Are coincidences actual? | Philosophy

In the summer season of 2021, I skilled a cluster of coincidences, a few of which had a distinctly supernatural really feel. Right here’s the way it began. I maintain a journal, and document desires if they’re particularly vivid or unusual. It doesn’t occur typically, however I logged one during which my mom’s oldest good friend, a lady referred to as Rose, made an look to inform me that she (Rose) had simply died. She had had one other stroke, she stated, and that was it. Come the morning, it occurred to me that I didn’t know whether or not Rose was nonetheless alive. I guessed not. She’d had a serious stroke about 10 years in the past and had gone on to undergo a sequence of minor strokes, descending right into a sorry state of bodily incapacity and dementia.

I discussed the dream to my accomplice over breakfast, however she wasn’t a lot . We had been staying within the Midlands on the time, in the home the place I’d spent my later childhood years. The place had been unoccupied for months. My father, Mal, was lengthy gone, and my mom, Doreen, was in a care residence, drifting inexorably by the superior levels of Alzheimer’s. We’d simply offered the property we’d been residing in, and there could be a number of weeks’ delay in gaining access to our future residence, so the outdated home was a handy place to remain within the meantime.

I gave no additional thought to my unusual dream till, a fortnight later, we returned from the grocery store to seek out {that a} word had been pushed by the letterbox. It was addressed to my mom, and was from Rose’s daughter, Maggie. Her mom, she wrote, had died “two weeks in the past”. The funeral could be the next week. I handed the word to my accomplice and reminded her of my dream. “Bizarre,” she stated, and carried on unloading the groceries. Sure, bizarre. I can’t recall the final time Rose had entered my ideas, and there she was, turning up in a dream with information of her personal dying.

So, what am I to make of this? Right here’s one interpretation: Rose died, and her disembodied spirit felt the necessity to inform me and located its approach into my dream. Maybe she had first tried to contact Doreen, however for one motive or one other – the impenetrable wreckage of a broken mind? – couldn’t get by. Right here’s one other interpretation: the entire chain of occasions occurred by sheer coincidence, an opportunity concatenation of happenings with no deeper significance. There’s nothing in any respect supernatural about it.

In case you ask me which of these two interpretations I want, it will, unequivocally, be the second. However right here’s the factor. There is part of me that, regardless of myself, needs to entertain the likelihood that the world actually does have supernatural dimensions. It’s the identical a part of me that will get spooked by ghost tales, and that will really feel uneasy about spending an evening alone in a morgue. I don’t consider the universe accommodates supernatural forces, however I really feel it’d. It is because the human thoughts has essentially irrational parts. I’d go as far as to say that magical considering varieties the premise of selfhood. Our expertise of ourselves and different folks is actually an act of creativeness that may’t be sustained by wholly rational modes of thought. We see the sunshine of consciousness in one other’s eyes and, irresistibly, think about some ethereal self behind these eyes, buzzing with emotions and ideas, when actually there’s nothing however the darkish and silent substance of the mind. We think about one thing comparable behind our personal eyes. It’s a essential phantasm, rooted deep in our evolutionary historical past. Coincidence, or quite the expertise of coincidence, triggers magical ideas which are equally deep-rooted.

The time period “coincidence” covers a variety of phenomena, from the cosmic (in a complete photo voltaic eclipse, the disc of the moon and the disc of the solar, by sheer likelihood, seem to have exactly the identical diameter) to the non-public and parochial (my granddaughter has the identical birthday as my late spouse). On the human, experiential, scale, a broad distinction might be drawn between serendipity – well timed, however unplanned, discoveries or growth of occasions – and what the Twentieth-century Lamarckian biologist and coincidence collector Paul Kammerer referred to as seriality, which he outlined as “a lawful recurrence of the identical or comparable issues or occasions … in time and area”.

The biography of the actor Anthony Hopkins accommodates a placing instance of a serendipitous coincidence. When he first heard he’d been solid to play an element within the movie The Lady from Petrovka (1974), Hopkins went in quest of a duplicate of the ebook on which it was based mostly, a novel by George Feifer. He combed the bookshops of London in useless and, considerably dejected, gave up and headed residence. Then, to his amazement, he noticed a duplicate of The Lady from Petrovka mendacity on a bench at Leicester Sq. station. He recounted the story to Feifer once they met on location, and it transpired that the ebook Hopkins had stumbled upon was the very one which the creator had mislaid in one other a part of London – an advance copy stuffed with red-ink amendments and marginal notes he’d made in preparation for a US version.

Hollywood offers one other selection instance of seriality. L Frank Baum was a prolific youngsters’s creator, best-known for The Fantastic Wizard of Oz (1900). He didn’t stay to see his novel changed into the enduring musical fantasy movie, but he apparently had a exceptional coincidental reference to the film. The actor Frank Morgan performed 5 roles in The Wizard of Oz (1939), together with the eponymous Wizard. He makes his first look within the sepia-toned opening sequences as Professor Marvel, a travelling fortune-teller. Film lore says that, when it got here to display testing, the coat he was sporting was thought-about too pristine for an itinerant magician. So the wardrobe division was despatched on a thrift-shop mission to seek out one thing extra appropriate, and returned with an entire closetful of potentialities. The one they settled on, a Prince Albert frock coat with a worn velvet collar, was an ideal match for the actor. Solely later was it apparently found that, sewn into the jacket was a label bearing the inscription: “Made by Hermann Bros, expressly for L Frank Baum”. Baum had died 20 years earlier than the movie was launched, however the coat’s provenance was allegedly authenticated by his widow, Maud, who accepted it as a present when the movie was accomplished.

Some coincidences appear to include a component of humour, as if engineered by a capricious spirit purely for its personal amusement. Not lengthy after first shifting to Bathtub in 2016, I made a splash throughout the busy London Highway, misjudged the peak of the kerb on the opposite facet, tripped, fell awkwardly and fractured my proper arm. Over the following 5 years, I lived variously in Bathtub, rural Worcestershire and London. Quickly after shifting again to Bathtub on a extra everlasting foundation, I observed a trendy mahogany chair within the window of a charity store on London Highway, went straight in and acquired it. I assumed I’d don’t have any bother lugging the chair again to my flat half a mile away, but it surely turned out to be heavier than I anticipated and awkward to hold. As I used to be crossing the highway the place I’d had my fall, the chair slipped, crashed to the bottom and splintered its proper arm. Hear the chuckles of the coincidence imp.

Whereas some coincidences appear playful, others really feel inherently macabre. In 2007, the Guardian journalist John Harris set out on “an intermittent rock-grave odyssey”, visiting the final resting locations of revered UK rock musicians. About midway by, he went to the tiny village of Rushock in Worcestershire to collect ideas on the gravestone of the Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham, who died on the age of 32 on 25 September 1980, after consuming a prodigious amount of alcohol. A Guardian photographer had visited the grave a number of days earlier to get an image to accompany the piece. It was, writes Harris, “an icy morning that gave the churchyard the look of a scene from The Omen”, and, becoming with one of many key motifs of that movie, the photographer was “spooked by the looks of an unaccompanied black canine, which urinates on the headstone after which disappears”. Black Canine (1971) occurs to be the title of some of the iconic songs within the Led Zeppelin catalogue.

If we image a continuum of coincidences from the trivial to the extraordinary, each the Hopkins and the Baum examples would absolutely be positioned in direction of the unusual and weird finish. My “damaged arms” coincidence tends in direction of the trivial. Different nonetheless extra mundane examples are commonplace. You get chatting to a stranger on a practice and uncover you’ve got an acquaintance in widespread. You’re considering of somebody and, within the subsequent breath they name you. You learn an uncommon phrase in {a magazine} and, concurrently, somebody on the radio utters the identical phrase. Such occurrences may elicit a wry smile, however the weirder ones can induce a robust sense of the uncanny. The world momentarily appears stuffed with unusual forces.

It’s a frame of mind resembling apophenia – a bent to understand significant, and normally sinister, hyperlinks between unrelated occasions – which is a typical prelude to the emergence of psychotic delusions. Particular person variations might play an element within the expertise of such coincidences. Schizotypy is a dimension of character characterised by experiences that in some methods echo, in muted type, the signs of psychosis, together with magical ideation and paranormal perception. There may be proof to counsel that individuals who rating excessive on measures of schizotypy can also be extra vulnerable to experiencing significant coincidences and magical considering. Maybe schizotypal people are additionally extra powerfully affected by coincidence. Somebody scoring excessive on measures of schizotypy would maybe be extra spooked by a dying dream than I (a low scorer) was.

I have set naturalism and the supernatural in binary opposition, however maybe there’s a third approach. Let’s name it the supranatural stance. This was the place adopted, in numerous methods, by Kammerer, and by the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung. Arthur Koestler’s The Roots of Coincidence (1972) launched Kammerer’s work to the English-speaking world and was influential in reviving curiosity in Jung’s concepts. Kammerer started recording coincidences in 1900, most of them mind-numbingly trivial. For instance, he notes that, on 4 November 1910, his brother-in-law attended a live performance, and quantity 9 was each his seat quantity and the variety of his cloakroom ticket. The next day he went to a different live performance, and his seat and cloakroom ticket numbers had been each 21.

Kammerer’s ebook Das Gesetz der Serie (1919), or The Regulation of Seriality, accommodates 100 samples of coincidences that he classifies by way of typology, morphology, energy and so forth, with, as Koestler places it, “the meticulousness of a zoologist dedicated to taxonomy”. Kammerer’s huge concept is that, alongside causality, there may be an acausal precept at work within the universe, which, as Koestler places it, “acts selectively to carry comparable configurations collectively in area and time”. Kammerer sums issues up as follows: “We thus arrive on the picture of a world-mosaic or cosmic kaleidoscope, which, regardless of fixed shufflings and rearrangements, additionally takes care of bringing like and like collectively.” Albert Einstein, for one, took Kammerer critically, describing his ebook as “unique and certainly not absurd”.

The speculation of synchronicity, or significant coincidence, proposed by Jung, follows the same line. It took form over a number of many years by a confluence of concepts streaming in from philosophy, physics, the occult and, not least, from the wellsprings of magical considering that bubbled within the depths of Jung’s personal prodigiously artistic and, at occasions, near-psychotic thoughts. Sure coincidences, he suggests, will not be merely a random coming-together of unrelated occasions. They’re linked acausally by advantage of their that means. Synchronicity was the “acausal connecting precept”.

In line with the physicist and historian of science Arthur I Miller’s ebook Deciphering the Cosmic Quantity: The Unusual Friendship of Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung (2009), Jung thought-about this to be top-of-the-line concepts he ever had, and cites Einstein as an affect. Within the early years of the Twentieth century, Einstein was on a number of events a dinner visitor on the Jung household residence in Zurich, making a robust impression. Jung traces a direct hyperlink between these dinners with Einstein and his dialogue, 30 years later, with the Nobel prize-winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli, a dialogue that introduced the idea of synchronicity to fruition.

Jung’s collaboration with Pauli was an unlikely coalition: Jung, the quasi-mystic psychologist, a psychonaut whose deep excursions into his personal unconscious thoughts he deemed probably the most vital experiences of his life; and Pauli, the hardcore theoretical physicist who was influential in reshaping our understanding of the bodily world at its subatomic foundations. Following his mom’s suicide and a short, sad marriage, Pauli suffered a psychological disaster. At the same time as he was producing his most necessary work in physics, he was succumbing to bouts of heavy consuming and stepping into fights.

Pauli turned for assist to Jung, who occurred to stay close by. His remedy concerned the recording of desires, a activity at which Pauli proved remarkably adept, with the ability to bear in mind advanced desires in beautiful element. Jung additionally noticed a chance: Pauli was a keen information to the arcane realm of subatomic physics; and moreover, Pauli noticed Jung’s concept of synchronicity as a approach of approaching some elementary questions in quantum mechanics – not least the thriller of quantum entanglement, by which subatomic particles might correlate instantaneously, and acausally, at any distance. From their discussions emerged the Pauli-Jung conjecture, a type of double-aspect concept of thoughts and matter, which seen the psychological and the bodily as totally different facets of a deeper underlying actuality.

Jung was the primary to carry coincidences into the body of psychological inquiry, and made use of them in his analytic apply. He presents an anecdote a couple of golden beetle as an illustration of synchronicity at work within the clinic. A younger girl is recounting a dream during which she was given a golden scarab, when Jung hears a mild tapping on the window behind him and turns to see a flying insect knocking towards the windowpane. He opens the window and catches the creature because it flies into the room. It seems to be a rose chafer beetle, “the closest analogy to a golden scarab that one finds in our latitudes”. The incident proved to be a transformative second within the girl’s remedy. She had, says Jung, been “an awfully troublesome case” on account of her hyper-rationality and, evidently, “one thing fairly irrational was wanted” to interrupt her defences. The coincidence of the dream and the insect’s intrusion was the important thing to therapeutic progress. Jung provides that the scarab is “a basic instance of a rebirth image” with roots in Egyptian mythology.

Whereas Kammerer hypothesised impersonal, acausal components intersecting with the causal nexus of the universe, Jung’s acausal connecting precept was enmeshed with the psyche, particularly with the archetypes of the collective unconscious. Jung’s archetypes are primordial buildings of the thoughts widespread to all human beings. Resurrecting an historical time period, he envisioned an unus mundus, a unitary or one world, during which the psychological and bodily are built-in, and the place the archetypes are instrumental in shaping each thoughts and matter. It’s a daring imaginative and prescient, however the place, we’re certain to ask, is the proof for any of this? There may be greater than a grain of plausibility within the suggestion that archetypal buildings have an affect in shaping thought and behavior. However your complete universe? Pauli apart, the concept of synchronicity acquired little assist from the broader scientific neighborhood.

Modern cognitive science presents a safer, if much less vibrant, conceptual framework for making sense of the expertise of coincidence. We’re predisposed to come across coincidences as a result of their detection, it could be stated, displays the essential modus operandi of our cognitive and perceptual programs. The mind seeks patterns within the stream of sensory information it receives from the world. It infuses the patterns it detects with that means and typically company (typically misplaced) and, as part of this course of, it varieties beliefs and expectations that serve to form future perceptions and behavior. Coincidence, within the easy sense of co-occurrence, informs pattern-detection, particularly by way of figuring out causal relationships, and so enhances predictability. The “world” doesn’t merely current itself by the windowpanes of the eyes and channels of the opposite senses. The mind’s perceptual programs are proactive. They assemble a mannequin of the world by frequently trying to match incoming, “bottom-up” sensory information with “top-down” anticipations and predictions. Uncooked sensory information serve to refine the mind’s greatest guesses as to what’s taking place, quite than constructing the world afresh with every passing second. The mind, merely put, is continually looking out for coincidence.

From a wide-ranging survey of psychological and neurocognitive analysis, Michiel van Elk, Karl Friston and Harold Bekkering conclude that the overgeneralisation of such predictive fashions performs a vital half within the expertise of coincidence. Primed by deeply ingrained cognitive biases, and ill-equipped to make correct estimates of likelihood and chance, we’re innately inclined to see (and really feel) patterns and connections the place they merely don’t exist. “Innately inclined” as a result of, in evolutionary phrases, the tendency to over-detect coincidences is adaptive. Failure to detect contingencies between associated occasions – for instance, rustling within the undergrowth/proximity of a predator – is usually extra pricey than an inaccurate inference of a relationship between unrelated occasions. One other driver of coincidence is what the linguist Arnold Zwicky calls the “frequency phantasm”, a time period that originated in a blogpost however has since discovered its approach into the Oxford English Dictionary:

frequency phantasm n. a quirk of notion whereby a phenomenon to which one is newly alert immediately appears ubiquitous.

Van Elk and his colleagues weren’t the primary to sign the unreliability of intuitive judgments of chance as an element within the notion of coincidence. Numerous authors earlier than them – reminiscent of Stuart Sutherland in his ebook Irrationality (1992) – have prompt that paranormal beliefs, together with the idea that some coincidences are supernatural, come up due to failures of intuitive chance. The so-called birthday downside, a staple of introductory courses in chance concept, reliably exposes the failings of our intuitions. It asks what’s the chance that two folks will share a birthday in randomly chosen teams. Most individuals are shocked to study {that a} gathering of solely 23 folks is required for the probabilities of two of them sharing a birthday to exceed 50%. I’d been that means for a while to attempt a easy empirical train involving “deathdays” to reflect the birthday downside. When I discovered myself once more staying briefly at my mother and father’ outdated home, a brief drive from Rushock, I made a decision I might use Bonham’s grave as the place to begin for my analysis, for no motive aside from the imprecise pull of that black canine story.

His gravestone is straightforward to find, festooned as it’s with drumsticks and cymbals left as choices by the various pilgrims who make their approach to the shrine from world wide. The grave lies within the shade of a spreading, blue-needled conifer and, to the precise, there’s a row of three different graves – so simply 4 graves in whole (there may be additionally a small, sandcastle-like monument on the base of the tree trunk, which I discounted for lack of title and dates). The plan was to conduct a self-terminating search. Beginning with Bonham’s gravestone, and with my pocket book in hand, I might examine the opposite graves within the row after which the rows behind and in entrance, working my approach methodically across the graveyard, till I discovered any two matching dates of dying, however my mission ended virtually as quickly because it had begun. I wanted to go no additional than the 4 graves (with 5 occupants) in Bonham’s row. The occupants of the 2 on the precise shared 29 September as their date of dying (21 years aside). I want I might report that the mysterious black canine made an look, but it surely didn’t.

Turning to the chance of dream coincidences, suppose for the sake of argument that the chance of a dream coincidentally matching real-world occasions is 1 in 10,000, and that just one dream per evening is remembered. The chance of a “matching” dream on any given evening is 0.0001 (ie, 1 in 10,000), that means that the chance of a “non-matching” dream is 0.9999. The chance of two consecutive nights with non-matching desires is 0.9999 x 0.9999. The chance of getting non-matching desires each evening for an entire yr is 0.9999 multiplied by itself 365 occasions, which is 0.9642. Rounding up, this implies that there’s a 3.6% likelihood of any given particular person having a dream that matches or “predicts” real-world occasions over the course of a yr. Over a interval of 20 years, the chances of getting an identical/precognitive dream could be larger than even.

Rose, the lady within the dying dream I skilled, was 90 years outdated, and the probabilities of a 90-year-old girl within the UK dying earlier than her 91st birthday are round one in six, which is to say, not unlikely. Given her medical historical past, the chance that Rose would die earlier than her 91st birthday was in all probability a lot larger than that. However why ought to I dream about her within the first place? It’s true, I hadn’t been consciously excited about Rose, however, staying in my childhood residence, there would have been many implicit reminders. She used to stay shut by, and got here to our home typically. Additionally, visiting my ailing mom extra typically than normal at her care residence would have me excited about dying at each acutely aware and unconscious ranges, and maybe (unconsciously) about her friendship with Rose.

Makes an attempt at understanding coincidence thus vary from extravagant conjectures conceiving of acausal forces influencing the basic workings of the universe, to sober cognitive research deconstructing the essential mechanisms of the thoughts. However there’s something else to contemplate. Exceptional coincidences occur as a result of, nicely, they occur, they usually occur with out inherent that means and independently of the workings of the pattern-hungry mind. Because the statistician David Hand places it, “extraordinarily inconceivable occasions are commonplace”. He refers to this because the improbability precept, one with totally different statistical strands, together with the legislation of actually giant numbers, which states that: “With a big sufficient variety of alternatives, any outrageous factor is more likely to occur.” Each week, there are various lottery jackpot winners across the globe, every with odds of successful at many hundreds of thousands to at least one towards. And, in defiance of actually phenomenal odds, a number of folks have gained nationwide and state lottery jackpots on a couple of event.

I’m a naturalist, however coincidences give me a glimpse of what the supernaturalist sees, and my worldview is briefly challenged. Quickly, although, for good or in poor health, I’m again on my normal observe. One remaining coincidence story: it was a heat afternoon in mid-June, and I used to be feeling sorry for myself. My accomplice had walked out on me simply the week earlier than, and I assumed a great way to take care of self-pity could be to launch into a brand new undertaking. I might perform a little research into the psychology of coincidence. I settled in an armchair surrounded by books and articles on the topic, together with Koestler’s The Roots of Coincidence. Amongst different issues, I’d been studying his account of Jung’s golden scarab story.

In want of espresso, I set Koestler apart and went to the kitchen, returning to seek out, set squat on the again of my armchair, a golden beetle, a rose chafer just like the one which had made its approach by the window of Jung’s consulting room. It should have flown in by the wide-open balcony door. I rapidly took an image in case the insect took flight once more, after which nudged it on to my palm to return it to the wild, but it surely merely rolled on to its again and lay immobile. Useless.

I despatched the image to my ex, and requested how she was doing. She didn’t reply, however later that night referred to as with unsettling information. Zoe, an acquaintance of ours, had that afternoon killed herself. My mind by now was in magical considering mode, and I stated I couldn’t assist however hyperlink Zoe’s dying to the looks, and dying, of the golden beetle. I didn’t consider there was a hyperlink, after all, however I felt there could be. There was one thing else behind my thoughts. In Greek mythology, all that king Midas touched turned to gold. His daughter’s title was Zoe, and she or he too was turned to gold.

Ah, however rose chafers are fairly widespread within the south of England; they’re lively in heat climate; the balcony opens out on a water meadow (a typical rose chafer habitat); et cetera. And it has since been prompt to me that the beetle was fairly probably “taking part in lifeless” quite than actually lifeless. Maybe, after I’d thrown it again out on to the meadow, there was a “rebirth” of the type these creatures are stated to symbolise.

Bizarre, although.

This text was initially printed on aeon.co