Science Ideated: The Fall of Matter and the Contours of the Next Mainstream Scientific Worldview by Bernardo Kastrup

Author:Bernardo Kastrup [Kastrup, Bernardo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philosophy, Metaphysics, Science, General, Philosophy & Social Aspects
ISBN: 9781789046694
Google: d181EAAAQBAJ
Amazon: 1789046688
Publisher: Iff Books
Published: 2021-08-26T18:30:00+00:00

18.4 Synchronicity

Quantum predictions hold only at a statistical level. The outcomes of individual measurements—that is, individual observations or events—are non-deterministic and un predictable; quantum theory enforces no result whatsoever at the level of individual outcomes. It is this causally undetermined space that psychiatrist Carl Jung and Nobel Prize Laureate physicist Wolfgang Pauli populated with their notion of ‘synchronicity’: acausal meaningful coincidences that allegedly reflect archetypal patterns underlying not only the human psyche, but also the physical world at large (Jung 1985, Jung & Pauli 2001).

The authors denied “that something about quantum theory may explain the serial coincidences that underlie synchronicity” (Mroczkowski & Malozemoff 2019: 150). I believe this statement, although strictly correct, is misleading in that it sets up a straw man. The point is not that QM positively accounts for synchronicities; the point is that—unlike classical physics—QM leaves space open for synchronicities. Indeed, according to QM, at its most fundamental level nature is not deterministic; there is no causal necessity enforced at that level. This notion opens the door to other organizing principles still unknown to science.

The authors repeatedly argued that wave function collapse leads to random outcomes. But this seeming randomness does not contradict synchronicity either: regarding the latter, theorists have postulated that nature organizes itself according to global archetypal patterns. These global patterns can be easily reconciled with apparent randomness at the level of individual quantum events, as I illustrate with the following analogy.

Imagine that you toss three dice on a table, multiple times. After each toss, each individual die randomly displays a number from one to six. In other words, the behavior of each die is seemingly random from toss to toss. But now imagine that, when you look at all three dice together, after every toss, you realize that either they all display an even number or they all display an odd number. This is a simple hypothetical example of a global, synchronistic pattern that can occur even when the individual constituent events, considered in isolation, meet randomness criteria. In Jung’s words, “Within the randomness of the throwing of the dice, a ‘psychic’ orderedness comes into being” (Jung & Pauli 2001: 62).

If this kind of global synchronistic alignment were to happen across quantum events in the world at large, physicists would be none the wiser. For although they can test individual events in the laboratory and verify that, when taken in isolation, the events are random, they wouldn’t be able to discern a global pattern within the complexity of the physical world at large; there are just too many ‘dice’ to look at under controlled laboratory conditions.

The relationship between synchronicity and QM, which I articulated above, has been vouchsafed by Pauli himself. After reviewing the final draft of Jung’s synchronicity essay, Pauli wrote: “I … found that … from the standpoint of modern physics, [the essay] is now unassailable” (Jung & Pauli 2001: 71).

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