Synchronicity and the Nature of Reality

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Excerpts from Synchronicity and the Nature of Reality

Jung once counseled a woman he described as having a disposition of total rationality. She couldn't free herself from this attitude to explore things from a different perspective. One day, she was in his office describing a dream about an Egyptian scarab beetle. To the Egyptians, the scarab was a symbol of rebirth or new awakening. Jung heard a tapping on the window behind him and turned around to see that just such a beetle was bumping against his window! Catching the beetle, he presented it to his patient. The occurrence of such an irrational event so stunned her way of thinking that it provided the breakthrough for his treatment of her problems!

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Pauli saw parallels between modern physics and Jung's theories of consciousness. He even postulated a revision in the theory of evolution.
It was assumed in the past that mutations within species occurred at random, and natural selection, then, favored the more desirable traits. More recently, however, scientists have pointed out that the selection of mutations by chance alone would have taken much longer than the age of the earth would allow for. Pauli suggested Jung's concept of synchronicity might account for how stressed organisms could produce changes in physical reality more quickly than by chance.
As time passed, it became well known among the physicists of Europe, that the presence of Pauli often produced catastrophic failure in experimental apparatus. This became so pronounced that it was humorously dubbed: "The Pauli Effect"! It seemed uncannily symbolic of Pauli's break with traditional thinking, considering his belief in the limitations of the experimental method.

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An experiment performed in May 1997 by a team from the University of Geneva showed that a measurement carried out on one photon particle had an instantaneous and identical effect on another photon, although separated by nearly seven miles! Physicist Nicolas Gisin, the team leader, said it was the equivalent of having two persons seven miles apart flipping coins. Each time one person would grab the coin out of the air his colleague's coin would simultaneously stop spinning and always land identically! This was repeated thousands of times in a row! Any connecting force would need to travel faster than light, something thought to be an impossibility. It implies an inter-connectedness or "whole" aspect inherent within matter itself.
The experiment was actually proposed in 1935 as the "EPR" paradox, by Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen. It was presented as a thought experiment whose paradoxical result was originally intended to show that the "uncertainty principle" was a measurement problem not a problem of what would actually occur. In 1964, physicist John Bell turned the idea into a testable hypothesis by developing an equation called "Bell's inequality." The EPR paradox was first verified experimentally in 1981, although the photon separation in that experiment was only a few meters. Appropriately, it's called "Quantum Synchronicity."

Complete article

That last bit is what Einstein termed 'ghostly action at a distance', I believe. Fascinating stuff. If you've ever experienced synchronicity, you know things are not what they seem. Personally, I've experienced a good deal of strange phenomena, and wonder how many others here have. I feel there's more to this Spectrum than is generally thought.

I think it's also called "entanglement" and you have to first "correlate" the two photons together AND THEN separate them, in one lab of course, the equivalence of several miles. No one really understands entanglement, but they understand enough to know that it's not 'action at a distance' as Einstein and others had hoped.

Very interesting concept.

Can anybody link me to some mainstream articles about that University of Geneva experiment?

This isn't exactly mainstream, even though it is wikipedia. But this is what the experiments were about.


Bell's inequality experiments

The original article doesn't say how recently or which scientists. I read a lot about biology, and within the last 20 years the only people I have seen or heard making that claim were creationists. Not a single biologist I know of has ever expressed that opinion either in writing or when talking to me, unless you count the biochemist and creationist Michael Behe, whose basic argument I will happily take apart for anyone who wants me to.



Pauli died nearly 50 years ago, so he couldn't know recent work which makes an appeal to synchronicity unnecessary. There are at least two mechanisms which very quickly can make genetic variation available to selection. One is the existence of mutational hotspots, regions of the genome where the mutation rate increases very quickly under stress. Their function seems to be to generate variation when the current phenotype doesn't work.

Then there are chaperone proteins which help to fold proteins into their correct shape even if there is some genetic variation. The chaperones hide the genetic variation from selection. Under stress, the chaperones do that job less well, the variation comes under selection, and the frequency of genes can then shift quite quickly. In this context, you could say the chaperones let you save up genetic variation which is only released to selection when the current phenotype doesn't work. You don't have to wait for mutations to happen only once things go bad. That speeds up the evolutionary response to environmental change.

I don't know enough about quantum physics to make an informed comment on entanglement. I can only say that in none of the discussions of entanglement I have come across in the last 5 years has anyone ever mentioned Jung's concept of synchronicity. So I intend to remain sceptical for now.

Gromit

I go along with Gromit.

As I mention, from time to time, when I cease to notice coincidences (not synchronicities) happening, I'll get worried. It will mean someone is preventing them from happening.

Shouldn't this thread be in the "Politics, Philosophy, and Religion" forum?

It would not have headlined on the home page if I had put it there.

I'm curious. How does that work? (I just looked at the home page - for the first time in months.)

You'll have to ask Alex.

:) Easier said than done. I still have a PM to Alex in my outbox, dated Fri May 11, 2007. (Re the FAQ)

Me too.
July 25 x3
July 5
March 19
February 7
January 28
January 25 x5
Oh, and there's one for hale_bop back in November

I think I agree with you Gromit. Jung's ideas and others like them have been thoroughly discredited by the 'cognitive revolution' which started when psychologist decided to actually go about looking at how the brain functions, not how we think it does.
Entanglement is a bona fide deal, just no two theorists agree much on what is actually occurring, though they all tend to agree on that there's no action at a distance happening. Currently popular, a force we don't understand is happening; we don't understand our own experiments; and, Bell's Inequalities make action at a distance uneccesary, so if we're seeing it, we're seeing wrong. Period. All 3 of those views have many proponents.
Geneticists think that many mutations are neutral, but no one ever claimed that the rate of mutation observed, acting in accord with other factors, isn't "fast" enough over deep evolutionary time, to account for the variation now seen. Behe and them use non-sensical "statistical" computations, really just mathematical hocus-pocus is the opinion of the applied math. community, to show that there must be more than mutations at work. Wow, there's nothing new there. Everything I've read about biology, and I'm now a theoretical bio. grad student (OK, well in 2 weeks, but I've got 5 papers under re-write to be re-submitted), indicates that even without many random mutations, Selection can cause rapid genomic change.

I'd like to read some of the work that specifically discredits Jung's ideas. It's always good to get a differing point of view. Could you give me a reference?

A great place to start is called "Innate Mind: Structure and Content." It's a collection of articles. Another good one, for some reason I'm thinking it's by Wittgenstein, no scientists of course but a very bright man, called "The Myth of the Unconscious." I'll let you know some more later. Gotta get back to studying here.