Epistle to the Very Curious

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I'm going to use my powers of deduction to come to a conclusion about you.  You aren't listening to the preachers and you aren't listening to the scientists.  Because they've already got your answers, so why are you still curious?  Maybe you don't know fully what they have to say, in which case that counts as "you aren't listening," I suppose.  

  

In case you got here without being inspired by coincidences in your life, I'll explain. There was a famous psychologist named Carl Jung who had a physicist friend named Wolfgang Pauli.  A real, rigorous scientist he was nevertheless famously surrounded by improbable coincidences.    Wikipedia used to have a list of them but it mysteriously disappeared.  So, instead here's  a link to a website that gives some examples.  I searched for "coincidences" rather than "synchronicity" because the latter will get  you all kinds of advice about interpretation.  "Just the facts ma'am," I said to myself.  And that reminded me of one of my own...I was visiting my parents when home from college and petting the cat and realized she looked like a small dragon.  So I said, affectionately, "Dragonette" and the next thing that came on the TV an instant later, when my father randomly surfed to the next channel, was the opening theme to an episode of the old show "Dragnet."  

 

So, that's what I'm talking about and what most of the people in the class already know about.

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Remedial lesson complete.

 

Regarding these uncanny coincidences, scientists will tell you different things depending on specialty.  In general, science can't ignore that there's something happening because you are observing something so it must have a cause.  

The hard sciences can't test it, so they aren't interested, per se.  They have some theories about other things resulting from speculation about what they can test, and those other theories can suggest some possibilities, but they only go so far.  Quantum stuff, non locality, alternate universes, all that.  Some say maybe time isn't real.  They aren't sure on any of this stuff.  Wierd stuff happens where it can be detected by real machines and replicated in labs so it must be real, but that stuff doesn't affect ordinary life.  it averages out on large scales.  

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So that leaves it to psychologists.  You are experiencing something, so explaining that is in their wheelhouse.  You are detecting something with your mind, and they're the scientists whose job it is to explain results from that particular detector.  Most psychologists these days will tell you those coincidences are a trick of the mind. The mind is a detector of patterns, and you're detecting patterns even when they're not there.  Improbable events are probable given the sheer number of events that occur.  

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Beyond that, there was a psychologist who had a deeper theory about why your mind picks out the specific miracles it does from among the constant miracles that are really ordinary and nothing to pay attention to.   Carl Jung said we choose to become aware of these coincidences because there are deep structures in our minds that want to express themselves in relation to things going on in our lives.  It's  your unconscious trying to create meaning and you can learn about your true self from it. You learn about all our true selves, since we are all the same deep down.  Otherwise how could we all be seeing similar cases of apophenia?  

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Most modern psychologists reject that as reading too much into it.  They say you just have a primitive understanding of statistics and you're tricking yourself.  That can answer it, so no other explanation is compelling, especially more complicated ones because of Occam's razor.

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But you and I know there's something real going on.  I've thought it through and you won't like it.  How do I know that?  Because if  you were religious when you encountered coincidences you would have already jumped to the conclusion that it's some religious thing.  That would have been your first thought.  

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If you see coincidences and you neither explain them away with facile theories that are themselves based on confirmation bias, or instantly fit them into your magical thinking you are in a very select group.  You are open minded.  That's rare.  Open minds are dangerous and if one is spotted in the wild it is likely to be leaped upon by any number of hungry predators.  I don't know how you got protected, but please be assured that my tongue is an extremely comfortable place to sleep.  Come into my parlor.  Would you like a cup of bad science and bad religion?

It's called philosophy you say?  The thing about philosophy is that it is always trying to derive general truths from local truths and then apply them out of context and out of scope.  Things are true in the right scope, when they don't make extravagant claims about their own breadth of utility.  But they're boring like that.  You can't be a rock star with that kind of stuff. 

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Based on the assumption that the coincidences are a real thing, not a trick of the mind, we must either shrug or open ourselves up to extraordinary explanations. Science offers plenty of room because it hasn't really conclusively explained this quantum stuff.  It understands the patterns  well enough to make predictions, but not why they exist, leaving much uncharted.  Religion also offers plenty of extraordinary explanations which all disagree with each other.   Speculation on this could lead to yet another religion--which we need like a couple of holes in the head.  It could be a new religion that uses quantum stuff for justification.  Not enough of that, people haven't tried that  yet, what an idea. 

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Cause and effect seems to have not gone away.  But effects are happening that seem to cause each other without being connected.  They must have a common cause.  But this common cause would have to be in the distant past and it would have to have been set on its course taking into account extremely long chains of cause and effect.  Even with classical physics nobody is that smart.  Because of the quantum stuff it isn't even theoretically possible.  It's not just intractable; there are limits about the possibility of knowledge that are as ironclad as the speed of light.  But there it is. 

 

We know it happens.  So we have to go way outside the bounds of anything like safe territory and speculate wildly.  That's a "high risk, high reward" pursuit, except the reward and the risk are both figurative....other than the promise of significance and coherence and purpose.

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I've done all that.  I've actually got the answer.  Turns out it's something like religion...a new religion that leans on that quantum stuff.  The whole universe affects random "leaps in atoms", and it does so backwards through time because time has (a lot) more than one dimension.  I know,  you can't see probability fields evolve.  But it actually does have something to do with daily life.  It sheds light on meaning and purpose and you can do a sort of magic with it, when you currently have the right status, when you are sufficiently pregnant with potential. But the upshot turns out to not be all that radical.   Carry on with  your life.  Try to be a productive worker and good citizen. Maybe have a little ambition.   Those are the things God wants us to do.  And if you can get other people to do those things, well, that pleases God a lot while you're doing it.  I have no ulterior motive here.  Yeah, my theory winds up at "God".  But I can explain God without mysticism.  And I've checked.  It's unique.  Mostly.  It will be useful to you if  you take the trouble to learn it.

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Understanding this can be valuable to you, and if you want it, here it is: 

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                     Link to Theoconsequentalist Doctrine

 

But, if you just want religious community, there are big wrong religions that you can join.  If they're all equally unproven, what matters is not plausibility but the appeal of the design.  It's not science, it's art.  What would you rather believe?  What makes a good community?  What endears you to your ancestors?  What comforts you?  They  have professionals who can help you with your doubt. They have community that can help you feel less alone in your belief, thus banishing doubt--and serving so many other purposes. But what if it matters what the religion makes you do?  What if God is real and God cares what you do?  What if that's what's going on?  What you are seeing is this: God is trying to nudge your life in a different direction.  

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First Draft of Epistle to the Very Curious:

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What you've been seeing is called "synchronicity."  It's not that it goes away, but you just get used to it.  It's not some new phenomenon.  It's an incredibly ancient and pervasive part of human, and probably pre-human, experience.  Of course you live inside a world that is alive, they would say.  Duh. 

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You think this is unheard of because it has been masked by more modern culture.  You've been trained to ignore it and explain it away.  "The world is nothing but a machine and coincidences are just that, coincidences.  Incredibly unlikely events happen all the time, there's just so much going on that you are sure to encounter them.  The human mind is designed to generate meaning, to create patterns even in chaos.   This is sometimes a possibility so naturally it must always be true.

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It's a trick of the eye.  It's just the wind.  Ignore the man behind the curtain. "

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The man who coined the term "synchronicity" thought it was related to meaning, which is related to myths that are deep structures shared by all human minds.  There are patterns, he thought, archetypes that recur and manifest in different forms but they're really the same thing.  It's those meanings trying to be found, that's all. 

 

If you really think about it, what does "meaning" mean?  It's just "effect on a mind."  Colloquially we use the term "meaning" to refer to consequences, as in "The daytime sky is darkening so that probably means it's going to rain."    Sure, if you know clouds predict rain it's probably because  you've seen it go that way before.  You could say that means you've designated clouds as a symbol of future rain.  You could go down this whole rabbit hole of symbols.  But really it's all just what they call "teleological."  It's all going somewhere.    Instead of looking at past causes you can think of it in terms of future purposes.   If causality is being violated, we certainly don't see it directly but we can see retro-causal effects anyway.

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We're systematically taught not to think that way.  That's primitive, superstitious thinking.  Like a savage.  Everything can be explained in terms of prior causes, and all we can control are prior causes, so what's the point of thinking about purposes?  Not only can we not do anything about them, make them work for us, we can't really know what they're getting at.  If a coincidence, say a car backfiring out on the street, wakes  you from a reverie and reminds you of an appointment, then all you know is that one connection.  Perhaps, just for conversation, the purpose of a coincidental noise was to help you keep  your appointment.  But there's no way to know the whole story.  Why is it important to keep your appointment, what does that do?  Such questions immediately lead to an endless chain of unknowns.  The past, on the other hand, is easy to understand.  The car backfired because the owner wasn't taking care of the car, which was because he can't afford it because he didn't get a good education because his family didn't take the trouble to teach him to value it because…It just goes on and on endlessly into the past all the way to prior causes which are totally known like math.  Unlike the future, which gets lost in complexity and unknowns.  That's sarcasm, of course.  We can know more about the short term past than the future, but on the grand scale (in the general case as they say) our knowledge in both directions has about the same precision.   The only case in which we have any precise knowledge is the short term past and the predictability of the short term future that is reflected from it, as in a mirror.

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So, we can chart out the pathway to knowing everything, even if we haven't travelled it yet.  First, come to know all the rules of how the past causes the future at short range.  See?  It's mindless and independent.  We're only looking at isolated things so all things are isolated.  Then, just extend those patterns infinitely in both directions.  The whole world is nothing but a giant predictable machine just like one domino knocking down the next.  Theoretically.  We just don't know the details, but we know that if we know the details we know the results.  Because after all, that was one of our assumptions. 

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On the human scale of what we can do, cause and effect works pretty well, the way Newtonian physics works pretty well for most everyday purposes.  But there are effects that it doesn't account for.  Those effects  are the coincidences you've been seeing.  Strict empricists say to ignore your lying eyes, "the satellites just have broken clocks".   They have to, that's their method.  It's very good for so much.  When you detect inexplicable radiation, first double check your instruments before you go publishing that you've discovered cosmic background radiation.  It would be irresponsible not to.

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But the issue with synchronicity isn't as simple.  It's impossible to conclusively prove that coincidences aren't apophenia or the inevitability of improbability.    In this case it will always be possible that the instruments are just broken. 

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Here's the thing.  When you have something like that you get a whole bunch of instruments and compare notes.   You don't just tell them to stop detecting anything at all, you make distinctions.  You don't look for reasons why it's all wrong because it doesn't fit your separate belief.  You look at the preponderance of the data, the reproducibility.  And here's the thing.  The instruments are human minds, and guess what.  They've been detecting certain kinds of stuff in some ways forever, everywhere.  The theory that ignores that is that there's a manufacturer's defect.  The instruments are all broken.    They must be, because look:  most people have religion.  Most people aren't "sensible materialist atheists."  They see the magical in every atom of the world.  Maybe because there's magic in every atom of the world.   Maybe we see patterns because there are patterns.  Looking for ways for that to be false is a form of looking for patterns that confirm your bias, it's motivated reasoning.  It's not scientific to dismiss evidence.  It's not logical to jump from "it's sometimes this" to "it's always this."  It's religious  Apophenia is really a thing and people can develop rare and unjustifiable beliefs.  But when there are commonalities like there are, there's something more.  Telling people to close their eyes is wrong.  

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But you might object that all these religious people don't agree.  They believe widely varying things.  That's true, but the one thing they agree on is that there's something not quite kosher in Denmark.  All is not as it appears on the surface.  That's the piece of evidence we have.  Since simplicity is one quality of a good scientific theory, the scientific approach is of course to always seek the simplest possible solution to anything and everything and dismiss it.  But that snark isn't fair.  Science doesn't come to a conclusion about synchronicity because it doesn't come to conclusions.  It sets the question aside.  It could be apophenia, and it's untestable so we are not compelled to look at it any more.  Let's count the bugs under this log, and see what this chemical does when you use it on bald heads.  Such things are much more amenable to our process, so that's what we are going to do.    That's being just like those who see magic in the world and leap to the first answer that comes to them and hang onto it for millennia.  It's not trying, it's jumping at a quick slapdash conclusion so you can move on.  If you abandon this matter  you can't complain if it is picked up.

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So science has set synchronicity aside.  Presumably on a side table.  And what lives on that side table?  That would be philosophy.  Philosophy handles all the "other" out there.  It's where we pursue inquiries that aren't really testable, yet if ever.  It's where we speculate pointlessly but earnestly.  There are rules, sure, but they aren't hard and fast.  The more cool stuff you use to justify a philosophical model the more cool points it gets, but nothing is really mandatory.  It's like cooking.  Use what you've got and try stuff and see if it tastes good.  Relative to the other entrees.    But not really.  There's rigor.  There are brands and types of dishes, and if you don't fit one well you have no credibility. 

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There's no brand of "neo-theology."  Oh, they tried it in the 19th century.  Hegel was into it to the extent he's penetrable.   They gave up after that.  There was a period of pure semantical mechanics, kind of like math, totally boring and useless but strictly behaving itself and not making trouble.  Now it's about seeing how many principles of critical thought you can break.  Philosophy is not confronting this whole issue at all well, and it's in its wheelhouse.   Correction:  I failed to mention an isolated spur called  Process Theology.

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So, anyway I did some untutored thinking about all this for a long time and I've developed a theory about it.  That's what this website is.  I'm explaining my theory.  But then I'm trying to start a new religion.  Because the groupies. 

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No, really because that's all it's good for.  I had to understand this and once I had invested all this effort into it, I had this thing I'd made and I needed to do something with it and really that's all it's good for.  It's a religion, which is to say it's ammunition against existing religions.  They can't claim my soul because they disagree with this and this is what I believe.   

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I suspect that old religions have a lot to do with strident atheism.  They hate heresy more than they hate disbelief.  They would rather you were an atheist than that you do theism wrong.  There's a name for doing theism wrong and it's called "devil worship."  They're afraid if you don't follow their orthodoxy the devil will get you. 

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This comes down to a heresy hating heresy called "Gnosticism."  It's the notion that the real world is the domain of the devil and the real God only exists in Heaven.  If you see it, it's the Prince of Evil.  If you hear about it second hand or from a tiny voice in your soul, it just might be the Prince of Peace.  Despite the fact that the people giving you these second hand accounts are, oops, in the world.  And maybe working for the devil.  And that tiny voice in your soul is…ahem, your imagination, fueled by experience.  If God doesn't exist in the real world, and you have to be protected from the devil by sticking to only a very strict orthodoxy inherited from people long ago given the truth God can only reveal once, then that God isn't actually real.  If it doesn't exist in reality, it exists in unreality, aka it's imaginary.   Gnosticism, the belief that the devil rules in reality (replay those words), is devil worship.  It's worship of the self-styled God that has been exiled.  The one that was cast out.  Sound familiar?  And the notion that all theology must be based on received wisdom is rooted in Gnosticism.  It's saying "ignore God acting in your life, listen to me." 

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Now, it's sensible to have tests for prophets.  Anyone claiming to speak for God must prove it by working miracles or making predictions that come true.  And must concur with existing orthodoxy, so no prophets that shake things up.  The trouble making kind are false prophets.  And if they actually produce miracles they're clearly acts of the devil.  Oops didn't tell you about that ahead of time.  Right, if you pass the test you fail the test.  Heads I win, tails you lose. 

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But what is a "prophet"?  Someone who speaks for God.  Must all neotheology be prophecy?  That's the trap there, that's the logic leap.  Maybe God doesn't need a mouthpiece.  Maybe we can study God without either speaking for God or staying in the archives.  But then again, as they say, we're actually studying the devil because the God in the real world is the devil.   "Wouldn't you rather be an atheist?" they practically say out loud. 

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So the first step of neotheology is to get rid of the devil.  There's no devil.  It makes no sense to have a God that's all powerful and another God that is in that God's way.  The real God acts in the world and there is no other.  To go further, I'll be the exact opposite of the Gnostics and tell you I don't know how God will reveal Itself to you.  I'm not going to "work a miracle" for you, to elevate myself as an authority, but I'm going to use miracles as evidence anyway.  It's not about me.  It's about God.  And yes, I think I've developed some expertise I have to share.  I do have something original to say.  It's a leap to say that means I'm claiming to speak for God.  The religious don't want us to think about God, and if we aren't going to believe what they tell us about God they'de rather we just didn't believe in God at all.  When you are a gnostic atheist you aren't rebelling, you're doing just what you're supposed to. 

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You noticed that capitalized It?  God is an It.  They say we need to make God a "he" or at least a "she" because God being an "It" makes God unhuman, it's tantamount to atheism.  "Humans have genitals, so God must have genitals.  Anything else is crude primitive religion, superstition."    Man is made in God's image in the sense that we both have intelligent minds.  Not in that we have the same aquiline noses and beard styles.   God appears in your life in the form of these coincidences you've seen.  I've thought this through and can tell you about It.  Look further and consider what I have to say, or you can pick an alternative.  Shut your eyes.  Adhere to an ancient religion.  Or mull it through yourself and reinvent the wheel. 

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Now, what I have to say is moderately hard..  You can get true or you can get easy.

  Try to pay attention.