Synchronicity, Carl Jung, and The I Ching: Nothing but Ordinary Coincidence

[[Some background information on Synchronicity and The I Ching.]]

C. G. Jung was impressed by the ability of the I Ching (The Chinese Book of Changes) to offer clear answers to important questions. Jung had previously coined the term synchronicity, a principle which he used to explain how the I Ching works, stating that “...whatever is born or done in this moment of time has the quality of this moment of time.”[1] Synchronicity deals with meaningful coincidences that are not connected in a cause and effect relationship, but are somehow more than mere chance. In relation to the I Ching, Jung says, “…synchronicity takes the coincidence of events in space and time as meaning more than mere chance, namely, a peculiar interdependence of objective events…as well as the subjective (psychic) states of the observer or observers.”[2]

Unfortunately, the only real proof that synchronicity is behind the appearance of two coincidental events is simply that one finds the occurrence of those events significant. The problem is that in life we’re exposed to so many events that the probability is quite high that some coincidences will seem dramatic.[3]

Even Jung himself is not clear about how synchronicity works. At one point he maintains that the outer event and the mental state are simultaneous.[4] Later he maintains that a mental state coincides with a “(more or less simultaneous) external event,” or with a “future event that is distant in time.”[5] The writer Arthur Koestler, a popularizer of much of Jung’s work, found Jung confusing on the matter of synchronicity, writing “One wonders why Jung created these unnecessary complications by coining a term which implies simultaneity, and then explaining that it does not mean what it means.”[6] As is often the hallmark of many pseudoscientific claims, Jung’s synchronicity principle is a “nonrefutable or irrefutable hypothesis.”[7]

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Notes:
1. Wilhelm, Richard. (1931, 1969). The Secret of the Golden Flower: A Chinese Book of Life, p. 142.
2. Jung. C. G. (1950, 1979). “Forward to the I Ching.” The I Ching or Book of Changes. Trans. from the Chinese by Richard Wilhelm. Trans. from the German by Cary F. Baynes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, p. xxiv.
3. Dean, Geoffrey; Loptson, Peter; Kelly, Ivan; et al. (2005). “Theories of Astrology: A Comprehensive Survey.” Correlation 1996, 15(1): 17-52, p.7.
4. Jung, C. G. The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, p. 441 (paragraph 850).
5. Jung, C. G. The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, p. 526 (paragraph 984).
6. Koestler, Arthur (1972, 1974). The Roots of Coincidence. London: Pan Books Ltd., p. 95.
7. McGowan, Don (1994). What Is Wrong with Jung. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, p. 137.

Aliens over Texas

Aliens over Texas

Apparently over two dozen people saw some strange lights in the night sky above the small town of Stephenville, Texas a few days ago, but no one took a photo or a video. In this day and age when almost every cell phone has a camera, why were there no photos, especially when the lights were visible for nearly five minutes?

It's enough to make you suspicious. Without photos or video there's nothing that can be examined by impartial scientists.

Perhaps Stephenville needs an economic boost. This will certainly bring in the tourists. A new Roswell perhaps?

As Carl Sagan once said about UFO sightings, they could be: "unconventional aircraft, conventional aircraft with unusual lighting patterns, high-altitude balloons, luminescent insects, planets seen under unusual atmospheric conditions, optical mirages and loomings, lenticular clouds, ball lightning, sundogs, meteors including green fireballs, and satellites, nosecones, and rocket boosters spectacularly reentering the atmosphere."

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Quotation from: Sagan, Carl. (1995). The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. New York: Random House, pp.70-71.

Flying Saucers: Discovered or Invented?

Flying Saucers: Discovered or Invented?

On June 24, 1947, businessman Kenneth Arnold was flying his private plane over the Cascade Mountains in Washington State when he saw nine shiny objects quickly moving across the sky like "geese in formation." After a few minutes they were gone. Arnold described the objects themselves as "crescent shaped," and that they "moved like a saucer would if you skipped it across the water." The Associated Press misquoted Arnold, describing what he saw as "flying saucers." Later, Arnold complained about being misquoted, saying, "They said that I'd said they were saucer-like. I said they flew in saucer-like fashion" (Clancy 2005, pp. 91-92).

Arnold's misquoted statement about flying saucers was published in 150 newspapers, and soon afterwards hundreds of reports of flying saucers began to surface. What's strange is that hardly anyone seems to have reported seeing crescent-shaped or boomerang-shaped objects as Arnold had reported. It's not hard to see the suggestive power of the media in all these reports of flying saucers. And just a few years later Hollywood made its first contribution to the flying saucer craze with the science fiction film The Day the Earth Stood Still, firmly embedding the iconic image of the flying saucer in the American psyche. Some UFO sightings have included variations on the saucer theme, with some objects described as cylindrical or spherical, but by and large the most common shape is the saucer. This should certainly give us pause, serious pause.
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Quote from: Clancy, Susan A. (2005). Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Abducted by Aliens. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 91-92.

Homeopathy Mixup in France

The equivalent of the FDA in France (the AFFSAPS) revealed startling news this past November about a mislabeling of homeopathic remedies. Here are two short exerpts:

"AFSSAPS has been informed by Laboratoires Boiron of an inversion of the labelling of two homeopathic medicaments, The bottles labelled 'mother tincture of Gingko biloba' contain mother tincture of Equisetum arvense and vice versa."

"AFSSAPS has said that this mix-up does not pose any particular risk . . ."

Why does this mixup pose no risk, you might ask? Unlike mislabeling real drugs, homeopathic remedies are nothing but water (read following blog for details).

Consider this bit from the exchange between Lord Broers and Ms. Kate Chatfield of the Society of Homeopaths in England from the minutes of evidence to the Select Committee on Science and Technology.

Lord Broers: I have a simple, technical question about homeopathy and drugs. Is it possible to distinguish between homeopathic drugs after they have been diluted? Is there any means of distinguishing one from the other?

Ms. Chatfield: Only by the label.

Well, there you have it. There's no way to distinguish them because (I'll say it again) they're nothing but water!

Thanks to DC's Improbable Science for this gem.

Homeopathy: Bogus Medicine

Homeopathy, that most bogus of medical practices, is based on two basic principles:

1. Like cures like.

At first blush this might seem like something akin to a vaccination, where one receives a small dose of a virus (often a dead virus) to help prevent one from falling ill with the viral infection. But a vaccination works by triggering the immune response so that your body will fight against that viral infection when it's encountered in the environment.

Homeopathy is nothing like this. If you have a skin infection whose symptoms might vaguely resemble poison ivy, then ingesting a small dose of poison ivy would be the cure for you. Do you have seizures? Ingesting large quantities of plants from the nightshade family can also cause seizures. Therefore, the cure for you is to ingest small quantities of plants from the nightshade family.

2. The smallest effective dose.

According to homeopathy, you want to ingest a very diluted quantity of the "medicine." In fact, the more diluted the substance the better it is. Most homeopathic remedies are so diluted that not even one molecule of the active ingredient remains in the "medicine." It's nothing but water. But this is special water. This water somehow has a memory of the active ingredient, and it is this memory in the water that acts as a cure. That's right, the memory of the water. Or as a homeopath might describe it: An imprint of the substance has been retained in the water.

Is there any scientific evidence for such an imprint or memory in water? None. But that doesn't stop homeopaths. Science, they say, hasn't figured out how to identify or measure this imprint yet. Homeopaths don't require observational evidence of imprints or memories in water. They just know that these imprints exist. But how they know is anyone's guess.

This sounds like it was made up by some 18th century quack, before the rise of modern medicine. And in fact that's the case. Samuel Hahnemann (1755-1843) came up with homeopathy. And while scientific medicine has improved over the years through research, studies and evidence, homeopathy hasn't changed one drop since the day of Hahnemann.

What's more disturbing is that homeopaths claim that their "cures" actually work. But every properly designed scientific test of homeopathy has shown that it works no better than a placebo. All experiments of homeopathy that show otherwise have been proven to use flawed methodologies in their experiments.

Save your time and money. Don't waste it on homeopathy. It's only water.

Intuition and Empirical Evidence

Kepler's Orbits

While recently doing research on astrology, I've come to the conclusion that there's no evidence that astrology can predict future events, or accurately describe someone's personality based on celestial bodies, beyond the vague generalities that can apply to anyone. But this leads me to a bigger question about why astrology is so compelling to so many people. Simply put, it has a common sense appeal, or an intuitive appeal primarily because it seems on its surface to be rather scientific. Moreover, celestial bodies can be observed and mapped and predicted mathematically.

But unfortunately, we can't always trust our intuitions in such matters. This is where empirical testing is necessary to pry apart what works from what doesn't. Consider these examples in scientific history of what seemed intuitively obvious (to some) but turned out to be mistaken.

In the late 1600s, King Charles helped establish the scientific organization, The Royal Society of London. He set the members of the organization with a tough question, asking “Why is it that when a glass is full to the brim, and you put a frog in the glass, the water does not overflow?” Well, the scientific minded members contemplated this question for some days until one experimental fellow filled a glass with water, placed a frog in it, and the water actually did overflow!

Aristotle made a common sense mistake that took until Galileo to remedy. Aristotle thought that a heavier object will fall faster than a lighter object. And of course a rock will fall faster than a feather, but once the objects being dropped are heavy enough that air resistance plays relatively no role, then the two objects will fall at about the same speed.

Aristotle believed that objects tend to seek their "proper place," and thus it is that lighter objects fall slowly because they have more lighter elements (air and fire) which tend to rise. On the other hand, heavier objects fall faster because they contain more heavier elements (earth and water) pulling the object down faster.

But Galileo showed that a heavier object and a lighter object will fall at the same rate by experimenting with rolling balls of different weights down inclined planes, in effect slowing down the effect of gravity and measuring the speed traveled with his primitive but useful water clock.

Johannes Kepler did some mathematical experimentation based on observation, and came to the conclusion that the orbits of the planets are eliptical, not perfect circles, which had seemed intuitively obvious.

This conclusion seemed so strange to Kepler that he was initially reluctant to accept it, since the idea of planetary orbits as perfect spheres goes back at least to the ancient Greeks. But he realized that, as counter-intuitive as it seemed, nothing could predict the movement of planets so simply as elliptical orbits.

In fact, even Galileo refused to accept Kepler's claim about elliptical orbits since it seemed to disagree with what he thought was common sense.

There may be times when it makes sense to trust common sense, and we would be fools to dismiss it completely. But in some cases it is best to test our beliefs against nature by seeking out empirical evidence through experimentation when we can. When intuition has failed some of the greatest thinkers in history, we would be wise not to fall into the same trap.

Five Bad Evolutionary Designs

Have you ever seen those nature documentaries where the narrator describes how perfectly designed, say, the cheetah, the polar bear, or the chameleon is for its environment? Of course, calling an animal perfectly designed is just shorthand for saying that the slow processes of evolution have led to that animal's well-adapted features. Yet evolution hasn't always generated the best designs, or at least not the best from an engineering perspective. In fact, some features seem downright poorly designed. This should come as no surprise when we understand a little about how evolution works.

When new features evolve in a species, they tend to build on already existing features. They aren't built from scratch. It's just too costly for evolution to go back to the drawing board and start over. This explains why lungs evolved from the swim bladders of ancient fish. This also explains why dolphins don't move their tails from side to side like fish do. The up and down movement of dolphin tails was built upon the galloping motion of their land-dwelling four-legged ancestors.

From an evolutionary standpoint new features don't need to have the best possible design either. They just need to be good enough to allow the organism to live long enough to reproduce. The evolution of the human body is no exception. We have body parts whose design is wanting, but they've been good enough to keep our species from going the way of the dinosaurs. Consider the following suboptimal designs in the human body.

Design One: The Pharynx

The human pharynx is the part of the throat that begins behind the nose and leads down to the voice box. It does double duty as a tube for breathing and for swallowing. But when you're swallowing you can't breathe, and when you're breathing you can't swallow. That's why humans run a serious risk of choking if the pharynx doesn't close at the right time when eating.

Curiously, human infants under six months and chimpanzees don't have this problem. But infants and chimps can't talk, and without our uniquely situated pharynx we wouldn't be able to talk either. The evolutionary advantage of talking must have outweighed the risks of choking in our early human ancestors. All in all, it's not a bad tradeoff, but engineers could certainly come up with a safer design especially if they didn't have to build on preexisting features.

Design Two: The Birth Canal

The Bible says that God punished Eve and her female descendants with painful childbirth because she partook of the forbidden fruit. Presumably, childbirth would be a snap if not for that damned curse. And not only has pain long accompanied childbirth, but so has death. The rate of mothers dying during childbirth in the United States in 1900 was about 65% higher than it is today.

You could blame God, or Eve, or the serpent. Or you could point the finger at bipedalism--walking upright on two legs. This evolutionary innovation forced a smaller pelvis on us. But bipedalism isn't the whole story. Humans have evolved big brains, and we needed a big container to hold those brains. This is why human infants are born more premature and helpless than most other mammals. Babies need to get through the birth canal before their heads get too big.

Design Three: The Jaw

The human jaw has too many teeth for its size. Many people have no room for wisdom teeth (third molars) if they get them, and a lot of people's teeth have to fight one another for limited territory, leading to crooked teeth and orthodontists. Impacted wisdom teeth can result in serious infections, and before modern dentistry these late eruptors could be deadly. If you couldn't eat, you died.

There's no consensus on why human jaws got smaller, but the fossilized jawbones of our Homo erectus ancestors show that, compared to us, they had massive jaws with huge molars. Some scientists suggest that our small jaw may have evolved in response to eating smashed and cooked food, so that over time there was little advantage to having a bigger jaw. Other scientists implicate the deactivation of a gene responsible for large jaw muscles, which may have allowed for our skulls to take on a new shape providing more room for those big brains of ours. Either way, we're stuck with small toothy mouths.

Design Four: The Appendix

This is a case of a vestigial organ if ever there was one. The human appendix has no known function, except perhaps to put money in surgeons' pockets. About the size of a finger, this organ is located at the beginning of the large intestine. Undigestible food that enters the appendix is normally forced out by muscular contractions. But when it isn't, the result is a potentially deadly infection.

The appendix is related to a digestive organ found in many other vertebrates. This is the cecum (pronounced SEE-cum), and it's largest in herbivores, where it helps to digest plant matter. Since evolution isn't keen on cleaning up after itself, we're left with a useless and potentially life-threatening organ. In fact, NASA is so concerned about appendixes bursting in outer space that it's considering requiring appendectomies prior to future long-term missions.

Design Five: The Spine

The spines of four-legged mammals work well horizontally. But when the spine stands up vertically, as in humans, it creates a lot of pressure on the vertebral discs. These discs can become compressed and slip, causing herniated discs and all manner of back pain and expensive therapy.

Standing on two legs must have benefited our early hominid ancestors who first adapted the upright position. A brand new spine designed for walking upright would have been an improvement, but instead evolution had to work with what it already had. There's no consensus on what advantages walking upright initially provided, but a widely-held view is that it freed up the hands for carrying food and manipulating objects. That's not a bad tradeoff, considering that it now allows us to rub our aching backs.

Building Upward

While evolution has created some wonderful adaptations that really do seem like optimal designs, it hasn't always done so. This is because novel features aren't designed from the ground up, but built up slowly on already existing features. Where an engineer would start from scratch, natural selection builds on whatever foundations it already has. As Richard Dawkins once put it: "Natural selection is like a robot that can only climb uphill, even if this leaves it stuck on top of a measly hillock. There is no mechanism for going downhill, for crossing the valley to the lower slopes of the high mountain on the other side."