COINCIDENCES? FATE.. or something else?
Fact: Mathematically, it’s a mystery they don’t occur more often.
Schick Vaugn 1995 “Why People Believe Weird Things” is where the data is from, my words from a thesis draft that was put into a book about rational thought and non violence. Sort of a book… a cheap book. This is about when people have dreams, and think they are prophecy when they are simply coincidences.
“Take the individual, average person, with the benchmarked 250 dreams per night. With over 350 million in the United States alone, that comes to about a billion dreams every night, maybe trillions a year. So, it would follow that some dreams would be seen as prophetic, and those with more of an emotional impact will be the ones that are shared.”
Then you get into selective attention, subjective validation, and the Forer Effect.
But yes I believe in them, don’t believe in fate, and think it’s an uphill battle believing anything else. However, when the rational mind cowers in the bully of emotion anything is possible… especially people being really, really dumb.
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“one problem is that most of us don’t realize that because of ordinary statistical laws, incredible coincidences are common and must occur. An event that seems highly improbably can actually be highly probably – even virtually certain – given enough opportunities for it to occur. Drawing a royal flush in poker, getting heads five times in a row, winning the lottery – all these may seem incredibly unlikely in any instance. But they’re virtually certain to happen sometime to someone. With enough chances for something to happen, it will happen.
Consider prophetic dreams, mentioned earlier. If a normal person has about 250 dreams per night and over 250 million people live in the United States, there must be billions of dreams dreamed every night and trillions in a year. With so many dreams and so many life events that can be matched up to the dreams, it would be astounding if some dreams didn’t seem prophetic. The really astonishing thing may not be that there are prophetic dreams but that there are so few of them.
Suppose you’re reading a novel. Just as you get to the part that mentions the peculiar beauty of the monarch butterfly, you look up and see on on your window. Suppose you’re sitting in an airport, musing over the last name of an old classmate. Just then the person sitting next to you says that very name aloud in a conversation with someone else. These are indeed uncanny pairings of events, strange couplings that provoke wonder — or the idea that psychic forces are at work. But just how likely are such pairings? The answer is *VERY*. A demonstration of this fact by psychologists David Marks and Richard Kammann goes something like this: Let’s say that in an ordinary day a person can recall 100 distinct events. The total number of pairings of these events for a single person in a single day is thus 4,950 (99+98+97…+3+2+1) (citation 33). Over a period of 10 years (or about 3650 days), 1000 people are thus expected to generate over 18 billion pairs (4950 x 3650 x 1000 = 18,067,500,000). Out of so many pairs of events, it’s likely that some of those 1000 people will experience some weird, incredible pairings. Thus, the seemingly impossible becomes commonplace.”
The dream # reference is from Psychologist James Alcock in a lecture talking about research about dreams. It’s all in the book (and yes I am happy I re-read and keep reference texts !)
How to Think about Weird Things – “Critical Thinking for a New Age” by Schick, Jr. and Vaughn, 1995.
Awesome book… and deals with a lot of stuff, also goes on about coincidences, etc.
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subconscious doesn’t make sense, and it’s a scam. There is nothing “under” the level of consciousness. It’s either unconscious waiting to be drawn into consciousness, or conscious. Subconscious is ludicrous, and the concept makes me itchy. Just because some person put sub and conscious together to better explain the complexity of random memory accessibility doesn’t mean it’s real.
We court and exploit language in such flawed ways.
Yvonne….we are friends or I would unfurl hate near your comment. =) I know you joke… but that stuff kills me.
Why is the secret okay? Does it only work for positive affirmations? What about all the Oprah book club reading pedophiles that are creating their own reality of hopes and dreams… or the racist and violent willing death to people?
Fuzzy logic pisses me off. Not that I am not susceptible. Hell… irrationality makes me more irrational than anything else… and that’s funny.
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Everything DOES NOT happen for a reason. You can’t just say something pseudo poetic and then expect it to be true. WHY does everything happen for a reason? What is reason?
Are you talking cause and effect….? If that’s the case… yes there is a cause and effect.
But meaning and purpose are human defined and CAN NOT be quantified…. they are individually defined and don’t really mean much. Just because you know an old saying doesn’t mean you can say it and have people slap you on the back and say, “WHOAH BUDDY YOU ARE RIGHT” because it’s insane.
The people that use “everything happens for a reason” are people that find vestige in arcane, pliable words that comfort from trauma like losing a child, or resting in “God’s Plan”.
It’s ignorant. And I have imbibed well this eve, so I will watch the cantankerous passion that I levy here. Pardon that.
I am all hip for believing in stuff… I just want it to make a little bit of logical sense.
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Dreams rose out of the need to interpret the sensory stimuli that happened during our rest, otherwise the smell of food, the sound of the river, or the feeling of the cave floor would keep us awake long enough for us to go insane. Dreams were nothing more than a evolutionary skill we developed to prevent lack of rest. They are interpretations of our immediate surroundings….
and hell yeah they are so badass. I don’t like to do that whole psuedoscientific dream analyzing thing… it’s sort of loose. I think you use common sense you will figure it out…. but wow. Some of the studies on dreaming are amazing. Apparently not one face in your dream EVER is a strange or random face…. apparently, studies say, they are all rooted in reality and about people you know.
I just can’t figure out the Aphex Twin faces I keep seeing.
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Funny… just looked at wiki:
in matters of science, it is not necessarily considered surprising or alarming when they happen. It just is this matter of fact thing.
I think the way you define a coincidence, aka are you saying it is an improbable product of amazing circumstances or a mathematical probability, is really important.
If you are asking if coincidences are magical, absolutely not. If you are asking if I believe that they happen… I mean… yeah… of course. Mathematically it’s obvious they do and should. The problem is that we think on such a micro level, and this meta/macro level of shit is going on above our personal ego and it would make us suicidal if we really understood it.
Amazing coincidences? One that are almost hard to believe?
I think it’s amazing that were here… that our solar system formed just so… and we aren’t 1 degree closer to the sun or away which would make the planet completely incapable of supporting life. That’s an amazing coincidence… but if we weren’t here, we wouldn’t be able to prattle on about it on an internet chat board…. so the amazing and wonderful chance that brought us together in this moment in time is what is amazing…. that this improbable coincidence of coalescing gases brought us to this point. It wasn’t expected, but coincidences never are.
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