5-4-09
Serendipity. Coincidence. What are these things? Recently, while idly looking for a possible web-page profile for an old acquaintance I came upon a profile that might have been what I sought. Unfortunately, I was informed in bold letters that “This profile is private“. That was followed by the further message, “… but here are other people you might be interested in meeting.” One of them caught my eye. The photo was striking and in particular the profile name was intriguing. Now thoroughly off on a tangent I clicked on the profile and began to browse through it. Before me began to emerge the image of an intelligent, creative, strong, tough young woman clearly on the leading edge of “hipness” for her generation. I liked her, or at least the impression of her conveyed by her written words, despite a sometimes “in your face” abrasive attitude. There seemed to be heart and sensitivity beneath the veneer. Then I discovered some blogs she had written. I began to read.
I read a poem. After selecting the next entry I was once again informed in bold letters, as if I had crossed some forbidden line, that “only her friends can read this!” But I had been captured! I wanted to read on! There was only one thing to do. It seemed futile, but if I wanted to continue reading I had to send her a friend request. I did. I shut off my computer and went to bed, musing as I fell to sleep that probably there would never come a reply.
By the next morning, with the day’s work details on my mind, I had all but forgotten the events of the night before. I turned on my computer and checked my email. To my surprise there was a notice that my friend request had been accepted! That evening I returned again to her page. I read more of her thoughts. My impressions of the previous night were reinforced. I was also rewarded by a powerful, thought provoking poem which I had not been able to read the previous night. I commented on it.
The next day, I was again surprised when she replied to my comment. Over the next two weeks, this pattern continued. At first, I admit, I believed that she would any day vanish from my friends list since I am an old fart and under natural law must say what I think and feel. After all, people sometimes don’t want to hear things, particularly from essential strangers. So far the deletion hasn’t happened, but I am certainly not confident that it won’t. I am coming to realize that she is really a quite complicated person and it is not possible to predict what she will do. The point is, I am glad that she has, however obliquely and for however long, become known to me and part of my life experience. She has shaken up and stirred my thoughts. My life is richer for it.
What is fascinating for me about this episode is that it seemingly came to pass by essentially random means. Who knows the exact mathematically prescribed physical laws and programmed instructions that led a certain stream of electrons and network packets to arrive at my computer on that dark night several weeks ago and light up my monitor with information that led to the above events? Possibly there was even random noise involved… perhaps a sunspot that created a voltage fluctuation or tiny power surge somewhere out there in the vast electronic web that now girdles our planet and tipped one stream of electrons rather than another towards my computer. She lives a half continent away from me. She is of a distant generation. Her life is in an early phase; mine is in a late phase. The connection is completely implausible. Nevertheless the connection was created and has had an effect.
What puzzles me is the question, again, about whether or not there is some über pattern or purpose to these kinds of things? On the one hand, any time we attempt to search for anything beyond the physical laws governing a given sequence of events we shall fail. I firmly believe this. On the other hand many of us have personally had, or know someone who has had, some nearly inexplicable experience, a coincidence so startling that our eyes widen in amazement. Sometimes it is impossible enough to give us an eery feeling that it has clearly been designed, that it has been planned… if not by God then by some other intelligence for some obscure purpose. Sometimes they are so incredible that the psychologist Jung gave them the special name, “magnificent coincidences”.
Richard Bach once wrote about a cross country flight with a fellow pilot in an antique aircraft that had been built around the time of WW1. Trouble developed in a bracing strut for the horizontal stabilizer. They were forced to land in a farmer’s field far from any towns or villages. As they talked over their seemingly dismal options, the grizzled old farmer sauntered across his field to them. “Any way I can help you boys?”, he asked. Bach turned to him and answered, a little sarcastically, “Not unless you happen to have a bracing strut for the horizontal stabilizer of a 1917 (very rare, very old) biplane”. “Why, I believe I do… right over there in that barn”, the farmer replied, pointing to a crumbling, weathered old barn across the field as the jaws of the grounded aviators began to sag to the ground in astonishment. Sure enough, in the old barn sat a long forgotten, long retired, dust covered and partially cannibalized duplicate of the antique aircraft they were flying with its bracing strut for the horizontal stabilizer still there, usable and intact. That is what is meant by “magnificent coincidence”. It is coincidence so unlikely, so improbable, so apropos that it seems it would take several times the age of the universe to ever occur by sheer chance.
Nevertheless, as I wrote above, if we look for some kind of cause of events beyond the physical laws we are doomed to fail. What is going on, then? Tonight a thought about what could be happening occurred to me. The world is an extremely complicated system. All around us there are vast numbers of local processes taking place. These might even be thought of as independent streams of physical events, each unfolding according to the laws of nature. While the events in stream A and the events in stream B, for example, all follow sequentially and rigorously from physical laws and consequences what controls the correlation of the streams of events A and B? Is it possible that there exist higher level interactions and interferences between separate streams of physical events? When one takes such a notion towards its limits a chaotic system seems to arise where cause can no longer be precisely determined and the emergence of some sort of intrinsic awareness or intelligence or purpose that yields the startling kinds of coincidences mentioned above cannot be trivially dismissed.