Coincidence, synchronicity, and other things going bump, together, in the night...

BLOT: (11 Oct 2010 - 11:24:29 AM)

Coincidence, synchronicity, and other things going bump, together, in the night...

I meant to post this a week or two ago. It started with separate coincidences. The first. I was reading a novel from the 90s back around the end of September and I noted a strange word, "argy-bargy". From context, it was pretty obvious that it meant "argument". Then, less than a week later, I was playing a "talking book" written this year, and in one scene, there was again the use of the word argy-bargy. How many times has that happened to you? The second bit. I was reading Cracked.com's article, "6 Romantic Movie Gestures That Can Get You Prison Time," when I came across the phrase—in #5—"rape by fraud". I wouldn't say it is a unique phrase, and I can immediately grasp what it is getting at. But then, about two days later, saw this linked to on Fark.com: "Girl Poses as Man for 6yr Fling". With the strange circumstances put to a side—how exactly do you convince someone you are having sex with that you are of another gender?*—this was another case of coincidence. I read about "rape by fraud" just a couple of days before seeing a news article about it.

My friend Raymond and I have joked about it quite a bit. He once posted about the very phenomenon I am talking about, hearing a word once and then the next day: hearing it again. It was a few weeks later, in the mall, that we were talking about Drew Barrymore when a huge wall poster featuring her (not sure the use of such a thing) was carried right by the door of Book Gallery. Let's call that the speak of the devil coincidence. What else is there? You have things like un/lucky numbers and colors. You wear a green shirt, and meet the woman of your dreams. You walk into a green door, and find $100 just lying on the ground. You pick the green scratch card, and win a vacation. However, whenever you wear red or otherwise choose red, something bad happens. I've seen people do the same thing with numbers, where a certain number of steps or dumplings is good, but one less is bad.

There are lots more examples of the phenomena, but it won't really help my point to list them all. What I am curious about is explaining them, if you can do such a thing. There are several explanations, which I will list from the crazier and/or more divine, down to the more practical and, you might say, more boring.

• The Paranoid Explanation: "Something is up. The universe, or some agency, is actively organizing the coincidences to mess with me. This is why I notice them and others don't, because they are aimed at me?"
• The Controlled System Proof Explanation: "Coincidence is just proof that I live inside of some controlled system [e.g., The Matrix] and its programming creates little swirls from time to time."
• The Divine Sign Explanation: "God is trying to get my attention."
• The Jungian Collective: "The Collective Unconcious is just expressing itself."
• The Not-Quite Jungian Explanation: "Various memes and ideas are organizing under a loose density wave equation."
• The Finitude Explanation: "There's just not that much stuff to go around, eventually some of it loops back on itself."
• Statistics, aka The Pascal's Triangle Explanation: "The number of pairs between units of a set increases geometrically faster than the number of units [3 units has 3 pairs, 4 units have 6, 5 unites have 10, 6 has 15, etc]. Therefore, in a significantly large body of units, apparent coincidence amongst the many, many sub-characteristics will approach certaintity over time."
• The Translation Bias Explanation: "Your brain 'translates' fuzzy concepts and ill-fitting data into discrete categories. What you call a coincidence is really you rounding up one factor and rounding down another so they fit into the same category."
• The Recency Explanation: "As you witness/experience millions and billions of event, over time, the most recent will stick in your mind. When you see two events with similar characteristics in something of a recent time, it sticks out.
• The Common Interest Explanation: "We tend to hang around others with common interests, therefore things which will seem like coincidences are actually just everyday group dynamics."
• The Sensitivity Explanation: "We are more sensitive to certain words and ideas. We look harder for them to occur than others." [In other words, if your favorite number is 5, you are going to be more aware of it than other words, making it seem to show up more.]

I am sure there are others. How about you, how do you resolve coincidence and synchronicity? Something different from above? I am somewhere between the bottom half. I think that things involve a mixture of density waves (in the entry linked, I discuss them in academic settings), as well as a case of large-number pairs, recency theory, translation/confirmation bias, group dyndamics, and sensitivity. This makes me somewhat boring, but it comes down to two things I consider true about the universe and us in it: a) lots of stuff happens and b) our brain is made to compress lots of stuff into a couple of lines of usable data. Mix this in with "stuff happening" being pre-sorted by groups-of-belonging and you increase the likelihood of smoething showing up that just doesn't seem explanable. Then again, you get those really weird ones, like these mentioned by today's articles on Cracked.com (something of a coincidence that made go ahead and finish this article), and sometimes you wonder. I don't really wonder, I'm pretty set in my boring ways with the whole "really large numbers" theory, but there you go. Makes some of us wonder.

* I know at least one of you went "carefully".

TAGS: Matters Probabalistic

BY WEEK: 2010, Week 41
BY MONTH: October 2010