From: Glenn Bradford (gmbbradford@netscape.net)
Date: Sun Dec 08 2002 - 17:37:01 GMT
Erin, Steve, David and all,
ERIN wrote:
>Enough stalling.
I think there are a few features of human nature that collude
to explain the attraction to ideas like synchronicity. One is that
people are great at finding patterns in things, and less good at
reasoning about them. This means that we create not only meaningful
patterns about the world but also bogus ones, and our reasoning
skills aren't always up to the task of telling one from the other.
A second is selective reasoning. For all the events that hit us on a
daily basis, we tend to push the commonplace ones to the background
and focus on the unusual ones. It's this feature that makes us good
at pattern making, but also gives us tunnel vision, or in more
technical jargon, confirmation bias.
Third, we tend to be overly surprised by coincidences. We tend to
exaggerate the improbability of coincidences because our brains
are not good at mathematical reasoning. When asked how many
people must be picked at random to have a 50% chance of at least
one common birthday, many people will guess it's 1/2 of 365. It's much
lower. And since we ignore the commonplace events, we underestimate the
total number of events that are candidates for a coincidence, so that
when coincidences do happen, we're more surprised than we should be.
When a colleague tells us something, we don't slap ourselves and say
"Gee, there was nothing coincidental about that!"
The web page for "23 Skidoo" is a good example of confirmation bias.
There is no doubt that the person who wrote this up is creative and
driven, and there is no doubt that 23 comes up a lot in our world.
In fact the number of people you need to pick at random for a 50%
chance of at least one common birthday is 23. But I could pick my
favourite number, 19, devote my life to it, and come up with an equally
impressive list. It seems to be lost on the numerably challenged that
you can do this with any number. Such an exercise would generate a lot
more interest from people if all the facts listed about 23 were also
related to each other in other ways, so that they all contributed to one
compelling, coherent web of a story. As it is they do not have this
"compelling interconnectedness", and deserve ridicule for falsely
suggesting otherwise.
The Jung stories about the scarab and the the trip to Spain rely on
memories of dreams, and these are notoriously unreliable. How
someone could say that details of his trip "exactly corresponded to
the dream images" when the dream took place probably weeks before his
trip, is doubtful considering people don't remember dreams accurately
a couple hours from waking. Also there are small embellishments to the
story-telling, such as Jung catching the beetle as it flies in and the
suggestion that a beetle wouldn't fly into a darkened room to begin
with, that increase the air of surprise and predestination undeservedly.
The story about the 100 monkeys sounds like spam to me. How did the
investigators know that all monkeys on all other islands started
washing sweet potatoes once the nth monkey learned to do it? And why
is 1950's research only coming to light now? Who were the investigators?
Why is this "book" not copywrited? The link to the whole book is broken.
"... They are finding that the isolation and separation of objects from each
other is more apparent than real; at deeper levels, everything -atoms, cells,
molecules, plants, animals, people - participates in a sensitive, flowing web
of information. Physicists have shown, for example, that if two photons are
separated, no matter by how far, a change in one creates a simultaneous change
in the other." From: A Wink From the Cosmos by Meg Lundstrom
Capra, Chopra, and a host of other mystically bent people have said
something close to this, but none have said it quite so poorly as Ms.
Lundstrom. Physicists have indeed shown what she says, but they've also
shown that it's not possible for the two photons to exchange any
information. So if it's true that all the things she lists in her previous
sentence "participate in a sensitive, flowing web of information", it's
not because of what physicists have shown about separated photons.
Glenn
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