Hey Charloot
For your consideration
Dr Gustav Jung, Brilliant Swiss psychologist/meta-physician on the pathology of chance and synchronicity
During his career, Jung furnished several different definitions of the term,[7] defining synchronicity as "a hypothetical factor equal in rank to causality as a principle of explanation",[8] "an acausal connecting principle", "acausal parallelism", and as the "meaningful coincidence of two or more events where something other than the probability of chance is involved".[9] Though introducing the concept as early as the 1920s, Jung gave a full statement of it only in 1951 in an Eranos lecture.[10] In 1952, Jung published a paper titled "Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle" (German: "Synchronizität als ein Prinzip akausaler Zusammenhänge")[11] in a volume which also contained a related study by the physicist and Nobel laureate Wolfgang Pauli,[12][13] a close collaborator who held a "critical, yet constructive and genuinely positive view of Jung and his ideas".
Jung's view was that, just as causal connections can provide a meaningful understanding of the psyche and reality, so too may acausal connections.[4][15] Events connected by meaning need not have an explanation in terms of causality, which does not generally contradict universal causation but in specific cases can lead to prematurely giving up causal explanation.[16] The three identifying aspects of synchronistic events are (a) meaningful coincidence, (b) acausal connection, and (c) numinosity—the last of which has drawn the most criticism upon the entire concept.[3] Jung similarly proposed three categories of synchronistic phenomena, as when there is either (1) a meaningful correspondence between a mental state and a simultaneous physical event, (2) a meaningful correspondence between a mental state and a physical event outside the individual's perception, or a meaningful correspondence between a mental state and some future event.
Jung used the concept in arguing for the existence of the paranormal,[18] as did writer Arthur Koestler in his 1972 work The Roots of Coincidence. The concept was similarly taken up by the New Age movement. However, as it is scientifically neither testable nor falsifiable, synchronicity does not fall into the realm of empirical study.[17] The main objection from a scientific standpoint is that synchronistic events are experimentally indistinguishable from ordinary coincidences. While a given observer may subjectively view a coincidence as meaningful, this does not necessitate assigning any objective meaning to the coincidence.[17] Jung however, believed that meaning could be as rigorous and objective as logical thought by looking past personal feelings and instead to psychological elements that are held in common, yet he did not conduct objective studies in this regard based on observable mental states and scientific data. Mainstream science explains synchronicities and mere coincidences alike as underestimated chance events or spurious correlations which can be described by laws of statistics (e.g. by the law of truly large numbers) and confirmation biases.[21][22][23] However, for lack of more sophisticated explanations coincidence can also be useful as kind of link to folk psychology and philosophy.Moreover, it is considered that multiple meaningful coincidences contribute to the early formation of schizophrenic delusions (See also: Apophenia). Distinguishing which of these synchronicities can be morbid, according to Jung, is a matter of interpretation–pathology, if any, lies in the reaction rather than the occurrence of synchronistic experiences.[26] The International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis states that "it is important that the individual grasp [the] compensatory meaning" of a synchronistic event, in order for it to "enhance consciousness rather than merely build up superstitiousness".[27]