WillSpirit!

It seems my synchronicity post piqued interest among readers. The possibility that what we experience as serendipity reflects profound and essentially mystical interconnections between events is one of the pillars of my spirituality, so I am happy to take a cue from the comments and pursue the subject further. Obviously, I can’t answer the metaphysical question that matters most: Is synchronicity anything more than standard coincidence?

What I can do, however, is elaborate why I believe quantum principles might permit events to interweave on a hidden level. I’ve only read a little of the New Age literature, much of which talks about quantum mechanics in similar terms. Unfortunately, many of these authors are so vague in their physics and so sweeping in their conclusions that I can hardly stand to parse their arguments. I read a book by Deepak Chopra that frankly appalled me, he took such liberties with quantum mechanics. I was especially disappointed because some of Chopra’s writings are truly valuable, but ever since I’ve had a hard time reading him without wondering if I can trust his facts and conclusions.

I believe in truth. The universe is running on certain principles, and science is able to elucidate many of them. There may be shadowy influences that can’t easily be pinned down with empirical techniques, but even if that is so I expect them to remain consistent with sound scientific principles. Either synchronicity sometimes reflects deeper interconnection between events, or it does not. At this point I don’t believe science can say, though many with materialist viewpoints, nearly as loose as Chopra with known facts, argue that we live in a universe filled with nothing more mysterious than randomly interacting packets of matter and energy. However, there are no scientific findings to prove this fatalistic conclusion. I’m not saying it’s impossible, only that it’s unproven.

From the standpoint of providing possible mechanisms for meaningful synchronicity, two especially relevant principles from quantum mechanics are entanglement and the central role of the observer. I don’t claim sophisticated understanding of these topics. I studied them briefly in graduate school, and have read a little since. I am well aware that the phenomena in question can be variously interpreted, and that only some of the possible explanations for them would support synchronicity in the universe. The point is that there are some quite respectable interpretations of quantum phenomena that do provide potential mechanisms for intimate interrelationships between events.

Crudely put, entanglement refers to the fact that any two particles that were created simultaneously from the same source must maintain certain symmetries even when they are separated by great distances. Consider two entities which are known to require a balance of rotational spin such that if one is pointed in one direction, the other must point 180 degrees away (i.e., in the opposite direction). Depending on how you subject one particle to electrical forces upon measuring its spin, you can find it pointing in any direction you choose. Entanglement means that the other particle, no matter how distant, will when measured be found to point in the exact opposite direction, as required by symmetry. This doesn’t sound too momentous, but it is a profound fact. The measurement can be taken arbitrarily, setting the first particle pointing in any direction, and the second will always be found to obey the symmetry. This is true even if the entities are so far apart that light couldn’t span the distance in the time required. According to relativity theory, no information-containing signal can travel faster than light. Yet the two particles remain behaviorally yoked.

There is an inherent and unbreakable connectedness that persists without any known physical signal transmitting the orientation of the first particle to the second. The particles remain mysteriously interwoven.

Take this experimentally verified finding, and combine it with the fact that all matter in the universe once occupied an infinitesimally small volume at the start of the Big Bang. We are led to the conclusion that all matter must in fact be entangled by virtue of its origin from the same source. A deep and mysterious, but factually verified connectedness underpins the entire physical universe.

No doubt my description of these quantum principles is overly simplistic, but the underlying argument is not mine. It was outlined, among other places, in a very solidly written book called The Conscious Universe: Parts and Wholes in Physical Reality by physicists Menos Kafatos and Robert Nadeau.

Entanglement is exactly the sort of behavior we would expect to find in a universe where events sometimes correlate in ways defying superficial explanation. It may seem hard to believe that matter that has been separated for billions of years might remain responsive to such effects, or that this could explain an eerily appropriate quotation read on a significant morning like I described in my last past. Certainly, it boggles the mind to see how such complicated interactions could work. But the door to such a reality remains ajar. There is a possibility, even if remote, that events appear interlinked partly because matter is entangled.

It is true that meaningful synchronicity would defy hard-boiled sensibility and much daily experience, but the same contradiction of expectation is in the nature of modern physical theory. Quantum theory (and relativity too, for that matter) tells us nothing if not that the universe is stranger than it seems. It opens the door to all kinds of possibilities that are disquieting to fervent materialists. Again, I must emphasize that nothing as elaborate as synchronicity has ever been scientifically verified. Simply demonstrating entanglement between two subatomic particles was an epic experimental achievement, so we may be waiting a long time for science to show us verifiably synchronous macroscopic events. My point is only that there is room to believe in a deeper interconnection, a more mysterious reality, than the one proposed by the cynical view that we are living in a heartless and purely random universe of independent particles.

Observer dependence is equally strange and suggestive. Complexity and the behavior of self-organizing systems are other scientific principles that can be seen as possibly facilitating synchronicity. However, this post is too long already, so I’ll put off further discussion until another time.