test synchronicities, scientifically? (I may offer my own suggestion, as an answer.)

Answer 1

I think these synchronicities is the reason why so many of us believe in God/heaven/spiritual world — otherwise we would not, borrowing from Pierre-Simon Laplace, “require that hypothesis”.

Incidentally, this makes it impossible for a person to explain rationally why they believe — except to say that their lifetime of experience lead them to this conviction. And, of course, usually they won't even go that far, saying simply that their belief is deeply personal or something to that effect.

In fact, it's hard for a person not to get a bit annoyed/defensive — in the way we get annoyed when pressed to explain what is a chair, how do we know that the object in front of us is a chair?

This is because those kinds of ideas — of God, or of chair — are intuitive/statistical/probabilistic in nature. We only rationalize them after the fact, and only because we have this natural aversion for uncertainties -- because we want to see ourselves as rational, predictable beings living in a rational, predictable world. Often, it takes quite a shock -- a war, a pandemic, Donald Trump getting elected -- to open a person's mind to other possibilities. And, perhaps, for them to start noticing the synchronicities around them?

Answer 2

If I remember correctly, Carl Jung referred to an "acausal connecting principle" in this connection. He was using a rather (neo-)Kantian framework/terminology throughout his work, so we may interpret Jung as understanding the combination of points to form lines in time as causality, whereas the combination of timelines themselves is then "synchronicity" (the lines are what are synchronized). This suggests at least a two-dimensional temporal manifold, then.

Now coincidences resonate with us emotionally, i.e. we respond to them emotionally, and they link conditions of feeling and sentiment with each other. I am willing to speculate that references to emotional "highs" and "lows," modulo the graph-theoretic form of musical representation, are echoes of the form of time in this regard, to wit our experience of time oscillates "up" and "down" as it flows forward, and this oscillation is the form of our emotions. Different rates, patterns, etc. of "vertical" flux correspond to different feelings, passions, and the like.

So is this speculation a priori or empirically abductive? If emotional consciousness is experiential, but yet has an a priori characteristic to it (the pure form of time, again; c.f. Kant's assertion that the dimensionality of time is synthetically, not analytically, known), perhaps it's both as such. How would we experiment with this process? But if experimentation is geared towards the discovery of cause-and-effect relations, one might think that we won't find acausal connecting relations by experiments! Still, if a postulate of time as multidimensional could be mathematically stabilized modulo the relevant considerations, and involved "predictions" or "anticipations" of phenomena that could be searched for in experience, maybe things like two-dimensional time crystals could be legitimately interpreted as evidence for a robust extra dimension of spacetime (as such), or for a reinterpretation of one of the four generally presumed spacetime dimensions as more timelike than it is classically credited with being?

Answer 3

Synchronicities are almost eerie, uncanny everyday coincidences.

No, synchronicity is not serendipity...

Jung had been interested and influenced in his work by eastern doctrines and philosophies, and his introduction to the I Ching (the Book of Changes) in particular explains what synchronicity means to the western reader.

Synchronicity is the notion that everything is connected to everything here and now, which is the reason why throwing sticks as in divination reflects the entire cosmic situation (the present, not the future!). Everything is connected to everything in the one and whole: in fact, all distinctions are rather illusory.

Answer 4

You can't 'test' synchronicities- you can only test hypotheses about them. You might try collating information about large numbers of them and see if any pattern emerges. However, you will face two challenges. One is that you will need some way of determining what is and isn't a synchronicity- at what point on the spectrum from humdrum to ultra-unlikely do events become synchronicities? The other is that you will probably find that many of the reported synchronicities will be personal experiences that cannot be validated. If I were to tell you, for example, that I saw a cloud formation that was a strikingly vivid and realistic image of my late uncle Cedric, how would you validate my claim?

Incidentally, on what grounds do you or your suggestive someone suppose that quantum effects could play a relevant role?

Answer 5

While synchronism and synchronic are much older words, Synchronicity is a word from Carl Jung. My understanding is that during his mystic phase he used it to make sense of ideas like the astrologer's dictum 'As above, so below.'

It's a common experience in certain mental health conditions to see messages and portents in phenomena. It's reasonable to see this as an extension or extra emphasis on our pattern-seeking faculty, which we see in pareidolia, like seeing faces in clouds, and it has been suggested this s involved in religioys behaviours, eg Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion (PhilPapers journal article). Robert Sapolsky makes a great case in his lecture on Biological Underpinnings of Religiosity, that what we think of now as schizo-spectrum and obsessive-compulsive disorders are the extreme end of spectrum that has a functional role, allowing people's conscience or intuition to powerfully compel them to speak up or act, or to create rituals and shared experiences that help bind people together (see Durkheim's theory of religion).

The more challenging thing yo recognise, is that what we call causality is only our best guess at narrating events. See: Is the idea of a causal chain physical (or even scientific)? A great deal of what we call causality, is about creating tractable models, those just good enough to give useful predictions or inferences. We are very prone to mistake that, for a deep understanding of things. See Cartwight's book How The Laws of Physics Lie.

Many areas of human endeavor, like composing music, tap in to ways to organise experience which is not based on a physicalist-materialist analysis of the past to make predictions. I see synchronicity above all as the simple recognition that we don't have to approach our lives entirely as scientists, we can do so as painters, we can see our life as more like a piece of music, than an equation being solved.

We can point to this as a way out of Turing's Halting Problem: we are not forced to exhaust the iterations established when we were 'coded'; unlike a computer we can alter our own code on any whim, by an ordering principle acausal or not.

This, especially factoring self-reference to decide who to be, in light of outcomes that will create, can create the Tangled Hierarchies of Hofstadter's Strange Loops - what he sees as the defining quality of minds, to be able 'recode' on the fly. See: Why does Man ask Why questions?