No. Try to read the original writings. Pseudoscientific beyond belief. Worth reading just to see what the thought process was, but there're a lot fallacies and straight up confusions in Jung's account. All that said, always worth reading something that tries to push rational limits.
As a scientist, I just tried reading into synchronicity and indeed it's hard to make heads or tails of it. Likely because of Carl Jung's unscientific methodology (I am surprised psychology ever takes him seriously).
If they wanted to talk about acausal relationships, they could have started writing correlation functions. Granted most interactions are governed by the speed of light, which determines a causal relation. But then there is the Pauli exclusion principle effects, which can appear to be acausal, so I can see why Pauli got involved now. And if Pauli or Jung really cared about this, they should have wrote acausal correlation functions.
Rather than any mathematical formulation I just get hit with psycho-babble. I guess it is the essence of philosophers to take all propositions seriously. But, even as a radical skeptic, I act like life is limited and its hard to take such talk seriously. It reminds me of those people who mass-email universities talking about flat earth, mirrors reflecting the earth to create the illusion of stars, or perpetual motion devices (I got one in my inbox that was even crazier a few months ago).
I have lately been frustrated that this topic is not given more attention. Jung and Pauli were famously associated with the number 137, and I happen to think that there is something strange going on with that number. I was a graduate student in philosophy, but lately I'm more interested in coincidences. I have come across some that have been quite disturbing to me. And meanwhile, I have also been giving thought to the philosophical implications. For example, certain constellations of coincidences could be taken as abductive evidence for synchronicity, but they could also be taken as abductive evidence for broader metaphysical theories of which synchronicity is a part. For example, the theory that the universe is purposeful, that things happen for a reason in the sense typically meant when people say "everything happens for a reason".
I happen to think that it is more Lovecraftian than anyone wants to hear, though. Partly due to what it might mean for there to be a secret orchestration of reality in general, and partly due to what certain constellations of coincidence seem to say specifically.
Lately, I am focused in particular on this idea from Carl Sagan's Contact, where it is suggested that maybe there is a cosmic signature hidden deep in π in the form of binary code that describes a circle. But if synchronicity were true, then Contact itself may be exactly the sort of thing that is meaningfully acausally correlated with something else, e.g. a coincidence in π.
There is a known fact that in both π and φ (the golden ratio) at the 137th decimal place, they give the number 317. 137 is the 33rd prime, and already famously associated with synchronicity; 317 is the 66th prime.
Sagan said about Contact that he was imagining a signal having three parts: (1) a beacon to get our attention; (2) an address to let us know that it is for us; and (3) a message. When I was learning about this, my address was 317. The context around it in π is 231725. That happened to include my address, my birthplace, and my birthday, so I was intrigued enough to look further. But naturally, so far, it looks like we already have a beacon (in the form of the coincidence at the 137th index) and an address (the beacon contains information pointing to the person receiving it -- oh, an aside, "Kabbalah" famously has a gematria value of 137, and the word means "to receive").
And it turns out that there really does seem to be something weird going on with 137 and π (and to a lesser extent φ). I have posted to reddit some of what I've found, but I'm always still digesting and organizing it. For example, the original coincidence itself brings to our mind permutations of 137, so we look around for whether there is anything else weird going on with permutations of 137 in π. Within the first 1000 decimal places of π, we would expect permutations of 137 to show up about six times, but they actually show up 14 times. No other three-digit number permutation group has even 13 instances in the same span.
Decimal place 360 has the first string of binary of its length; immediately before it we find the number 360; and so on. After that, within the first 1000 decimal places, we find a string of binary that is six digits long, and this is rather early for this length of binary. But moreover, it is separated by just one digit (a 3) from the first occurrence of 137 itself in π.
Then one can look to the meanings of these binary strings, the binary in φ, other coincidences, and things continue to self-reference and cross-reference in unexpected ways.
I do consider what I'm doing to still be philosophy. I think that 137 is a clue to the "world riddle", but that it must be considered through the lens of synchronicity. And then we can get not only evidence that something purposeful is going on, but by examining that evidence, we can start to learn more what exactly this is all about.
But already, the Charlie Day/Pepe Silvia memes are predictable, and that fact maybe says more about the extent to which synchronicity is seriously investigated.
A lot of this hinges on using base-10 numbers, though. That seems a tad arbitrary.
Especially since base 8 (our finger count leaving the thumbs as position keepers) or base 12 (the phalange count on a single hand) seem equally likely to have been used as our number system base.
When this concept is introduced in Contact, Sagan frames it as: the fact that it occurs in base-10 suggests that the "Message" was meant for us.
Moreover, if you're already considering synchronicity, then the fact that we use base-10 (or 360 degrees for a circle) would already be on the table. You don't need these facts about how humans encode things to also be mathematically fundamental. On the contrary: the fact that something mathematically fundamental seems to coordinate with relatively arbitrary/optional human conventions is precisely the sort of thing that is interesting.
knockingatthegate | a day ago
Short answer, no.
seldomtimely | a day ago
No. Try to read the original writings. Pseudoscientific beyond belief. Worth reading just to see what the thought process was, but there're a lot fallacies and straight up confusions in Jung's account. All that said, always worth reading something that tries to push rational limits.
Immorpher | 12 hours ago
As a scientist, I just tried reading into synchronicity and indeed it's hard to make heads or tails of it. Likely because of Carl Jung's unscientific methodology (I am surprised psychology ever takes him seriously).
If they wanted to talk about acausal relationships, they could have started writing correlation functions. Granted most interactions are governed by the speed of light, which determines a causal relation. But then there is the Pauli exclusion principle effects, which can appear to be acausal, so I can see why Pauli got involved now. And if Pauli or Jung really cared about this, they should have wrote acausal correlation functions.
Rather than any mathematical formulation I just get hit with psycho-babble. I guess it is the essence of philosophers to take all propositions seriously. But, even as a radical skeptic, I act like life is limited and its hard to take such talk seriously. It reminds me of those people who mass-email universities talking about flat earth, mirrors reflecting the earth to create the illusion of stars, or perpetual motion devices (I got one in my inbox that was even crazier a few months ago).
Fantastic_Back3191 | 21 hours ago
I just wanted to say- I have never knowingly met a self-confessed diletante. So that's one more thing I can cross off my bucket list, thank you.
Asleep_Farmer_3138 | 22 hours ago
I have lately been frustrated that this topic is not given more attention. Jung and Pauli were famously associated with the number 137, and I happen to think that there is something strange going on with that number. I was a graduate student in philosophy, but lately I'm more interested in coincidences. I have come across some that have been quite disturbing to me. And meanwhile, I have also been giving thought to the philosophical implications. For example, certain constellations of coincidences could be taken as abductive evidence for synchronicity, but they could also be taken as abductive evidence for broader metaphysical theories of which synchronicity is a part. For example, the theory that the universe is purposeful, that things happen for a reason in the sense typically meant when people say "everything happens for a reason".
I happen to think that it is more Lovecraftian than anyone wants to hear, though. Partly due to what it might mean for there to be a secret orchestration of reality in general, and partly due to what certain constellations of coincidence seem to say specifically.
Lately, I am focused in particular on this idea from Carl Sagan's Contact, where it is suggested that maybe there is a cosmic signature hidden deep in π in the form of binary code that describes a circle. But if synchronicity were true, then Contact itself may be exactly the sort of thing that is meaningfully acausally correlated with something else, e.g. a coincidence in π.
There is a known fact that in both π and φ (the golden ratio) at the 137th decimal place, they give the number 317. 137 is the 33rd prime, and already famously associated with synchronicity; 317 is the 66th prime.
Sagan said about Contact that he was imagining a signal having three parts: (1) a beacon to get our attention; (2) an address to let us know that it is for us; and (3) a message. When I was learning about this, my address was 317. The context around it in π is 231725. That happened to include my address, my birthplace, and my birthday, so I was intrigued enough to look further. But naturally, so far, it looks like we already have a beacon (in the form of the coincidence at the 137th index) and an address (the beacon contains information pointing to the person receiving it -- oh, an aside, "Kabbalah" famously has a gematria value of 137, and the word means "to receive").
And it turns out that there really does seem to be something weird going on with 137 and π (and to a lesser extent φ). I have posted to reddit some of what I've found, but I'm always still digesting and organizing it. For example, the original coincidence itself brings to our mind permutations of 137, so we look around for whether there is anything else weird going on with permutations of 137 in π. Within the first 1000 decimal places of π, we would expect permutations of 137 to show up about six times, but they actually show up 14 times. No other three-digit number permutation group has even 13 instances in the same span.
Decimal place 360 has the first string of binary of its length; immediately before it we find the number 360; and so on. After that, within the first 1000 decimal places, we find a string of binary that is six digits long, and this is rather early for this length of binary. But moreover, it is separated by just one digit (a 3) from the first occurrence of 137 itself in π.
Then one can look to the meanings of these binary strings, the binary in φ, other coincidences, and things continue to self-reference and cross-reference in unexpected ways.
I do consider what I'm doing to still be philosophy. I think that 137 is a clue to the "world riddle", but that it must be considered through the lens of synchronicity. And then we can get not only evidence that something purposeful is going on, but by examining that evidence, we can start to learn more what exactly this is all about.
But already, the Charlie Day/Pepe Silvia memes are predictable, and that fact maybe says more about the extent to which synchronicity is seriously investigated.
FetaMight | 15 hours ago
A lot of this hinges on using base-10 numbers, though. That seems a tad arbitrary.
Especially since base 8 (our finger count leaving the thumbs as position keepers) or base 12 (the phalange count on a single hand) seem equally likely to have been used as our number system base.
Asleep_Farmer_3138 | 13 hours ago
When this concept is introduced in Contact, Sagan frames it as: the fact that it occurs in base-10 suggests that the "Message" was meant for us.
Moreover, if you're already considering synchronicity, then the fact that we use base-10 (or 360 degrees for a circle) would already be on the table. You don't need these facts about how humans encode things to also be mathematically fundamental. On the contrary: the fact that something mathematically fundamental seems to coordinate with relatively arbitrary/optional human conventions is precisely the sort of thing that is interesting.
FetaMight | 10 hours ago
That sounds like picking and choosing what's important and what isn't.
How do you know you're not just writing the story you're hoping to find?
goldtransam29 | 17 hours ago
Thank you for this interesting reply… I’ve only just learnt about and leant into synchronicity. This Sunday is the 137th day of the year… I wonder…