Synchronicity...

Let’s start with a small back-story, shall we?

So I introduced my family to the magic that is 8tracks a few weeks ago. Since we have a desktop with a reasonably good sound system, we often spend our dinner-times jamming out to some vintage 80’s MTV stuff. I had recently stumbled upon the penultimate playlist- 1,992 80’s pop and rock songs, everything from The Cure to Bruce Springsteen- so, naturally, I had to turn it on during dinner last night.

 The problem was, of course, that with a virtually unlimited stream of music from an era when every song was electrifying, enjoyable, or bearable, and nothing less, it became rather hard to turn it off, and considering the fact that I had a Biology practical exam the next morning and I hadn’t once practiced a single floral diagram, turning it off was something of a necessity. Billy Jean was blasting out across the living room when I made a deal with 8tracks. I would turn it off, I said if any song except Take On Me, by Aha, probably the most 80’s 80’s song out there, and one of my all time favourites (along with Africa by Toto, and… oh forget it, they’re all genius), came up next. It was a pretty good deal for the machine- one song in nearly two-thousand. The odds don’t get much better than that.

I nearly died (of a combination of hypertension and eyes nearly popping out of my head) when the last notes of Michael Jackson’s classic faded out, and were replaced by the rhythmic bass and snare of, you guessed it, Take On Me, by Aha. One in two-thousand. Mind you, there’s absolutely no way to predict what the next song on a fresh 8tracks mix is going to be, nor is there any way to control the order, as a listener.

You might call this some form of telepathy. Here is an interesting blogpost I found, explaining the rational side to the ‘supernatural’ phenomenon of telepathy. While the logic seems sound (I haven’t even graduated high-school yet, how would I know), and I have had several similar experiences over the course of my lifetime, it doesn’t explain what happened last night at all. Oh, I forgot to mention this, but this is probably the third or fourth time something like this has happened to me, but this time, it was different in the fact that in all my previous experiences, the second parties have been live radio stations, controlled by human radio jockeys. If what the above article details is to be taken as true, and humans collectively are, in fact, a literal bio-electrical network, all my previous experiences can be explained, since both the radio jockey and I are both definitely and completely human.

8tracks, on the other hand is not. 8tracks consists on an endless number of ‘mixes’ created by its users, containing a number of songs chosen by them in an order they decide, but when you play a mix, it’s the website that plays song after song in the predetermined order, no humans involved at that precise moment when I so desperately willed Take On Me to play next.   

In 1996, when the supercomputer Deep Blue defeated then-reigning world chess champion, the Russian Garry Kasparov, he remarked that the computer displayed “human” intelligence.

Was I, in fact, communicating telepathically with the website? This article talks about a ‘telepathic’ computer that can ‘read your mind’. Hardly related to what happened with me, since my computer and the website haven’t been designed to perform that function, and have no way to do so, but it does open up the realm of possibility whereby telepathic communication between man and machine becomes possible. Have we so integrated machines and computers into our society that we have been able to unconsciously allow them to become part of the aforementioned hypothetical bio-electrical network of the human brain?

Well, yes and no. Yes because the possibility of artificial intelligence has long been looming, and no because even the possibility of human-to-human telepathy is merely hypothetical. What may seem uncanny, as was Deep Blue’s victory over Kasparov, is in fact simple action out of analysis of observed facts and logical reasoning.

But, since my mind that desired a song that I wanted to hear had not converted that desire into an input into the website via typing in the search bar, that thought remained only in my nervous system. There was absolutely no way to put that desire down as a hard fact for the website to analyse and act accordingly in response, since, as I mentioned before, my personal computer was not built with the capability to read my neurosignals. Yet, the next song that came on was the song I wanted to hear.

What I have overlooked in my logical flow up to this point, is the fact that, as its website claims, 8tracks is “internet radio created by people, not algorithms”. So there was in fact a human involved in my experience. It wasn’t just a computer. So the possibility of telepathy is still open for discussion, right? The fact that the mix I refer to was created on the 28th of January, this year, ten days before I even became aware of its existence, poses a metaphorical dead-end to that line of argument. 

Maybe not. I found this on an internet forum:

“I cannot prove that any of you exist outside my mind. Just like none of you can prove that I exist outside of your minds.
Consciousness can be boiled down to this: "me" and "you." In this case, "you" represents anything that cannot be identified as "me." Without "me" there is no "you," as there would be no "me" to even conceive of "you."
So you are all constructs of my mind. This is not where it ends though, as I'm just a construct of the mind of whatever consciousness happens to observe me.
Now, we've established that "you" only are because of "me," and essentially, this reality I exist in exists within me. This is always the part where I get stuck though.
My vocabulary is not advanced enough to speak the language of creation.
Okay, look at it this way: True it's all very circular and dependent on the concept of infinity, but if I exist in a reality that exists within me, and you all exist in a reality that exists within me, and the same can be said of each and every consciousness in existence, then what are we conscious of?

We're only conscious of ourselves, nothing else. We are one consciousness, continually segmenting and experiencing itself.” 

The most obvious bells ringing on your head will probably point straight to Jung’s concept of synchronicity. Jung coined the word to describe what he called "temporally coincident occurrences of acausal events."

Here’s an example from Jung:

“A young woman I was treating had, at a critical moment, a dream in which she was given a golden scarab. While she was telling me this dream, I sat with my back to the closed window. Suddenly I heard a noise behind me, like a gentle tapping. I turned round and saw a flying insect knocking against the window-pane from the outside. I opened the window and caught the creature in the air as it flew in. It was the nearest analogy to a golden scarab one finds in our latitudes, a scarabaeid beetle, the common rose-chafer (Cetonia aurata), which, contrary to its usual habits had evidently felt the urge to get into a dark room at this particular moment.”

All too familiar? In formulating his synchronicity principle, Jung was influenced to a profound degree by the "new" physics of the twentieth century, which had begun to explore the possible role of consciousness in the physical world. "Physics," wrote Jung in 1946, "has demonstrated...that in the realm of atomic magnitudes objective reality presupposes an observer, and that only on this condition is a satisfactory scheme of explanation possible." "This means," he added, "that a subjective element attaches to the physicist's world picture, and secondly that a connection necessarily exists between the psyche to be explained and the objective space-time continuum." These discoveries not only helped loosen physics from the iron grip of its materialistic world-view, but confirmed what Jung recognized intuitively: that matter and consciousness -- far from operating independently of each other -- are, in fact, interconnected in an essential way, functioning as complementary aspects of a unified reality.

The belief, in a nutshell- suggested by quantum theory and by reports of synchronous events- is that matter and consciousness interpenetrate.

I should probably stop now. This looks to be very open-ended, and is full of arguments based solely on hypothetical evidence. More importantly, I have satisfied myself to dwell on Jung’s concept, which makes the most sense by far. For now. Maybe in a few months, I might have something more to say, who knows? Maybe we’ll have another post like this, which, I must admit, is so very fun to write, by this August. If not, well, I just hope that my radio-telepathy/uncannily regular mingling in synchronicity/whatever continues. If you haven’t experienced it before, it feels utterly brilliant. Take my word for it.

If anyone has any (interesting) opinions on the whole thing, do feel free to comment. Ah, who am I kidding, nobody reads this blog.


As a reward for anyone who read this post right through to the end, here's Synchronicity II by The Police.

I shall get back to my ice cream sundae now.