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Synchronicity is a term that was used by the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung to describe the alignment of universal forces with one's own life experience. Jung believed that some (if not all) coincidences were not mere chance, but instead a literal "co-inciding", or alignment of forces in the universe to create an event or circumstance. The process of becoming intuitively aware and acting in harmony with these forces is what Jung labelled " individuation." Jung said that an individuated person would actually shape events around them through the communication of their consciousness with the collective unconscious.

Jung spoke of synchronicity as being an "acausal connecting principle", in other words a pattern of connection that works outside of or in addition to causality.

Jung's most well-known example of synchronicity involves plum pudding. He tells a tale of a certain Monsieur Deschamps who is treated to some plum pudding by his neighbor Monsieur de Fortgibu. Ten years later, he encounters plum pudding on the menu of a Paris restaurant, and wants to order some, but the waiter tells him the last dish has already been served to another customer, who turns out to be M. de Fortgibu. Many years later, M. Deschamps is at a gathering, and is once again offered plum pudding. He recalls the earlier incident and tells his friends that only M. de Fortgibu is missing to make the setting complete, and in the same instant the now senile M. de Fortgibu enters the room by mistake.

1 Criticism

The theory of synchronicity is not testable according to any scientific method and is not widely regarded as scientific at all, but rather as pseudoscientificA pseudoscience is any body of knowledge purported to be scientific or supported by science but which fails to comply with the scientific method. Pseudoscience is a kind of counterfeit or masquerade of science which makes use of some of the superficial tr. Probability theoryProbability theory Discrete mathematics Mathematical analysis Probability theory is the mathematical study of probability. Mathematicians think of probabilities as numbers in the interval from 0 to 1 assigned to "events" whose occurrence or failure to occ can attempt to explain events such as the plum pudding incident in our normal world, without any interference by any universal alignment forces. However, the correct variables required for actually computing the probability cannot be found. This is not to say that synchronicity is not a good model for describing a certain kind of human experience - but it is a reason for refusal of the idea that synchronicity should be considered a "hard fact", i.e. an actually existing principle of our universe.

Some may say that synchronicity is a strand of magical thinkingMagical thinking is a term used by historians of religion to describe one kind of non-scientific causal reasoning. Scholars like James George Frazer and Bronislaw K. Malinowski emphasized that magic is more like science than religion, and that societies w.

However, since the scientific method is applicable only to those phenomena that are (1) reproducible, (2) independent of observer, and (3) quantifiable, the argument that synchronicity is not scientifically 'provable' is largely a red herringA red herring also known as ignoratio elenchi ( Latin: ignorance of refutation or irrelevant thesis is a logical fallacy where an irrelevant topic is introduced to divert the attention away from the topic that's being discussed, or an argument where the p, as it may point to a property of natureFor alternative meanings, see nature (disambiguation). universe, the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. Image Credit: NASA, ESA, S. Beckwith (STScI) and the HUDF team. hydrogen atom electron orbitals shown as cross-sections with color-coded probability density flea not reducible to the classical scientific method.

Some think that a scientific basis for the phenomenon of synchronicity may be related to the principle of correlationIn probability theory and statistics, the correlation also called correlation coefficient between two random variables is found by dividing their covariance by the product of their standard deviations. It is defined only if these standard deviations are f, since a more precise scientific term for Jung's expression 'acausal connecting principle' is 'correlation'.

It is a well-known scientific principle that ' correlationIn probability theory and statistics, the correlation also called correlation coefficient between two random variables is found by dividing their covariance by the product of their standard deviations. It is defined only if these standard deviations are f does not imply causation'. Yet, correlation may in fact be a physical property shared by events without there being a classical cause-effect relationship. This is most clearly seen in the correlation effects of quantum physics, where widely separated events can be correlated without being linked by a direct physical cause-effect.