Coincidence!

[fr0d0]

Life follows patterns.. there are solid reasons for pattern/ instinctual behaviour.

You may notice something and then be predisposed to notice that one thing again. Without solid reasoning to link the things would be illogical.. and you'd call it coincidence until such time as you could hang a label on it... then it'd cease to be coincidence.

[ib.me.ub]

But many things in our Universe are illogical, including thought at a certain level....

[Violet]

I find with the coincidences that I encounter, the events are related and do show a correlation. Otherwise, I wouldn't notice them. I take no meaning from them, I just notice that they do occur.

Roll a dice 500 times, and if 499 of them are a 1: so what? It has as much a chance of occurring as any other sequence.

[Autumnlicious]

I find with the coincidences that I encounter, the events are related and do show a correlation. Otherwise, I wouldn't notice them. I take no meaning from them, I just notice that they do occur.

Repeat after me: correlation is not causation

[Rhizomorph13]

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What do you think of 'Coincidence'! What is it?

The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines coincidence as; "notable concurrence of events or circumstances without apparent causal connection--"

Carl Jung (I think) coined the term 'synchronicity'. My view is that coincidences are without meaning.I think it's more about the human tendency to look for meaning where none exists.

Random chance seems to me to be the simplest explanation.

Synchronicity is the experience of two or more events that are causally unrelated occurring together in a meaningful manner. To count as synchronicity, the events should be unlikely to occur together by chance.

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.

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

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That makes me think of another word: Apophenia

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

Apophenia is the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data.

[Oldandeasilyconfused]

That makes me think of another word: Apophenia

THAT'S the word I was trying to think of, thank you. I think that is WHY we notice what we see as coincidence in the first place and ignore almost everything else which goes on around us.

[Tiberius]

Repeat after me: correlation is not causation

Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'.

[Purple Rabbit]

I find with the coincidences that I encounter, the events are related and do show a correlation. Otherwise, I wouldn't notice them. I take no meaning from them, I just notice that they do occur.

Repeat after me: correlation is not causation

So you have solved the Problem of Induction then? Great. Tell me about it.

[TruthWorthy]

A correlation might represent a cause and effect relationship.
You've just got to guard against drawing that conclusion because correlation doesn't show cause and effect.

[Purple Rabbit]

A correlation might represent a cause and effect relationship.
You've just got to guard against drawing that conclusion because correlation doesn't show cause and effect.

So we're all in agreement here that correlation does not imply causation. But now for the more important question: how can we tell the difference of correlation/causation for phenomena in nature? Since we can not argue deductively that the laws of nature necessarily hold tomorrow because they hold today.