Coincidence Vs Syncronicity

[HalcyonicTrust]

Anyone here believe in synchronicity, whether religious or irreligious?

I myself don't believe in it at all. Although it's fun pretending that conincidences have meaning just as it's fun watching a movie or reading a story, despite it being fantastical and unreal.

So, who believes all coincidences are just coincidences (like I do), who believes that some are syncronicities, and who believes that ALL coincidences are syncronicities?

[Of_Tomato]

I guess synchronicity fits perfectly in a religious world since they all need to feel special and chosen.

[muhtesem insan]

I believe in synchronicity but not as traditional sense, it is in the eye of the beholder. We have tendencies to find patterns on two unrelated events. We don't like randomness.

[HalcyonicTrust]

Yeah, but for you, is that synchronicity literally believed in or do you recognize it as a fantastical illusion of the imagination?

[padraic]

'Synchonicity' is a term coined by by Carl Jung (who also believed in poltergeists) to explain unrelated events which seem occur in an meaningful pattern.Dr Jung spent a lot of time visiting the fairies. He and his contemporary,Sigmund Freud ,did not get along.

Quote:Synchronicity is the experience of two or more events that are apparently causally unrelated occurring together in a meaningful manner. To count as synchronicity, the events should be unlikely to occur together by chance. The concept of synchronicity was first described by Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung in the 1920s.
The concept does not question, or compete with, the notion of causality. Instead, it maintains that just as events may be grouped by cause, they may also be grouped by their meaning. Since meaning is a complex mental construction, subject to conscious and subconscious influence, not every correlation in the grouping of events by meaning needs to have an explanation in terms of cause and effect

Quote:Among some psychologists, Jung's works, such as The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche, were received as problematic. Fritz Levi, in his 1952 review in Neue Schweizer Rundschau, critiqued Jung's theory of synchronicity as vague in determinability of synchronistic events, saying that Jung never specifically explained his rejection of "magic causality" to which such an acausal principle as synchronicity would be related. He also questioned the theory's usefulness.[16]

A possible explanation for Jung's perception that the laws of probability seemed to be violated with some coincidences[17] can be seen in Littlewood's law.

In psychology and cognitive science, confirmation bias is a tendency to search for or interpret new information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions and avoids information and interpretations that contradict prior beliefs. It is a type of cognitive bias and represents an error of inductive inference, or as a form of selection bias toward confirmation of the hypothesis under study or disconfirmation of an alternative hypothesis. Confirmation bias is of interest in the teaching of critical thinking, as the skill is misused if rigorous critical scrutiny is applied only to evidence challenging a preconceived idea but not to evidence supporting it.[18]

Wolfgang Pauli, a scientist who in his professional life was severely critical of confirmation bias, made some effort to investigate the phenomenon, coauthoring a paper with Jung on the subject. Some of the evidence that Pauli cited was that ideas that occurred in his dreams would have synchronous analogs in later correspondence with distant collaborators.[19]

It has been asserted that Jung's analytical psychological theory of synchronicity is equal to intellectual intuition.[20]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity

Quote:Pareidolia (play /pærɪˈdoʊliə/ pa-ri-DOE-lee-ə) is a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) being perceived as significant. Common examples include seeing images of animals or faces in clouds, the man in the moon or the Moon rabbit, and hearing hidden messages on records played in reverse. The word comes from the Greek para- – "beside", "with", or "alongside"—meaning, in this context, something faulty or wrong (as in paraphasia, disordered speech) and eidōlon – "image"; the diminutive of eidos – "image", "form", "shape". Pareidolia is a type of apophenia.

Quote:Evolutionary advantage
Clouds are a classic source of pareidolia.

Carl Sagan hypothesized that as a survival technique, human beings are "hard-wired" from birth to identify the human face. This allows people to use only minimal details to recognize faces from a distance and in poor visibility but can also lead them to interpret random images or patterns of light and shade as being faces.[6] The evolutionary advantages of being able to identify friend from foe with split-second accuracy are numerous; prehistoric (and even modern) men and women who accidentally identify an enemy as a friend could face deadly consequences for this mistake. This is only one among many evolutionary pressures responsible for the development of the modern facial recognition capability of modern humans.[7]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia


There is another name for the tendency to do the same with coincidences,but I forget.

[muhtesem insan]

(19th January 2011 15:13)DoubtVsFaith Wrote:  Yeah, but for you, is that synchronicity literally believed in or do you recognize it as a fantastical illusion of the imagination?

synchronicity - or at least what i understand from it- does not mean there's a magic force (you know who ) that controls things. It's what we see in things. Most of the times it's only in our minds. We have tendencies to see a pattern in everything. That's why we use control groups in our experiments. That's why we repeat same experiment again and again. We're flawed in that way.
But this flaw can be also a strength because in some cases there's a connection -that we don't know yet- and this flaw helps us to detect and understand them.

[downbeatplumb]

My wife believes that there is no such thing as coincidences its all manipulated by the spirit realm.........sigh.

[Violet Lilly Blossom]

I'm a determinist, it would be hypocritical to allow for coincidence (a product of 'chance')

[Dotard]

Synchronicity.

[HeyItsZeus]

Wouldn't the synchronicity that you speak of have to have been caused by an outside force? Perhaps that source is natural and has nothing to do with anything supernatural at all. I don't want to say whether I believe in it or not because I have no proof for it or against it.