Among the various concepts that one hears bandied about in connection with New Age ideas, synchronicity may have the most plausible claim to be a new metaphysical concept. Unfortunately, it is hard to be sure, because it is hard to know exactly what the concept comes to.
The notion of synchronicity was introduced by the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, a thinker whose ideas are often cited in New Age metaphysics. Notions that Jung introduced include the Collective Unconscious and the idea of Archetypes as principles that somehow organize the unconscious. Jung is also responsible for the widespread currency of the distinction between extroverts and introverts, whether or not he is responsible for formulating the distinction itself. Jung's works are voluminous, and they do not make for smooth or easy reading; one suspects that they are known much better indirectly than by direct acquaintance, and if that be true in general it is true in particular for the present writer, who makes no claim to having anything remotely resembling a deep knowledge of Jung's thought.
With all of those caveats in mind, we can try to get some grip on what Jung means by "synchronicity." The shortest description is that it is "meaningful coincidence." However, this requires a bit of discussion. Strictly speaking, "coincidence" means "happening at the same time.:" Jung points out that the insistence on literal coincidence -- on sameness of time -- is too narrow to capture what he has in mind. But leave that aside. There is another aspect to the way we normally use the word "coincidence." When we say that two events happen at the same time, but that neither causes the other (and also that there is no common cause of the two.) That is part of what Jung means. Synchronicity is, as he puts it, an acausal connecting principle; there is no causal connection between synchronistic events. But there is another aspect of what we mean by "coincidence" that makes it different from synchronicity. When we call something a coincidence, that is normally a way of saying that it is mere chance -- that it has only the appearance of significance. Jung is claiming that there are "coincidences" that don't involve any causal connection between the things related, but that are not mere chance either. They are meaningful coincidences between a psychological state -- a "psychic event" -- an some outer event.
Jung describes synchronicity in various ways in various places, and it is not always clear either what the description actually amounts to nor whether the term means quite the same thing in different contexts. Perhaps one can do no better than look at examples. One of Jung's favorites involves a woman patient of his who was inhibited in her progress toward successful treatment by virtue of having an overly "rationalistic" or "Cartesian" or "geometrical" outlook. Jung had been unable to loosen the grip of this hyper-rationality until one day, in her session with Jung, she was recounting a dream in which a piece of gold jewelry in the form of a scarab played a prominent role. At that very moment, Jung heard a knocking sound at the window. When he looked, he saw a common rose-beetle, whose gold-green color was a fair match for the golden scarab in the woman's dream. When he opened the window, it flew in. He grabbed it and handed it to the woman, saying "Here is your scarab." This surprising and somehow irrational event loosened the grip of her own rationalism and she was able to complete her treatment satisfactorily.
Jung saw this as a meaningful coincidence, not in the sense of being a chance occurrence that somehow merely happened to involve a mirroring of outer and inner events. As he saw it, the coincidence was too improbable simply to attribute to chance, and yet was not a case of cause and effect either. Neither the beetle caused the dream nor vice-versa, nor was there some third common cause of both.
Why not treat such cases as mere coincidence? After all, improbable events do happen. Jung seems to answer in two parts, though he does not address the question head-on. The first is that some improbable events should not be treated as synchronicities simply because they are not sufficiently improbable. Suppose, for example, that I was thinking of the number three, in some emotionally-charged way (for reasons having to do with its symbolism, perhaps) while preforming a sequence of coin tosses to illustrate a point for a class. I toss the coin ten times, and get exactly three heads. Here is a mirroring of inner events by an outer event, but Jung would not call this a case of synchronicity; even though it is improbable that a coin flipped ten times in a row should come up exactly 3 times, it is the sort of thing that might well happen by chance -- it is, as Jung says, "within the realm of probability." (We might add, furthermore, that though it is improbable, the probability is nonetheless a little over 10% -- not the sort of thing that would count as significant by statistical standards.
On the other hand, the story I told in class is the sort of thing that might well count as a synchronicity. I was on my way into the mountains of West Virginia with a woman whom I had been seeing for several months. Our relationship was difficult in many ways and I had a sense that somehow this was a make-or-break weekend. Just after we crossed the West Virginia border, we stopped for gas. I put the nozzle in my tank and cocked the handle to fill automatically, then stood back. While I was watching the display, I thought to myself "Wouldn't it be a bad omen for the relationship if the pump stopped at exactly $13.00?" To my shock, that is what happened. At precisely $13.00, the pump stopped.
Here we have an outer event matching an inner state. There is certainly no reasonable possibility that one caused the other. Furthermore, the events took place in an atmosphere of psychological charge; I was anxious, and my thought was an expression of my anxieties. And while it might have been a reasonable guess that it would take somewhere around $13.00 to fill the car, I would have grave doubts about my ability to predict the exact amount any more accurately than to within $.50 either way. In fact, this seems much too optimistic, given that prices change from time to time and location to location and that gas gauges are not precision instruments. I find it very hard to believe that there was a chance greater than one in 100 that I could guess the precise amount it would take to fill the tank. But if an event with that low a probability by chance alone happens in the course of a psychology experiment, one has met the standard for publishing the result as "highly statistically significant."
My attitude toward this particular case is one of studied agnosticism. I neither admit nor deny that it is a genuine case of what Jung calls "synchronicity." (And by the way: that weekend turned out to mark the end of our relationship.) I am open to the possibility, but see no reasonable way of deciding. But whatever the appropriate judgement about this particular case, it certainly seems to have the hallmarks of what Jung had in mind: a coincidence that seems rather too improbable, a mirroring of outer and inner, and a clear and emotionally-laden significance.
Still, how can we rule out mere coincidence? In any particular case, it may be difficult to impossible. But Jung took there to be empirical evidence for non-causal but meaningful coincidences. He saw the experiments of the parapsychologist J. B. Rhine as showing that there are events that are too improbable to be dismissed as chance, but that are also not explainable in terms of cause and effect.
Why does Jung rule out causal explanations for psi-phenomena? The answer tells us something about his understanding of cause and effect relationships. According to Rhine, his experiments showed that psi effects are not dependent on time nor on distance. Furthermore, Rhine used Faraday cages, which shield the subject from electromagnetic radiation, and the effects persisted. (For the moment, we will take Rhine's results as given. Whether they would stand up to careful scrutiny is harder to say.) But causality, on Jung's view, is essentially a spatio-temporal affair that operates by the transfer of energy over time from one place to another.
In fact, Jung saw the concept of synchronicity as in line with ideas from the philosophy of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, and also as consistent with the results of modern physics. As Jung reads him, Kant held that causality is not a feature of the world as it is in itself, but is rather a category that the human mind imposes on the world in the process of constructing knowledge. Whether this is the best interpretation of Kant is not a topic that we will take up. Getting a little clearer on what it means is another matter.
As Kant saw it, it is a presupposition of knowledge that things in the world are governed by strict causal laws, operating in the framework of space and time. Without space and time descriptions, and without law-like relations among events, we would be unable to describe things in a way that amounted to knowledge at all. Whether reality itself is this way, however, is another matter. And here an analogy might help. We describe things in a language that has a subject/predicate structure. That means that we talk in terms of things that have properties, but are not the same as their properties. This idea came up in our discussion of Locke and substance. But while this might be how we are constrained to describe things, it not need be how things are in themselves. And in fact, the idea that we much think of the world in this way is challenged by bundle-theorists such as Hume. Jung believed that modern physics rejects the idea of strict causal laws; fundamental physics seems to be statistical at bottom. And although Jung does not discuss it in any clear fashion, we will see that modern physics gives at least some basis for rejecting the idea that connections among events are a matter of energy propogating through space-time. But to all this, Jung added his own idea of the collective unconscious, which operates n terms of "archetypes" that are shared by all of us and which determine the structure of our unconscious. As Jung saw it, archetypes are more likely to bring ideas into consciousness at times of emotional tension. And in a way that is very hard to understand, he seems to have associated synchronicity with the erupting of archetypal material into consciousness.
If you find this obscure, you are not alone. Perhaps we can do no better than quote the tentative explanation that the psychologist Alan Gould offers:
Synchronistic events occur when there emerges from the unconscious an image which either directly represents or else symbolizes an event whose distant occurrence or whose impending occurrence is already known to the unconscious mind. The event is likely to be of an archetypal kind, so the emergent image will, as it were, have come from the archetype, and will have corresponding doom-laden or numinous overtones.
This is a rather lovely idea as an image; whether there is anything to it in fact is, of course, quite another matter. But we can ask what, if anything, it would help us explain if it were true.
One small use to which Jung puts it is in the explanation of a certain persistent fact about ESP experiments: subjects tend to do better early in the experiment, and then there is a decline in performance. As Jung sees it, this is because early in the experiment, the emotions are likely to be involved, not least, one supposes, because we are dealing with something that has hints of mystery. But emotional charge is the sort of thing that tends to go with eruptions of the unconscious into consciousness. As the experiment progresses, however, boredom is likely to set in.
Jung also sees synchronicity as a fruitful way of approaching mantic (i.e,, divinatory) procedures such as the I Ching (Jung's example) or the Tarot. Such methods tend to be shrouded in mystery and are often approached when the questioner is concerned with emotion-laden issues. We could add that in the case of Tarot cards, many of the pictures themselves are potent symbols that seem quite capable of archetypal meaning.
Gould also sees another use for the idea. In the early part of his paper, he outlines the serious difficulties that stand in the way of coming up with a theory of Psi phenomenon that is based on any ordinary form of transmission of information. Such theories are of two sorts, he suggests: direct contact and mediated contact. Direct contact (even if it involves such peculiarities as contact through some extra dimension of space) seems hopeless as an explanation. (Consider that even if I were in direct contact with your brain, that would hardly help me know what you were thinking.) Mediated contact (transmission of some sort of "psi energy," for example) seems scarcely to be any better. A classic ESP experiment helps us see why. Rhine would sometimes turn a deck of cards face down on a table and ask subjects to list the cards from top to bottom. But suppose that somehow the subject is telepathically aware of the sixth card down in the pile. Gould quotes C.D. Broad, who makes the difficulty clear.
Gould's suggestion is that if we accept the concept of synchronicity, we are relieved of the need to concoct wierd physical explanations for psi. Instead, we concoct weird metaphysical explanations. (He doesn't put it that way, but it seems about right.) Psi as synchronicity would be a sort of direct knowing (shades of Jane English turning out to be right in spite of it all.) As Gould points out, if this is correct then we get to take the "P" out of "ESP," since psi does not involve perception at all. Gould helpfully quotes Jung at this point:
In fact, it is very hard to know what to make of the idea of synchronicity, and of knowledge associated therewith. To those -- like me -- who have a taste for goofy ideas, this one has a definite charm. But what would be required to make it truly credible is quite another matter. However, we will go on to explore one aspect of synchronicity: the analogies it may or may not have with quantum theory.
© Allen Stairs, 1998