IJesusChrist a dit:
I don't believe there is a human intervention in the universe, so I don't believe in synchronicity. I think it is a self-fulfilling prophecy...
If you don't I think you give too much credit to humans, or you are missing at how good your brain is at making connections.
But if synchronicity is a self-fulfilling prophecy, which I agree it
could be, why then are causal relationships not a self-fulfilling prophecy?
Synchronicity is an acausal relationship between events. Whereas causal relationships
become evident to us through cause and effect, relationships of the kind of synchronicity
become evident to us by them seeming meaningful, or as you put it by the brain seeing a (meaningful) connection.
So, compare the following two lines of thought:
1) Couldn't it be that a causal relationship is self-fulfilling in the sense that it only comes into existence as soon as we attribute cause and effect to those scenarios? For all we know these supposed causal relations are merely coincidental correlations (without implying causation), and cause and effect are complete illusions.
And..
2) Couldn't it be that synchronicity is self-fulfilling in the sense that it only come into existence as soon as we attribute meaning to, or when we see a connection in those scenarios. These as well could simply be coincidental correlations (without implying meaning or a connection), and synchronicity is nothing more than an illusion.
I think it becomes obvious that the only reason that we accept causal relationships as a given, and that we don't question its existence is because we have been brought up with it. In other words, the existence of causal relationships is by means of convention and/or because it is engrained in our culture.
One of the reasons in my opinion why synchronicity doesn't gain the same acknowledgement is because it is hard to make its existence scientifically plausible (not provable!), simply because the relationship cannot be easily "measured" in any way, opposed to cause and effect relationships.
However, it is not the case that relationships of the kind of synchronicity have never been attempted to be measured. Quite a number of studies have been conducted to measure synchronicity. One of the main findings is that synchronicity seems to occur more often, or rather that it becomes more evident, when the subjects are in a state of "high emotionality". This is actually pretty interesting, and seems to fit with I'm assuming most people's psychedelic experiences.
To answer the main question, wether there is synchronicity or randomness (i.e. random correlation), it seems you can ask the same question of whether there are causal relationships or simply random correlations. In my opinion everything is a random correlation (randomness), until we as humans attribute either causation or synchronicity to it. So, yes, I guess, in a way it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Yet at the same time no one would probably question the existence of causation, as it plays an important role in today's society and life in general. So,
in that sense I would actually not question the existence of synchronicity either.
In other words, to me it seems both causal relationships and synchronicity both exist
solely in the experiential reality, whereas completely meaningless correlations exist
only outside of human experience.