Showing posts with label causality. Show all posts
Showing posts with label causality. Show all posts

Friday, 7 June 2013

Synchronicity

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This article is about the philosophical concept. For other uses, see Synchronicity (disambiguation).
Synchronicity is the experience of two or more events that are apparently causally unrelated or unlikely to occur together by chance, yet are experienced as occurring together in a meaningful manner. The concept of synchronicity was first described in this terminology by Carl Gustav Jung, a Swiss psychologist, in the 1920s.[1]
The concept does not question, or compete with, the notion of causality. Instead, it maintains that just as events may be grouped by cause, they may also be grouped by meaning. A grouping of events by meaning need not have an explanation in terms of cause and effect.
In addition to Jung, Arthur Koestler wrote extensively on synchronicity in The Roots of Coincidence.[2]

Contents

Description [edit]

The idea of synchronicity is that the conceptual relationship of minds, defined as the relationship between ideas, is intricately structured in its own logical way and gives rise to relationships that are not causal in nature. These relationships can manifest themselves as simultaneous occurrences that are meaningfully related.
Diagram illustrating concept of synchronicity by CG Jung
Synchronistic events reveal an underlying pattern, a conceptual framework that encompasses, but is larger than, any of the systems that display the synchronicity. The suggestion of a larger framework is essential to satisfy the definition of synchronicity as originally developed by Carl Gustav Jung.[3]
Jung coined the word to describe what he called "temporally coincident occurrences of acausal events." Jung variously described synchronicity as an "acausal connecting principle", "meaningful coincidence" and "acausal parallelism". Jung introduced the concept as early as the 1920s, but gave a full statement of it only in 1951 in an Eranos lecture[4] and in 1952, published a paper, Synchronizität als ein Prinzip akausaler Zusammenhänge (Synchronicity — An Acausal Connecting Principle),[5] in a volume with a related study by the physicist (and Nobel laureate) Wolfgang Pauli.[6]
It was a principle that Jung felt gave conclusive evidence for his concepts of archetypes and the collective unconscious,[7] in that it was descriptive of a governing dynamic that underlies the whole of human experience and history — social, emotional, psychological, and spiritual. Concurrent events that first appear to be coincidental but later turn out to be causally related are termed incoincident.
Jung believed that many experiences that are coincidences due to chance in terms of causality suggested the manifestation of parallel events or circumstances in terms of meaning, reflecting this governing dynamic.[8]
Even at Jung's presentation of his work on synchronicity in 1951 at an Eranos lecture, his ideas on synchronicity were evolving. Following discussions with both Albert Einstein and Wolfgang Pauli, Jung believed that there were parallels between synchronicity and aspects of relativity theory and quantum mechanics.[9] Jung was transfixed by the idea that life was not a series of random events but rather an expression of a deeper order, which he and Pauli referred to as Unus mundus. This deeper order led to the insights that a person was both embedded in an orderly framework and was the focus of that orderly framework and that the realisation of this was more than just an intellectual exercise, but also having elements of a spiritual awakening. From the religious perspective, synchronicity shares similar characteristics of an "intervention of grace". Jung also believed that in a person's life, synchronicity served a role similar to that of dreams, with the purpose of shifting a person's egocentric conscious thinking to greater wholeness.
A close associate of Jung, Marie-Louise von Franz, stated towards the end of her life that the concept of synchronicity must now be worked on by a new generation of researchers.[10] For example, in the years since the publication of Jung’s work on synchronicity, some writers largely sympathetic to Jung's approach have taken issue with certain aspects of his theory, including the question of how frequently synchronicity occurs. For example, in "The Waking Dream: Unlocking the Symbolic Language of Our Lives", Ray Grasse suggests that instead of being a "rare" phenomenon, as Jung suggested, synchronicity is more likely all-pervasive, and that the occasional dramatic coincidence is only the tip of a larger iceberg of meaning that underlies our lives. Grasse places the discussion of synchronicity in the context of what he calls the "symbolist" world view, a traditional way of perceiving the universe that regards all phenomena as interwoven by linked analogies or "correspondences." Though omnipresent, these correspondences tend to become obvious to us only in the case of the most startling coincidences. The study of astrology, he argues, offers a practical method of not only becoming more conscious of these subtle connections but also of testing and even predicting their occurrence throughout our lives.[11]
One of Jung's favourite quotes on synchronicity was from Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll, in which the White Queen says to Alice: "It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards".[12][13]
'The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday--but never jam to-day.'
'It MUST come sometimes to "jam to-day,"' Alice objected.
'No, it can't,' said the Queen. 'It's jam every OTHER day: to-day isn't any OTHER day, you know.'
'I don't understand you,' said Alice. 'It's dreadfully confusing!'
'That's the effect of living backwards,' the Queen said kindly: 'it always makes one a little giddy at first--'
'Living backwards!' Alice repeated in great astonishment. 'I never heard of such a thing!'
'--but there's one great advantage in it, that one's memory works both ways.'
'I'm sure MINE only works one way,' Alice remarked. 'I can't remember things before they happen.'
'It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,' the Queen remarked.

Examples [edit]

The French writer Émile Deschamps claims in his memoirs that, in 1805, he was treated to some plum pudding by a stranger named Monsieur de Fontgibu. Ten years later, the writer encountered plum pudding on the menu of a Paris restaurant and wanted to order some, but the waiter told him that the last dish had already been served to another customer, who turned out to be de Fontgibu. Many years later, in 1832, Deschamps was at a dinner and once again ordered plum pudding. He recalled the earlier incident and told his friends that only de Fontgibu was missing to make the setting complete — and in the same instant, the now senile de Fontgibu entered the room.[14]
In his book Synchronicity (1952), Jung tells the following story as an example of a synchronistic event:
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. I must admit that nothing like it ever happened to me before or since.[15]
Jung wrote, after describing some examples, "When coincidences pile up in this way, one cannot help being impressed by them—for the greater the number of terms in such a series, or the more unusual its character, the more improbable it becomes."[16]
In the book Thirty Years That Shook Physics - The Story of Quantum Theory (1966), George Gamow writes about Wolfgang Pauli, who was apparently considered a person particularly associated to Synchronicity Events. Gamow whimsically refers to 'The "Pauli effect", a mysterious phenomenon which is not, and probably never will, be understood on a purely materialistic basis. The following anecdote is told:
It is well known that theoretical physicists cannot handle experimental equipment; it breaks whenever they touch it. Pauli was such a good theoretical physicist that something usually broke in the lab whenever he merely stepped across the threshold. A mysterious event that did not seem at first to be connected with Pauli's presence once occurred in Professor J. Franck's laboratory in Göttingen. Early one afternoon, without apparent cause, a complicated apparatus for the study of atomic phenomena collapsed. Franck wrote humorously about this to Pauli at his Zürich address and, after some delay, received an answer in an envelope with a Danish stamp. Pauli wrote that he had gone to visit Bohr and at the time of the mishap in Franck's laboratory his train was stopped for a few minutes at the Göttingen railroad station. You may believe this anecdote or not, but there are many other observations concerning the reality of the Pauli Effect! [17]

Criticisms [edit]

Among some psychologists, Jung's works, such as The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche, were received as problematic. Fritz Levi, in his 1952 review in Neue Schweizer Rundschau (New Swiss Observations), critiqued Jung's theory of synchronicity as vague in determinability of synchronistic events, saying that Jung never specifically explained his rejection of "magic causality" to which such an acausal principle as synchronicity would be related. He also questioned the theory's usefulness.[18]
In psychology and cognitive science, confirmation bias is a tendency to search for or interpret new information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions and avoids information and interpretations that contradict prior beliefs. It is a type of cognitive bias and represents an error of inductive inference, or as a form of selection bias toward confirmation of the hypothesis under study or disconfirmation of an alternative hypothesis. Confirmation bias is of interest in the teaching of critical thinking, as the skill is misused if rigorous critical scrutiny is applied only to evidence challenging a preconceived idea but not to evidence supporting it.[19]
Likewise, in psychology and sociology the term apophenia is used for the mistaken detection of a pattern or meaning, in what is actually random or meaningless data.[20] Primates use pattern detection in their form of intelligence,[21] and this can lead to identification of patterns in error. A famous example of this is how human face recognition is so robust, and based on such a basic archetype (essentially two dots and a line contained in a circle), that human beings are prone to identify faces in random data all through their environment, like the "man in the moon", or in wood grain, an example of the visual form of apophenia known as pareidolia.[22] Apophenia can lead to the "recognition" of "patterns" that are simply detection of truly random coincidences.
Wolfgang Pauli, a scientist who in his professional life was severely critical of confirmation bias, made some effort to investigate the phenomenon, coauthoring a paper with Jung on the subject. Some of the evidence that Pauli cited was that ideas that occurred in his dreams would have synchronous analogs in later correspondence with distant collaborators.[23]
It has been asserted that Jung's analytical psychological theory of synchronicity is equal to intellectual intuition.[24]

See also [edit]

References [edit]

  1. ^ Tarnas, Richard (2006). Cosmos and Psyche. New York: Penguin Group. p. 50. ISBN 0-670-03292-1. 
  2. ^ Koestler, Arthur (1973). The Roots of Coincidence. Vintage. ISBN 0-394-71934-4.
  3. ^ Jung, Carl (1960). The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche (Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 8). Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. pp. 417–519. ISBN 0-691-09774-7. 
  4. ^ Casement, Ann, "Who Owns Jung?", Karnac Books, 2007. ISBN 1-85575-403-7. Cf. page 25.
  5. ^ Jung, Carl G. (1993) [1952]. Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle. Bollingen, Switzerland: Bollingen Foundation. ISBN 978-0-691-01794-5. 
  6. ^ Roderick Main (2000). "Religion, Science, and Synchronicity". Harvest: Journal for Jungian Studies. 
  7. ^ Jung defined the collective unconscious as akin to instincts in Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious.
  8. ^ In Synchronicity in the final two pages of the Conclusion, Jung stated that not all coincidences are meaningful and further explained the creative causes of this phenomenon.
  9. ^ Igor V. Limar (2011). "Carl G. Jung’s Synchronicity and Quantum Entanglement: Schrödinger’s Cat ‘Wanders’ Between Chromosomes". NeuroQuantology 09 (2): 313. Archived from the original on 2011-06-30. 
  10. ^ Tarnas, Richard, "Cosmos and Psyche", 2006, Penguin Group, New York, Pgs 50-60
  11. ^ Grasse,Ray,"The Waking Dream: Unlocking the Symbolic Language of Our Lives", 1996,Quest Books, pages=249-255
  12. ^ lecture notes, Jung Foundation, New York City, 1980s.
  13. ^ Through the Looking-Glass, by Lewis Carroll, Ch. 5, Wool and Water.
  14. ^ Emile Deschamps, Oeuvres completes : Tomes I — VI, Reimpr. de l'ed. de Paris 1872 - '74
  15. ^ The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, paragraph 843, Princeton University Press Edition.
  16. ^ C. G. Jung Jung on Synchronicity and the Paranormal, p. 91
  17. ^ Thirty Years That Shook Physics - The Story of Quantum Theory, George Gamow, p. 64, Doubleday & Co. Inc. New York, 1966
  18. ^ Bishop, Paul (2000). Synchronicity and Intellectual Intuition in Kant, Swedenborg, and Jung. The Edwin Mellen Press. pp. 59–62. ISBN 0-7734-7593-1. 
  19. ^ Tim van Gelder, "Heads I win, tails you lose": A Foray Into the Psychology of Philosophy
  20. ^ Brugger, Peter. "From Haunted Brain to Haunted Science: A Cognitive Neuroscience View of Paranormal and Pseudoscientific Thought", Hauntings and Poltergeists: Multidisciplinary Perspectives, edited by J. Houran and R. Lange (North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc. Publishers, 2001).
  21. ^ Pattern recognition of behavioral events in the nonhuman primate
  22. ^ Svoboda, Elizabeth (13 February 2007). "Facial Recognition - Brain - Faces, Faces Everywhere". New York Times. Retrieved July, 2010. 
  23. ^ RealityShifters | Synchronicity
  24. ^ Bishop, pp 17-20.

Further reading [edit]

External links [edit]

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Monday, 10 December 2012

Superstitions



Clay hamsa on a wall, believed to protect the inhabitants of the house from harm
Superstition is a belief in supernatural causality: that one event leads to the cause of another without any physical process linking the two events, such as astrology, omens, witchcraft, etc., that contradicts natural science.[1]
Opposition to superstition was a central concern of the intellectuals during the 18th centuryAge of Enlightenment. The philosophes at that time ridiculed any belief in miracles,revelation, magic, or the supernatural, as "superstition," and typically included as well much of Christian doctrine.[2]
The word is often used pejoratively to refer to religious practices (e.g., Voodoo) other than the one prevailing in a given society (e.g., Christianity in western culture), although the prevailing religion may contain just as many supernatural beliefs.[1] It is also commonly applied to beliefs and practices surrounding luck, prophecy and spiritual beings, particularly the belief that future events can be foretold by specific unrelated prior events.[3]

Contents

[edit]Etymology

Look up superstition in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
The word superstition is first used in English in the 15th century, modelled after an earlier French superstition. The earliest known use as an English noun occurs in Friar Daw's Reply (ca. 1420), where the foure general synnes are emumerated as Cediciouns, supersticions, þe glotouns, & þe proude. The French word, together with its Romance cognates (Italian superstizione, Spanish supersticion, Portuguese superstição, Catalansuperstició) continues Latin superstitio. From its first use in the Classical Latin of Livy andOvid (1st century BC), the term is used in the pejorative sense it still holds today, of an excessive fear of the gods or unreasonable religious belief, as opposed to religio, the proper, reasonable awe of the gods.
While the formation of the Latin word is clear, from the verb super-stare, "to stand over, stand upon; survive", its original intended sense is less than clear.
It can be interpreted as "‘standing over a thing in amazement or awe",[4] but other possibilities have been suggested, e.g. the sense of excess, i.e. overscrupulousness or over-ceremoniousness in the performing of religious rites, or else the survival of old, irrational religious habits.[5][6]
Cicero derived the term from the term superstitiosi, lit. those who are "left over", i.e. "survivors", "descendants", connecting it with excessive anxiety of parents in hoping that their children would survive them to perform their necessary funerary rites.[7]
The Latin verb superstare itself is comparatively young, being "perhaps not ante-Augustan", first found in Livy, and the meaning "to survive" is even younger, found in late or ecclesiastical Latin, for the first time in Ennodius. The use of the noun by Cicero and Horace thus predates the first attestation of the verb.[citation needed]
The term superstitio, or superstitio vana "vain superstition", was applied in the 1st century to those religious cults in the Roman Empire which were officially outlawed. This concerned the religion of the druids in particular, which was described as a superstitio vana by Tacitus, andEarly Christianity, outlawed as a superstitio Iudaica in AD 80 by Domitian.

[edit]Superstition and religion

See also: Evolutionary psychology of religion and Evolutionary origin of religions
Greek and Roman polytheists, who modeled their relations with the gods on political and social terms, scorned the man who constantly trembled with fear at the thought of the gods, as a slave feared a cruel and capricious master. Such fear of the gods was what the Romans meant by "superstition" (Veyne 1987, p. 211).
In his Prelude on the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, Martin Luther (who called the papacy "that fountain and source of all superstitions") accuses the popes of superstition:
"For there was scarce another of the celebrated bishoprics that had so few learned pontiffs; only in violence, intrigue, and superstition has it hitherto surpassed the rest. For the men who occupied the Roman See a thousand years ago differ so vastly from those who have since come into power, that one is compelled to refuse the name of Roman pontiff either to the former or to the latter.[8]”
The current Catechism of the Catholic Church considers superstition to be sinful in the sense that it denotes a lack of trust in the divine providence of God and, as such, is a violation of the first of the Ten Commandments, defining superstition as "a perverse excess of religion" (para. #2110). The Catechism attempts to dispel commonly held preconceptions or misunderstandings about Catholic doctrinerelating to superstitious practices:
Superstition is a deviation of religious feeling and of the practices this feeling imposes. It can even affect the worship we offer the true God, e.g., when one attributes an importance in some way magical to certain practices otherwise lawful or necessary. To attribute the efficacy of prayers or of sacramental signs to their mere external performance, apart from the interior dispositions that they demand is to fall into superstition. Cf. Matthew 23:16–22 (para. #2111)

[edit]Superstition and folklore

Main article: Folk belief
As discussed above, the term superstition contrasts with the term religion, by definition referring to what are seen as excessive or false religious behavior as opposed to a standard of proper or accepted religious standard. In this sense, European folk belief fell under the definition of superstition inasmuch as it contrasted with Christian theology and liturgy. With the development of folklore studies in the late 18th century, use of the derogatory term superstition was sometimes replaced by the neutral term "folk belief". Both terms remain in use; thus, describing a practice such as the crossing fingers to nullify a promise as "folk belief" implies a neutral description from the perspective of ethnology or folklore studies, while calling the same thing a "superstition" implies its rejection as irrational.

[edit]Superstition and psychology

Main articles: magical thinking, placebo, and effective theory
In 1948, behavioural psychologist B.F. Skinner published an article in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, in which he described his pigeons exhibiting what appeared to be superstitious behaviour. One pigeon was making turns in its cage, another would swing its head in a pendulum motion, while others also displayed a variety of other behaviours. Because these behaviours were all done ritualistically in an attempt to receive food from a dispenser, even though the dispenser had already been programmed to release food at set time intervals regardless of the pigeons' actions, Skinner believed that the pigeons were trying to influence their feeding schedule by performing these actions. He then extended this as a proposition regarding the nature of superstitious behaviour in humans.[9]
Skinner's theory regarding superstition being the nature of the pigeons' behaviour has been challenged by other psychologists such as Staddon and Simmelhag, who theorised an alternative explanation for the pigeons' behaviour.[10]
Despite challenges to Skinner's interpretation of the root of his pigeons' superstitious behaviour, his conception of the reinforcement schedule has been used to explain superstitious behaviour in humans. Originally, in Skinner's animal research, "some pigeons responded up to 10,000 times without reinforcement when they had originally been conditioned on an intermittent reinforcementbasis."[11] Compared to the other reinforcement schedules (e.g., fixed ratio, fixed interval), these behaviours were also the most resistant to extinction.[11] This is called the partial reinforcement effect, and this has been used to explain superstitious behaviour in humans. To be more precise, this effect means that, whenever an individual performs an action expecting a reinforcement, and none seems forthcoming, it actually creates a sense of persistence within the individual.[12] This strongly parallels superstitious behaviour in humans because the individual feels that, by continuing this action, reinforcement will happen; or that reinforcement has come at certain times in the past as a result of this action, although not all the time, but this may be one of those times.
From a simpler perspective, natural selection will tend to reinforce a tendency to generate weak associations. If there is a strong survival advantage to making correct associations, then this will outweigh the negatives of making many incorrect, "superstitious" associations.[13]

[edit]See also

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:Superstition
Look up superstition in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Superstitions
Wikisource has original text related to this article:

[edit]References

  1. ^ a b Vyse, Stuart A (2000). Believing in Magic: The Psychology of Superstition. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. pp. 19–22. ISBN 978-0-1951-3634-0.
  2. ^ Wilson, Helen Judy; Reill, Peter Hanns. Encylopedia of the Enlightenment. New York: Facts on File Inc. p. 577. ISBN 0-8160-5335-9. "…equating all Christian beliefs except those accessible to unaided reason with superstition…"
  3. ^ Vyse (2000: 5; 52)
  4. ^ "orig. a standing still over or by a thing; hence, amazement, wonder, dread, esp. of the divine or supernatural." Charlton T. Lewis, Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary.
  5. ^ Oxford Latin Dictionary. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. 1982.
  6. ^ Turcan, Robert (1996). The Cults of the Roman Empire. Nevill, Antonia (trans.). Oxford, England: Blackwell. pp. 10–12. ISBN 0-631-20047-9.. Oxford English Dictionary (Second ed.). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. 1989. "The etymological meaning of L. superstitio is perhaps ‘standing over a thing in amazement or awe.’ Other interpretations of the literal meaning have been proposed, e.g., ‘excess in devotion, over-scrupulousness or over-ceremoniousness in religion’ and ‘the survival of old religious habits in the midst of a new order of things’; but such ideas are foreign to ancient Roman thought."
  7. ^ Cicero, De Natura Deorum II, 28 (32), quoted in Wagenvoort, Hendrik (1980). Pietas: selected studies in Roman religion. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill. p. 236. ISBN 978-90-04-06195-8.
  8. ^ http://www.godrules.net/library/luther/NEW1luther_b5.htm
  9. ^ Skinner, B. F. (1948). "'Superstition' in the Pigeon". Journal of Experimental Psychology 38 (2): 168–172.doi:10.1037/h0055873. PMID 18913665.
  10. ^ Staddon, J. E. & Simmelhag, V. L. (1971). "The 'supersitition' experiment: A reexamination of its implications for the principles of adaptive behaviour". Psychological Review 78 (1): 3–43.doi:10.1037/h0030305.
  11. ^ a b Schultz & Schultz (2004, 238).[full citation needed]
  12. ^ Carver & Scheier (2004, 332).[full citation needed]
  13. ^ Kevin R. Foster; Hanna Kokko (2009). "The evolution of superstitious and superstition-like behaviour". Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 276 (1654): 31–7.doi:10.1098/rspb.2008.0981. PMC 2615824.PMID 18782752.

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