Theos-Talk Archives (December 2002 Message tt00384)

I stumbled across some data the other day which I
completely forgot I collected. The data was of men who
walked past a certain point and I recorded whether or
not they had facial hair. The purpose of collecting
this data was to find patterns similar to Kammerer's
seriality. And indeed it showed some of the patterns
Kammerer observed way back early last century. Nothing
too exciting there. But as I was looking at the data
something was twigging in my brain as if I had seen
this pattern somewhere before. And then it occurred to
me: this pattern is a fractal and probably follows a
power law distribution. Sure enough it did with a
regression coefficient of 0.94 (in other words, very
very accurate). 

But how would one explain this pattern in a coherent
observational and functional model? Well to do this is
actually quite simple and you can try this at home.
All you need is a pack of playing cards and a computer
package such as excel that can analyse the data. Here
is what you do: 
1) get your cards and shuffle them so that they are
completely random;
2) place your cards face down and then pick one from
the top;
3) in excel record in column whether it was a heart,
diamond, spade or club;
4) continue this process until you have gone through
all 52 cards;
5) now go down your columns and record the number of
successive cards that match (so if I had the series
club, spade, spade, spade, heart, heart, club,
diamond; the number of successive cards that match
would be 1,3,2,1,1);
6) sort these numbers from largest to smallest and
graph so that the number of matches appears on the
y-axis and the rank of that match appears on the
x-axis. This should follow a power law distribution.

So, what is the theory behind this simple model? The
theory is that events that occur in our lives are
self-organised at what has become known as the edge of
chaos. Events occur randomly but in such a way as to
form a coherent whole. The above is suppose to
generate a very simple model that explains how events
occur to an oberserver or experiencer. In this model
the "universe" consists of 4 "species" (club, spade,
heart, diamond) and 13 "individuals" per species. The
universe lasts for 52 time-steps where one time step
is the equivalent to the turning of one card from the
deck. Kammerer's seriality manifests itself through a
succession of similar cards (eg spade, spade, spade).
So this model is effectively saying that an observer
lives in a closed universe where all the events that
are to occur in that observer's life are already known
and have been organised so that they appear at random,
though organised, throughout the observer's life
(hints of the 11-dimension universe here??).

So with my seriality data this theory works well and I
am in the process of collecting more data that will
either confirm this statement further or refute it.
But what has this to do with synchronicity? Jung
grouped all synchronicity phenomena into 3 groups and
the theory I am developing here works well with his
first group: "The coincidence of a psychic state in
the observer with a simultaneous, objective, external
event that corresponds to the psychic state or
content" (Jung, 1960; p. 526). Here synchronicity is
exactly the same as seriality except a psychic state
is invoked for synchronicity. Nevertheless that
psychic state is in effect an event in an observer's
life. With events occuring in an observer's life
according to a power law an observer will have many
moments when a psychic state does not coincide with an
external event. But sooner or later, due to the very
nature of complex systems, a psychic state will
coincide with an external event. That some
"scientific" or "universal" principle is behind
synchronicity should not come as a surprise as Carl
Jung said himself:

"The term [synchronicity] explains nothing, it simply
formulates the occurrence of meaningful coincidences
which, in themselves, are chance happenings, but are
so improbable that we must assume them to be based on
some kind of principle, or some property of the
empirical world." (Jung, 1960; p. 531).

Although complexity science may offer an explanation
for how synchronicity occurs it may not be able to
offer an explanation for the profound effect a
synchronicity event can have on an observer. 

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