“There are no coincidences” I have heard often. “There is a cause for everything.”
Not a reason, but a cause.
Things seem to happen unexpectedly - people, ideas, images, and situations do find me off-guard and I find myself unable to immediately decide if the coming together of multiple ideas or situations is random or purposeful.
I posted an essay(1) a few days ago and got a lot of email from the Philippines to Russia, all inherently saying the same thing: believing in coincidences is a mental laziness on my part when I do not push hard enough to find the cause.
Again not the reason but the cause. In other words, I should not ask Why but What.
…So, I contacted a colleague well respected within the circles of psychology. Our email “debate” was so delightful that I decided to paraphrase some of it to show the progression of the communication which extended over two days.
***
“So, I am faced again with the dilemma of questioning if coincidences exist or if they are random but expected coming-together of events for which we do not have an explanation.”
“Why do you need an explanation?”
“Because I am trained to find the cause of things through investigation of events. The cause not only helps me interpret and explain, but also anticipate.”
“Therefore, you believe that for something to happen there should always be a cause?”
“Well, yes. Obviously you know better than I do about human nature and how we react to observations and events. Tell me, what have you learned in the past 40 years about our need to identify causality?”
“Ha, you sound like a radio interviewer who is looking for a sound bite! You really want me to summarize what I learned in a sentence?”
“Ok, tell me about coincidences and theories that explain how humans have dealt with coincidences.”
“That is also a tall order. Ok, to simplify things let me say that for this topic we can classify people into two groups: the empiricists and the mystics. The first group believes that coincidences are random collisions of events and, more importantly, that they can be explained by the laws of probability. In short, at some point something is bound to happen (Taoist, eh?)
The mystics, in contrast, believe that nothing happens without a purpose. As you know, Jung started this line of thinking by proposing the concept of synchronicity and influenced two generations of psychologists.”
“Yes, I know. But that never convinced me because synchronicity is the celebration of acausality: that things happen for a purpose but we cannot find a causal link. Eventually, it seemed to me that synchronicity is just an excuse for not finding the cause! You agree?”
“Not totally. A mystic has to believe in the purposefulness of what he cannot understand; and an empirically trained mind can only accept what it can understand. Both are, by fiat, valid inclinations.”
.. And then he turned his psychologist’s demeanor to discuss my personality.
“See, your challenge is that you do not fit well in either of these pure categories. I have known you for a long time, I have read your work, and I have seen you in various settings around the world. You are a mystic by birth, and an empiricist by training. Not a comfortable identity, my friend.”
Hmm.
“Ok, so I will not be comfortable looking for a cause only, and equally uncomfortable I am accepting a purposefulness that I cannot explain. Is that the case?”
“You can be comfortable with either or both, but not all the time. That is exactly why you are at a loss regarding coincidences. For you a coincidence is a rainbow over purposefulness and causality. It appears for a short while and you wonder if what you see really exists. It is like an illusion for you, but the mystic in you loves it. At the same time the empiricist scolds you saying “How dare you forget that if there is no causal relationship then it does not exist."
I do not envy you.”
… We decided to call it a day and get back to our discussion, via email and across continents, the next day.
***
“So, you thought more about the topic?” he asked.
“Of course. I even did some homework, as an empiricist! I learned that the word coincidence is derived from the Greek word Synkirian, which translates as “what occurs simultaneously by providential arrangement of circumstances.” Is it possible that by construct, it is a mystical concept to which psychologists have tried to build an empirical framework?”
“You are not alone in such a proposal. But consider this: over the years I have, like Jung, asked my students what they think about this passage from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, when the Queen tells Alice that she is living backwards:
“Living backwards! Alice repeated in great astonishment. “I never heard of such a thing!”
“But there’s one great advantage in it” the Queen replied. “That one’s memory works both ways’”
“I am sure MINE only works one way,” Alice remarked. “I can’t remember things before they happen.”
“It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,” the Queen remarked.
See what I mean? Causality makes you live backwards – there are things that we experience before they happen.”
..That sounded like the proposed idea of retrocausality by physicists. I have indeed read and written about this topic(2).
“Have you, as a photographer, taken pictures of people in the streets and in your darkroom seen faces appear on paper, faces you thought you had photographed before?” he continued.
This made me think. Probably. But I could not see the connection to synchronicity or coincidence.
“The human mind recognizes situations via patterns that are in our unconscious. A human face is the most recognizable pattern and strangers, people you never met, will remind you of others you have, and think that you had met them before. Further, you may think that it was a coincidence that you took a picture of a stranger when you were thinking about another person who looked just like this stranger. What you did is called apophenia, or our tendency of finding patterns where they do not exist; being sloppy with large amounts of data by injecting our preconceptions. In that sense you may say that coincidence is just a wishful thinking! See, I am not a mystic…”
I knew that. Still, I wanted to learn about a solid theory or interpretation that did not depend on a Queen, Alice or apophenia!
“So, let me put on my empiricist’s hat” I said. “Can we say that coincidence is a correlation out of meaningless data? That it has no causal basis, and it is observed because probability theory tells us one of these days such a correlation will happen?”
“Now you are neither a mystic nor an empiricist—you have degenerated into a skeptic!” he wrote back. "I have a simple suggestion which is based on a statement you published years ago. You once said “Correlation is the same as superstition – just because a black cat crossed the street before you fell, does not mean that you will fall every time you see a cat. You remember writing this?”
Yes, I did.
“Then, why not consider coincidence as another variant of superstition? There is no purpose, no cause. It was bound to happen by probability alone. Your unconscious did not unite you with a higher plan or goal. Your wondering about the Why vs. the What did not make a ripple in the fabric of time or place. You just have to accept that just because you cannot find causality; it does not mean that there was an acausal relationship. You are committing an interpretation bias, which psychologists have termed Confirmation Bias. In short, you are not letting go of your preconceptions as a mystic while trying to apply critical thinking on information that does not exist!
Friend, relax and just enjoy these probability surprises when they happen!”
… I took my time to answer.
“The Spanish say that a spice is a weed to which we have given a name. Are you telling me that coincidence is a common weed and we should not try to make a delicate spice from it?”
This time he took his time to reply. He simply sent me a smiley face in the body of his email.
December 26, 2014
© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2014
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