We Are All Connected
Synchronicity (meaningful coincidence) as a way
of ordering the actual world out of the possible world.
Simply, this will be the most difficult piece
that I have ever written. Nothing I can say here amounts to scientific proof,
with the good reason that I will not be attempting to describe events within the
causal order. The causal order is described both by the physical sciences, some
aspects of the social sciences, and our everyday experience of the world as it
can be related to this body of knowledge. Rather, I will be trying to describe,
for lack of better words, the order of meaning or the order of possibility.
Within that order, I will also be attempting to describe the workings of an
acausal connecting principle of order which Karl Jung referred to as
synchronicity.
Wikipedia actually has a good entry on this
concept, if it is new to
you.
For most of my life I have been doing two things, A) using my mind to make sense of the causal order, and B) reflecting on the operation of my mind in accomplishing this process. Part of process B involves noting patterns in the things I say and do. The other part of process B involves making conscious meaningful connections in my mind, both verbal and non-verbal, and also finding ways to express these understandings in language. I have also come to the conclusion that I am an emergentist rather than a reductionist in the following sense: I hold that the order of meaning or possibility is not reducible to the order of causality or actuality. I even consider the possibility that the latter order may be reducible to the former order.
I regard meaning as most probably a quantum phenomenon, resulting from the synchronization of zillions of electrons (probably) into a single quantum entity. These possibilities have been widely described elsewhere, and some of them are summarized in this Consciousness Studies: Table of Theories from WikiBooks. For the purposes of this article, the salient feature of this fact is that with meaning and possibility, we are dealing with an entity that can best be understood not as a thing in the causal order, but rather as an aspect of our experience manifesting a range of properties more characteristic of the subatomic world. In an earlier article, I listed some of these characteristics and discussed their bearing on developing educational research: Coherence: particles share properties with whole (laser, superconductivity), Complementarity: matter has aspects of both waves and particles, Nonlocality: distant particles connected in space/time at superluminal speeds, Superposition: object occupies two states at the same time, Quantum leap: particle transmutes instantaneously from one state to another, particle emits another particle when changing state, and particles go into hyperspace between states, Quantum uncertainty: identical states can produce different outcomes, Unmeasurability: cannot measure a particle without altering its properties.
In short, I am proposing this: just as our perception is the matrix through which we establish events in the causal order, so is our understanding, "seen" as a quantum phenomenon with properties similar to the above characteristics, the matrix through which we establish the order of meaning or possibility. Specifically, understanding how we "move around in mental space" requires a non-causal model.
The Fundamental Unit of Meaning
I realize that I am on shaky, barely explored ground here, but I propose that the fundamental unit of meaning is the dialog, and I shall talk about this for a while. A dialog is a conversation between two conscious beings that are identifiable members of the same language community. The purpose of a dialog is to establish "meaning coordinates" in a shared mental space. Thus, just as one can give the position of an object in 4-D space, one can position the meaning of a dialog relative to a shared linguistic matrix. The concepts used in the dialog, as expressed in language, are the coordinates, and the shared language is the coordinate system. Beyond this, the analogy breaks down: I am definitely not proposing that there is any way, clear or otherwise of connecting the 10 or 11 dimensions of physical space with the potentially infinite number of linguistic coordinates that are established in the definitions of its concepts.
There are many analogies between the mental reality located through a language and the subatomic reality described through quantum theory, and I would like to elaborate on some of these. Coherence: the idiosyncratic meaning in a dialog shares properties with the linguistic expressions of the language in which it is expressed. Complementarity: speaking or writing the dialog is like the "particle" phase, the thought before being expressed is like the "wave" phase, Non-locality: all the competent language speakers who hear a world-wide TV broadcast instantly share the meaning in them. Quantum leap: memory, insight seems to occur instantaneously. Quantum uncertainty: the same statements have different interpretations, Superposition: the possibilities of mental space simultaneously co-exist, Unmeasurability: you must find out a person's meaning through dialog, but dialog changes the meaning.
In other places, I have talked about consciousness as being a point-of-view. A dialog is two points-of-view searching for a common ground of meaning. We have an interesting way of expressing dialogic accord in English: the two parties are of one mind. In actual practice, such accord rarely happens. No two people will ever be "of one mind" about everything. But people do share meaning; to deny this is a radical epistemological position. True dialog, in the Platonic sense, is the abandonment of one's self to the course of the discussion at hand. Two or more points of view become operands in a relationship. Something like this happens in the scientific and other communities. Members of these communities join themselves to the discussion and expand and shape it in various tenable directions. What clings to the strands of argument is the shared meaning of the community. I am suggesting it is profitable to view this meaning as a mind-wave.
What is particularly important for us in this piece is that dialog allows us to explore other aspects of reality than have been agreed upon by contemporary science. I have been claiming that the Universe is dual, in that there is the matrix of 4-dimensional events and the regularities we have discovered about this matrix, and there is also the reality of mind, in that mind contains meaning, and meaning is like a quantum phenomenon of sorts, in the world but not of it. If I can find a willing and skilled dialogic partner that also experiences this duality, it may be possible to use the "other" in the dialog as a kind of semi-objective check against my claims. At least the two of us can attempt to build an agreed-upon picture of this reality. And, there is also the possibility that, within certain limits, we actually are BUILDING this reality in establishing dialogic accord. It seems, indeed, that this is what is being attempted by the various schools of thought in consciousness studies.
I do want to make one last point before turning to the next section. If meaning is akin to a wave phenomenon, this could mean that, just as subatomic particles are spread throughout the universe—they are everywhere and nowhere until someone makes an observation—so meaning is everywhere and nowhere until a dialog is engaged in. At such time, we are then connected in a dialog, and it is the meaning we share that connects us.
Synchronicity as a Dialog with the Universe as Other
I propose that religion has arisen precisely because human beings find it in their experience that from time to time the Universe taken as a whole seems to engage them in a dialog. That old dialectical materialist, Karl Marx, thought that religion was the opiate of the masses. Clearly, religion is a form which we give to our conversations with God or No God. Insofar as such conversations trigger altered states of consciousness, these conversations may very well seem drug-induced. They need not blind us, however, to the evils of capitalism, or of any other form of government for that matter.
On the other hand, one of the problems of using religion to structure our conversations with the divine is that each religion is already the crystalized, polished, reshaped and often dust-covered conversation that some particular guru or wise seer had in a different age from ours. In my opinion there is no way out of thinking our own way through the looking glass to the great beyond. We can never JUST let someone do our thinking for us, even if we do lean on the thinking of others from time to time, or even most of the time.
But let's take a closer look at these close encounters of the divine kind, armed with this new perspective that the Universe is both mind and matter. This means, contrary to the logical empiricists and other truncated schools off philosophy, that there are actually two channels to which we can tune our cognitive apparatus. There is the channel of sense perception and its monumental scientific elaboration, and there is the channel of dialog. Just as every object we see is a chance to explore the causally connected Universe, so is every person that we speak to an opportunity to explore the domain of freely arranged circumstances. We build friendships, joint lives. Who causes the canasta games that Gil, Jerry, Stephen and I engage in? Well, we do, because we like to play. Before human beings walked on this planet, no one ever observed a canasta game. Canasta games are not part of the causal order. They are in the causal order, but not of it.
But we have to get on with struggling with synchronicity and how to characterize it. Jung defined it as acausal but meaningful connectedness. You think of an old friend, and she calls. Or, just to be fresh, this happened to me today. I had decided to buy the book The Other Mother by Harlyn Aizley as a present for Stephen's daughter's same-sex partner, Dawn, as a birthday present. I first decided to do this based on a radio program I heard. Then I discovered that Aizley was appearing at the Left Bank Books booth at Pride Festivities today. Stephen and I went there, and I bought the signed book. I even took a picture of Harlyn, her partner and Stephen with the book. Come to find out they live in Roslindale, MA, a few blocks from Stephanie and Dawn.
This story falls short of some of the truly amazing stories I could tell you, but the point is this is the KIND OF THING that we are talking about in synchronicity. There is no apparent causal explanation of these events, we only notice them because of the meaning we give to the events. However, it seems to me that the Universe thought that this idea I had for Dawn's birthday present was a really good idea, and so it decided just to give me a little nudge in that direction. There's really no arguing about this. I just happen to be building a picture of the Universe where there's room for these kind of connections. You may find things to be similar and then we could dialog on how it is that you reconstruct the synchronicity that you find in your experience. Or, perhaps you're like my friend, Barbara, or LaPlace, who said he had no need of such hypotheses, and then our dialog will doubtless end when we tire of convincing each other that the other is wrong.
But here, with Jim Andris, you're dealing with a guy who long ago just decided that I definitely could pose questions and make statements to the Universe, that there was a point to such activity. When I'm in a tight spot physically, emotionally, mentally or spiritually, I often just "open up" to the whole Universe, viewed as a presence in my awareness. I just as often get help, resolution, answers, and they often look like some kind of synchronistic (acausal but meaningful) connection. But if I were a fundamentalist Christian or Muslim, even though I had a very different, and actually quite a bit more specific image of "the Universe" in the form of God, I would do just this sort of thing: pray, ruminate, and wait for clues what to do. It really is the SAME PROCESS. It's just that the fundamentalists want to insist that there's only one correct description of the Universe. Only trouble being is that description is, as I said earlier, the crystalized, polished, reshaped and often dust-covered conversation that some particular guru or wise seer had in a different age from ours.
But, dear people, these fundamentalists and other literalists of various types AREN'T WRONG. They are engaging in the dialog with God. That's what we're supposed to be here doing. And, incidentally, the MEANING in God boils down to Christ Consciousness, and ultimately it is Christ Consciousness that we need to let flow through our eyes and our deeds.
I think I get it. Wanna talk?
For most of my life I have been doing two things, A) using my mind to make sense of the causal order, and B) reflecting on the operation of my mind in accomplishing this process. Part of process B involves noting patterns in the things I say and do. The other part of process B involves making conscious meaningful connections in my mind, both verbal and non-verbal, and also finding ways to express these understandings in language. I have also come to the conclusion that I am an emergentist rather than a reductionist in the following sense: I hold that the order of meaning or possibility is not reducible to the order of causality or actuality. I even consider the possibility that the latter order may be reducible to the former order.
I regard meaning as most probably a quantum phenomenon, resulting from the synchronization of zillions of electrons (probably) into a single quantum entity. These possibilities have been widely described elsewhere, and some of them are summarized in this Consciousness Studies: Table of Theories from WikiBooks. For the purposes of this article, the salient feature of this fact is that with meaning and possibility, we are dealing with an entity that can best be understood not as a thing in the causal order, but rather as an aspect of our experience manifesting a range of properties more characteristic of the subatomic world. In an earlier article, I listed some of these characteristics and discussed their bearing on developing educational research: Coherence: particles share properties with whole (laser, superconductivity), Complementarity: matter has aspects of both waves and particles, Nonlocality: distant particles connected in space/time at superluminal speeds, Superposition: object occupies two states at the same time, Quantum leap: particle transmutes instantaneously from one state to another, particle emits another particle when changing state, and particles go into hyperspace between states, Quantum uncertainty: identical states can produce different outcomes, Unmeasurability: cannot measure a particle without altering its properties.
In short, I am proposing this: just as our perception is the matrix through which we establish events in the causal order, so is our understanding, "seen" as a quantum phenomenon with properties similar to the above characteristics, the matrix through which we establish the order of meaning or possibility. Specifically, understanding how we "move around in mental space" requires a non-causal model.
The Fundamental Unit of Meaning
I realize that I am on shaky, barely explored ground here, but I propose that the fundamental unit of meaning is the dialog, and I shall talk about this for a while. A dialog is a conversation between two conscious beings that are identifiable members of the same language community. The purpose of a dialog is to establish "meaning coordinates" in a shared mental space. Thus, just as one can give the position of an object in 4-D space, one can position the meaning of a dialog relative to a shared linguistic matrix. The concepts used in the dialog, as expressed in language, are the coordinates, and the shared language is the coordinate system. Beyond this, the analogy breaks down: I am definitely not proposing that there is any way, clear or otherwise of connecting the 10 or 11 dimensions of physical space with the potentially infinite number of linguistic coordinates that are established in the definitions of its concepts.
There are many analogies between the mental reality located through a language and the subatomic reality described through quantum theory, and I would like to elaborate on some of these. Coherence: the idiosyncratic meaning in a dialog shares properties with the linguistic expressions of the language in which it is expressed. Complementarity: speaking or writing the dialog is like the "particle" phase, the thought before being expressed is like the "wave" phase, Non-locality: all the competent language speakers who hear a world-wide TV broadcast instantly share the meaning in them. Quantum leap: memory, insight seems to occur instantaneously. Quantum uncertainty: the same statements have different interpretations, Superposition: the possibilities of mental space simultaneously co-exist, Unmeasurability: you must find out a person's meaning through dialog, but dialog changes the meaning.
In other places, I have talked about consciousness as being a point-of-view. A dialog is two points-of-view searching for a common ground of meaning. We have an interesting way of expressing dialogic accord in English: the two parties are of one mind. In actual practice, such accord rarely happens. No two people will ever be "of one mind" about everything. But people do share meaning; to deny this is a radical epistemological position. True dialog, in the Platonic sense, is the abandonment of one's self to the course of the discussion at hand. Two or more points of view become operands in a relationship. Something like this happens in the scientific and other communities. Members of these communities join themselves to the discussion and expand and shape it in various tenable directions. What clings to the strands of argument is the shared meaning of the community. I am suggesting it is profitable to view this meaning as a mind-wave.
What is particularly important for us in this piece is that dialog allows us to explore other aspects of reality than have been agreed upon by contemporary science. I have been claiming that the Universe is dual, in that there is the matrix of 4-dimensional events and the regularities we have discovered about this matrix, and there is also the reality of mind, in that mind contains meaning, and meaning is like a quantum phenomenon of sorts, in the world but not of it. If I can find a willing and skilled dialogic partner that also experiences this duality, it may be possible to use the "other" in the dialog as a kind of semi-objective check against my claims. At least the two of us can attempt to build an agreed-upon picture of this reality. And, there is also the possibility that, within certain limits, we actually are BUILDING this reality in establishing dialogic accord. It seems, indeed, that this is what is being attempted by the various schools of thought in consciousness studies.
I do want to make one last point before turning to the next section. If meaning is akin to a wave phenomenon, this could mean that, just as subatomic particles are spread throughout the universe—they are everywhere and nowhere until someone makes an observation—so meaning is everywhere and nowhere until a dialog is engaged in. At such time, we are then connected in a dialog, and it is the meaning we share that connects us.
Synchronicity as a Dialog with the Universe as Other
I propose that religion has arisen precisely because human beings find it in their experience that from time to time the Universe taken as a whole seems to engage them in a dialog. That old dialectical materialist, Karl Marx, thought that religion was the opiate of the masses. Clearly, religion is a form which we give to our conversations with God or No God. Insofar as such conversations trigger altered states of consciousness, these conversations may very well seem drug-induced. They need not blind us, however, to the evils of capitalism, or of any other form of government for that matter.
On the other hand, one of the problems of using religion to structure our conversations with the divine is that each religion is already the crystalized, polished, reshaped and often dust-covered conversation that some particular guru or wise seer had in a different age from ours. In my opinion there is no way out of thinking our own way through the looking glass to the great beyond. We can never JUST let someone do our thinking for us, even if we do lean on the thinking of others from time to time, or even most of the time.
But let's take a closer look at these close encounters of the divine kind, armed with this new perspective that the Universe is both mind and matter. This means, contrary to the logical empiricists and other truncated schools off philosophy, that there are actually two channels to which we can tune our cognitive apparatus. There is the channel of sense perception and its monumental scientific elaboration, and there is the channel of dialog. Just as every object we see is a chance to explore the causally connected Universe, so is every person that we speak to an opportunity to explore the domain of freely arranged circumstances. We build friendships, joint lives. Who causes the canasta games that Gil, Jerry, Stephen and I engage in? Well, we do, because we like to play. Before human beings walked on this planet, no one ever observed a canasta game. Canasta games are not part of the causal order. They are in the causal order, but not of it.
But we have to get on with struggling with synchronicity and how to characterize it. Jung defined it as acausal but meaningful connectedness. You think of an old friend, and she calls. Or, just to be fresh, this happened to me today. I had decided to buy the book The Other Mother by Harlyn Aizley as a present for Stephen's daughter's same-sex partner, Dawn, as a birthday present. I first decided to do this based on a radio program I heard. Then I discovered that Aizley was appearing at the Left Bank Books booth at Pride Festivities today. Stephen and I went there, and I bought the signed book. I even took a picture of Harlyn, her partner and Stephen with the book. Come to find out they live in Roslindale, MA, a few blocks from Stephanie and Dawn.
This story falls short of some of the truly amazing stories I could tell you, but the point is this is the KIND OF THING that we are talking about in synchronicity. There is no apparent causal explanation of these events, we only notice them because of the meaning we give to the events. However, it seems to me that the Universe thought that this idea I had for Dawn's birthday present was a really good idea, and so it decided just to give me a little nudge in that direction. There's really no arguing about this. I just happen to be building a picture of the Universe where there's room for these kind of connections. You may find things to be similar and then we could dialog on how it is that you reconstruct the synchronicity that you find in your experience. Or, perhaps you're like my friend, Barbara, or LaPlace, who said he had no need of such hypotheses, and then our dialog will doubtless end when we tire of convincing each other that the other is wrong.
But here, with Jim Andris, you're dealing with a guy who long ago just decided that I definitely could pose questions and make statements to the Universe, that there was a point to such activity. When I'm in a tight spot physically, emotionally, mentally or spiritually, I often just "open up" to the whole Universe, viewed as a presence in my awareness. I just as often get help, resolution, answers, and they often look like some kind of synchronistic (acausal but meaningful) connection. But if I were a fundamentalist Christian or Muslim, even though I had a very different, and actually quite a bit more specific image of "the Universe" in the form of God, I would do just this sort of thing: pray, ruminate, and wait for clues what to do. It really is the SAME PROCESS. It's just that the fundamentalists want to insist that there's only one correct description of the Universe. Only trouble being is that description is, as I said earlier, the crystalized, polished, reshaped and often dust-covered conversation that some particular guru or wise seer had in a different age from ours.
But, dear people, these fundamentalists and other literalists of various types AREN'T WRONG. They are engaging in the dialog with God. That's what we're supposed to be here doing. And, incidentally, the MEANING in God boils down to Christ Consciousness, and ultimately it is Christ Consciousness that we need to let flow through our eyes and our deeds.
I think I get it. Wanna talk?
Posted: Thu - June 22, 2006 at 12:29 PM
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