8
There exists a type of phenomenon, even more mysterious than telepathy or precognition, which has puzzled man since the dawn of mythology: the seemingly accidental meeting of two unrelated causal chains in a coincidental event which appears both highly improbable and highly significant. Any theory which attempts to take such phenomena seriously must necessarily involve an even more radical break with our traditional categories of reasoning than the pronunciamentos of Einstein, Heisenberg or Feynman. It is certainly no coincidence that it was Wolfgang Pauli, discoverer of the Exclusion Principle, who collaborated with C. G. Jung on the latter's famous essay: 'Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle'. Jung coined the term 'synchronicity' for 'the simultaneous occurrence of two or more meaningfully but not causally connected events' [23]; and he claimed that the acausal factor behind such events is to be regarded as 'equal in rank to causality as a principle of explanation'. [24]
'I have often come up against the phenomena in question,' Jung wrote, '. . . and could convince myself how much these inner experiences meant to my patients. In most cases they were things which people do not talk about for fear of exposing themselves to thoughtless ridicule. I was amazed to see how many people have had experiences of this kind and how carefully the secret was guarded.' [25]
Apparently the Swiss are more secretive by nature than the British, for, ever since I wrote The Roots of Coincidence I have been inundated with coincidences in readers' letters. The most revealing among these were written by people who started by solemnly affirming that to attribute significance to coincidences is sheer nonsense, yet could not resist the urge to tell their own favourite believe-it-or-not story. Could it be that inside every hard-nosed sceptic there is a soft-nosed mystic crying to be let out?
Readers who share an interest in the collecting of coincidences will find a fair selection in The Challenge of Chance. While working through this vast amount of material, some distinct patterns began to emerge, although they often overlapped, while in other cases it seemed doubtful whether some event with astronomical odds against chance should be interpreted as a manifestation of 'classical' ESP or in terms of acausal 'synchronicity'. Thus in the library type of cases, you search for an elusive reference, open a fat volume at random, and there it is. In the deus ex machina type of episodes there is a seemingly providential interposition just in the nick of time to solve a problem, or avert a disaster, or fulfil a premonition. It is interesting to note that this intercession occurs indiscriminately on tragic or trivial occasions. A sub-category in this group is the seemingly miraculous recovery of lost property, usually of sentimental, not monetary value. In the poltergeist cases emotional tensions (usually in unstable adolescents) coincide with gross physical happenings -- again regardless whether the effect is dramatic or grotesque. Among the most frequent 'convergent' or 'confluential' events (as one may call this type of coincidence) are unlikely encounters, although many of these might seem to be induced by ESP. Worst of all from a rational point of view are the clusterings of names, numbers, addresses and dates. Lastly, there is a wealth of well-authenticated cases of premonitions or warnings of impending disasters -- but here it is particularly difficult to make a distinction between ESP and synchronicity, or 'confluential events'.
Even more frustrating is the attempt to draw a line between significant coincidences, which seem to be contrived by some unknown agency beyond physical causation, and trivial coincidences due to chance alone. For any such attempt must invoke the laws of probability, which are full of pitfalls -- as we shall presently see.
9
Jung's essay on 'synchronicity', published in 1952*, was partly based on Paul Kammerer's book Das Gesetz der Serie**, published in 1919. Kammerer was the brilliant Viennese experimental biologist of Lamarckian persuasion who was accused of faking his results, and committed suicide in 1926, at the age of forty-five.*** He was throughout his life fascinated by coincidences and, from the age of twenty to forty, kept a log-book of them -- as Jung also did.
* Published in one volume together with Pauli's essay Der Einfluss Archetypischer Vorstellungen auf die Bildung Naturwissenschaftlicher Theorien bei Kepler' (Jung-Pauli, Naturerklärung und Psyche, 1952). ** There is no English translation. *** See The Case of the Midwife Toad.
Kammerer defined his concept of 'seriality' as the concurrence in space or recurrence in time of meaningfully but not causally connected events. His book contains exactly one hundred selected samples, classified with the meticulousness of a biologist devoted to taxonomy. He regarded single coincidences as merely the tips of the iceberg which happened to catch the eye among the ubiquitous manifestations of 'seriality'. He thus reversed the sceptic's argument that we tend to see significances everywhere because out of the multitude of random events we only remember those few which are significant. At the end of the first, classificatory part of his book, Kammerer concluded:
So far we have been concerned with the factual manifestations of recurrent series, without attempting an explanation. We have found that the recurrence of identical or similar data in contiguous areas of space or time is a simple empirical fact which has to be accepted and which cannot be explained by coincidence -- or rather, which makes coincidence rule to such an extent that the concept of coincidence itself is negated. [26]
In the second, theoretical part of his book, Kammerer develops his theory that coexistent with physical causality there is an acausal principle active in the universe which tends towards unity-in-variety. In some respects it is comparable to that other mysterious force, universal gravity; but whereas gravity acts indiscriminately on all matter, this hypothetical factor acts selectively to make like and like converge in space and time -- it correlates by affinity or some sort of selective resonance, like tuning forks vibrating on the same wave-length. By what means this acausal agency interferes with the causal order of things we cannot know since it operates outside the known laws of physics. In space it produces confluential events related by affinities of form and function; in time, similarly related series:
We thus arrive at the image of a world-mosaic or cosmic kaleidoscope, which, in spite of constant shufflings and rearrangements, also takes care of bringing like and like together . . . [27]
One need not be a professional gambler to feel attracted by Kammerer's Law of Seriality. Most languages have a phrase or proverb for it -- 'Das Gesetz der Serie' is a cliché in German, the equivalent of 'It never rains but it pours'. Some people seem to become coincidence-prone as others become accident-prone. At the end of his book Kammerer expresses his belief that seriality is
... ubiquitous and continuous in life, nature and cosmos. It is the umbilical cord that connects thought, feeling, science and art with the womb of the universe that gave birth to them. [28]
The main difference between Kammerer's seriality and Jung's synchronicity is that the former emphasizes serial happenings in time (though he also includes simultaneous coincidental events), whereas the latter's emphasis is on simultaneous events (but also includes precognitive dreams which may have occurred several days before the event). Kanimerer based his theory partly on the analogy with gravity, partly on the periodic cycles in biology and cosmology. Some of his excursions into physics contain naive errors; other passages show tantalizing flashes of intuition -- so much so that Einstein commented favourably on the book; he called it 'original and by no means absurd'. [29] Jung, on the other hand, used Pauli quasi as a tutor in theoretical physics, but in the end made little use of it; his explanations of the 'acausal factor' were utterly obscure, invoking the collective unconscious and its archetypes. This was sadly disappointing but it helped to turn synchronicity into a cult-word.
The part played by Pauli in these developments is of special interest. Pauli shared Kammerer's and Jung's belief in non-causal, non-physical factors operating in the universe -- was not his own Exclusion Principle 'acting like a force though it is not a force'? He probably had a more profound insight than most of his colleagues in
to the limitations of science. Besides, like Jung, he was haunted all his life by poltergeist-like phenomena. [30] When he was fifty and a Nobel laureate, he wrote a penetrating study on science and mysticism, as exemplified in the works of Johannes Kepler. [31] It was first printed as a monograph by the Jung Institute in Zurich. Towards the end of the essay Pauli wrote (his italics):
Today we have the natural sciences, but no longer a philosophy of science. Since the discovery of the elementary quantum, physics was obliged to renounce its proud claim to be able to understand in principle the whole of the world. But this predicament may contain the seed of further developments which will correct the previous one-sided orientation and will move towards a unitary world-view in which science is only a part in the whole. [32]
This kind of philosophical doubt about 'the meaning behind it all' is not unusual among scientists when they reach the age of fifty: one might almost call it the rule. But Pauli went further than trying to devise physicalistic theories to explain ESP or synchronicity. He felt that this was hopeless, and that it was more honest to accept that these phenomena were the visible traces of invisible acausal factors -- like the bubble-chamber tracks of invisible particles. Pauli's revolutionary proposal was to extend the concept of non-causal events from the micro-world (where its legitimacy was recognized) to the macro-world (where it was not). He may have hoped that by joining forces with Jung, they might be able to work out an acausal theory which made some sense of paranormal phenomena. The result, as already said, was disappointing. The upshot of Jung's essay on synchronicity was a curious diagram on which, Jung says, he and Pauli 'finally agreed'. This is the diagram: [33]
Indestructible energy ^ Constant connection | Inconstant connection through effect | through contingency, (causality) <--------> similarity, or 'meaning' | (synchronicity) | v Space-Time continuum
Jung offers no explanation as to how the scheme is meant to work, and his comments on it are so obscure that I must leave it to the interested reader to look them up in the original. One cannot help being reminded of the biblical mountain whose labours gave birth to a mouse. But it was quite a symbolic mouse nevertheless. It was for the first time that the hypothesis of acausal factors at large in the universe was given the joint stamp of respectability by a psychologist and a physicist, both of international renown.
10
The belief in connections beyond physical causality did not, of course, originate with Kammerer or Jung. Its immediate ancestry can be traced back to Schopenhauer, who had considerable influence over both Freud and Jung. Schopenhauer taught that physical causality was only one of the principles ruling the world; the other was a metaphysical entity, a kind of universal consciousness, compared to which individual consciousness is 'as a dream compared to reality'. He wrote:
Coincidence is the simultaneous occurrence of causally unconnected events . . . If we visualize each causal chain progressing in time as a meridian on the globe, then we may represent simultaneous events by the parallel circles of latitude. . . . All the events in a man's life could accordingly stand in two fundamentally different connections. [34]
This idea of unity-in-diversity can be followed all the way back to the Pythagorean 'Harmony of the Spheres',* and the Hippocratics' 'sympathy of all things': 'there is one common flow, one common breathing, all things are in sympathy'. The doctrine that everything in the universe hangs together, partly by mechanical causes, but mainly by hidden affinities (which also account for apparent coincidences), provided not only the foundation for sympathetic magic, astrology and alchemy; it also runs as a leit-motif through the teachings of Taoism and Buddhism, the neo-Platonists, and the philosophers of the early Renaissance. It was neatly summed up by (among many others) Pico della Mirandola, A.D. 1550:
Firstly there is the unity in things whereby each thing is at one with itself, consists of itself, and coheres with itself. Secondly, there is the unity whereby one creature is united with the others and all parts of the world constitute one world. [35] * For the influence of this conception on Elizabethan philosophy and poetry, see The Sleepwalkers, Part One, Ch. II.
In the terms of the present theory, the first half of the above quotation reflects the working of the self-assertive, the second of the self-transcending or integrative tendency, on a universal level.
We may also compare Pico's statement with the consensus of contemporary physicists: 'It is impossible to separate any part of the universe from the rest.' The essence of both quotations, separated by four centuries, is a holistic view of the universe which transcends physical causality.
11
One of the best-kept secrets of the universe relates to the question how the sub-atomic micro-world of particles, which are at the same time wavicles, which defy strict determinism and mechanical causation -- how this ambiguous 'undulating carpet of foam' gives rise to the solid, orderly macro-world of everyday experience ruled by strict causality.
The modern scientist's answer is that this seemingly miraculous feat of creating order out of disorder must be seen in the light of the theory of probability or the 'law of large numbers'. But this law, like Pauli's Exclusion Principle, is not explainable by physical forces; it hangs, so to speak, in the air. A few examples will illustrate the point.
The first two are classic cases quoted from Warren Weaver's book on the theory of probability. [36] The statistics of the New York Department of Health show that in 1955 the average number of dogs biting people reported per day was 753; in 1956, 73.6; in 1957, 73.5; in 1958, 74.5; in 1959, 72.4. A similar statistical reliability was shown by cavalry horses administering fatal kicks to soldiers in the German army of the last century; they were apparently guided by the so-called Poisson equation of probability theory. Murderers in England and Wales, however different in character and motives, displayed the same respect for the laws of statistics: since the end of the First World War, the average number of murders over successive decades was: 1920-9, 3.84 per million of the population; 1930-9, 3.27 per million; 1940-9, 3.92 per million; 1950-9, 3.3 per million; 1960-9, approx 3.5 per million.
These bizarre examples illustrate the paradoxical nature of probability, which has puzzled philosophers ever since Pascal initiated that branch of mathematics -- and which von Neumann, the greatest mathematician of our century, called 'black magic'. The paradox consists of the fact that the theory of probability is able to predict with uncanny precision the overall result of a large number of individual events, each of which is in itself unpredictable. In other words, we are faced with a large number of uncertainties producing a certainty, a large number of random events creating a lawful total outcome.
But paradoxical or not, the law of large numbers works; the mystery is why and how it works. It has become an indispensable tool of physics and genetics, of economic planners, insurance companies, gambling casinos, and opinion polls -- so much so that we take the black magic for granted. Thus when faced with such bizarre examples of probability-lore as the dogs or cavalry horses, we may be mildly puzzled or amused, without realizing the universal nature of the paradox and its relevance to the problem of chance and design, freedom and necessity.
In nuclear physics we find striking analogies to the unpredictable dogs producing predictable statistics. A classic example is radioactive decay, where totally unpredictable radioactive atoms produce exactly predictable overall results. The point in time at which a radioactive atom will suddenly disintegrate is totally unpredictable both theoretically and experimentally. It is not influenced by chemical or physical factors like temperature or pressure. In other words, it does not depend on the atom's past history, nor on its present environment; in the words of Professor Bohm, 'it does not have any causes', it is 'completely arbitrary in the sense that it has no relationship whatsoever to anything else that exists in the world or that ever has existed' (italics in the original). [37] And yet it does have a hidden, apparently acausal relationship with the rest of the world, because the so-called 'half-life' period of any grain of a ra
dioactive substance (i.e. the time required for half of the atoms in the grain to disintegrate) is rigorously fixed and predictable. The half-life of uranium is four and a half million years. The half-life of radium A is 3.825 days. The half-life of thorium C is 60.5 minutes. And so on, down to millionths of seconds.
However, there may be fluctuations in the rate of decay of the grain; at some stages on the road to the half-life date there might be an excess or a deficit of decayed atoms which threatens to upset the time-table. But these deviations from the statistical mean will soon be corrected, and the half-life date rigorously kept. By what agency is this controlling and correcting influence exerted, since the decay of individual atoms is unaffected by what goes on in the rest of the grain? How do the dogs of New York know when to stop biting and when to make up the daily quota? How are the murderers in England and Wales made to stop at four victims per million? By what mysterious power is the roulette ball induced, after a glut of 'reds', to restore the balance in the long run? By 'the laws of probability' (or 'the law of large numbers') we are told. But that law has no physical powers to enforce its dictates. It is impotent -- and yet virtually omnipotent.