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Originally Posted by John Freestone  Similarly, if things of a co-incidental or syn-chronous nature keep happening to me that I can't explain my normal means, including what we know about psychology, I can only conclude one of two things - their relationship has some causal link, or it doesn't. If it has a causal link, it is not supernatural, but natural, and if it doesn't, it is coincidental. Now, even if there is some great pattern to the universe that means that everything is linked in such a way that when you start thinking about teal motocycles they actually being to increase in number around you, that's fine. If it had some really substantial evidence, we might have to consider it as a real contender for the universal cosmology, but it would still be a causal link, and it would only be magic(k) if you defined magic(k) that way - in other words, once discovered as REAL, it is NATURAL.
Some IMers say that there is a real process going on that we haven't discovered yet. Ok. No problem. If it is, let's investigate it. Others just seem to want it to be unknown, because they like being 'weirded out' and enjoy 'trippiness'. That's fine too, as long as you're happy to live in ignorance, in a world of makebelieve, not bothering to find out. I'm not meaning to tar everyone with the same brush. Some people are genuinely open minded and would forget these magical connections if they turned out to be false, a trick of the mind, as I think they are. Others would just hate it. That's ok too. Everyone's free to make up their own mind. |
Ok. This all makes total sense to me.
What you wrote makes me do some mind-bending. Perhaps there is an underlying causal relationship amongst a string of coincidences, and maybe sometimes that's where it feels weird -- like I am causing all this somehow, but I don't know how, or why.
Or perhaps there's an acausal relationship, which isn't just coincidental, the way correlation doesn't necessarily mean there is causation and also isn't coincidental. You can find articles in the media all the time which like to take a scientific study and draw a causal conclusion, which typically is false, and the study itself never stated anything like that. For instance, the study that shows people who live alone tend to die younger than people who live with somebody else. The media reports I read about this tended to heavily imply this all had to do with loneliness. But in fact there are probably all sorts of other reasons that are actually causal, that would better explain why a person who lives alone might die younger. Another one -- being male doesn't cause baldness, though by the looks of it, one sure might think so!
I'm very happy to investigate synchronicity further, although I'm not so sure how far we will get trying to create it in a lab.
I totally agree with wolfgang about the trippiness of natural phenomena that we do know the underlying reasons for, and would hope that if we found the underlying reasons for synchronicity, that it wouldn't take the magic out of it. Last night I drove over to the Mobil convenience store (we're so used to driving that we forget just how magical a car is, and we forget just how magical it is that there's a store right there which has aisles and aisles of stuff I can get if I need it, just like that), and the sunset was so breathtaking, I went out loud, "Whoaaaa . . . that's beautiful."
Wolfgang - did you ever hear George Carlin's take on why the sky's blue? "Why is the sky blue? Well, it's not really blue. We only think it's blue because that's the name we call that color."
