Are you finding that synchronicity in your life is significantly elevated, or is it just me?

My life is nothing but synchronistic moments like this. Ain’t it grand?

Yes I know what you mean and it is happening a lot to me lately. Perhaps it has always happened to me but I never was so tuned to it. I think there is something in the idea that “you get what you need’ or “what you need will come to you”. That type of thing. I don’t know what causes it. The term “vibrating on a higher frequency” might have something to do with it.

I wonder how often things happen to you at the same time or shortly after each other, that aren’t related. I’m tempted to assume that for every eerily “synchronic” coincidence you have a hundred non-coincidence experiences you don’t even remember.

To assess whether coincidences happen relatively often, you need a much more complicated kind of statistical reasoning than we’re normally used to. But humans being as they are, we remember the occasions where coincidences did happen and forget the occasions where they could have happened but didn’t, and so we get the illusion that coincidences happen more often than one should expect them to.

@Fyrius yes, I agree. You worded it so nicely though. We forget or don’t notice just how often it happens.

Actually what I said is that we forget or don’t notice how often is doesn’t happen. And so we aren’t aware that it doesn’t happen much more often than it does happen, and we get the illusion that it’s surprisingly common.

oh sorry I read it the other way around. I was just thinking that maybe it does happen a lot more than we realize with smaller things, but we don’t notice. Sorry I misquoted you.

That’s cool.

Maybe we just get shocked when something goes our way!

Very much so and it it started in earnest about a year ago now and so much so it is like I am living parallel lives moment by moment with this person. Really quite cool!!

I have found this happening to me for quite some time. I just look at them with amusement, though I know that Karl Jung felt that there was great significance in synchronicities. I figure with all the ways that information can be permuted there are bound to be some odd coincidences.

If Baudrillard is right, and everything is symbol in our minds, then the mass of information and connectivity that modern life is saturated with would have a parallelizing and homogenizing effect on the interplay between symbols in our minds, and would itself become a superstructure of interplay between all symbols.

The anime Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex is actually a fascinating look into this very phenomenon, one they call a standalone complex.

@Fenris, I just read something similar (nothing groundbreaking, just noteworthy) about postmodern architecture in this book. Since modern materials can handle all the structural concerns of buildings, architects were able to make formerly functional elements purely decorative. This created a paradigm of reading buildings as one would a language and gave some architects the freedom to simply play with symbols. They call it “magazine architecture” because it’s become a couture-like culture with little regard for function.

@Fenris
“If Baudrillard is right, and everything is symbol in our minds, then the mass of information and connectivity that modern life is saturated with would have a parallelizing and homogenizing effect on the interplay between symbols in our minds, and would itself become a superstructure of interplay between all symbols.”

I’ve read this sentence five times now and I still don’t know what you’re talking about.

Information is transferring how we interpret the relationship between symbols to others. The privileged first world superpower I live in is approaching a saturation of media connectivity, offering up identical symbolic relationships to millions. These millions now have nearly identical symbolic relationships and their interpretation of and behavior toward symbols becomes parallel.

I see…
And with that last clause that you didn’t include just now, you’re saying that the interaction of symbols is starting to take place less inside our individual heads, and more in the media we consume?

If we translate this all into colloquial non-Baudrillardian terms, I believe what you just said is that through our connectivity, everyone ends up having the same ideas, beliefs and points of view. But if only that were true.
No, it seems there are certain mutually exclusive relationships between symbols, and all the connectivity in the world is not going to keep the holders of one set of relationships from hating the guts of the holders of a competing arrangement, whether those are liberals or gay bashers or atheists or pro-life activists or vegetarians. On the contrary, the opportunities to clash only make the schisms all the wider, the convictions all the stronger and the controversies all the more acrimonious.

I think meme theory is a much clearer way to think about this sort of thing.

I am with @davidbetterman – my entire life is moments like these.

That album kicks ass.
The Police rock!

@Fenris

But Baudrillard did not quite believe that everything was per se a symbol, even when referring to all the contemporary crap that surrounds us today and has no real/ substantial function. There is a progression from the functional to the exchangeable to the symbolic to finally the sign itself, the latter category being extremely rich (read: diverse) and containing most of the objects we surround ourselves with, I think, right now. It’s in fact this mass production of objects (and opinions, as you noted) that brings about the death of the symbolic – the juncture he seems to claim we’ve now reached.

Provocative, but his fatalism is a little depressing, a little silly, even if it makes for great anime (as SAC is truly great).

@Fyrius

The point though is not that people disagree, but that they do so in large and organized groups. Also important is that an opinion loses its functionality as more people hold it (at least, it isn’t more functional just because more people hold it). Neither does the opinion have exchange value, neither symbolic value. Like a cliche phrase, it kind of spreads out and then loses its significance, its meaning. It becomes a thing in/ of itself, empty. And yet we continue to build our self-images and identities on these empty and massively disseminated ideas. And what is the result? I think Baudrillard was very much addressing the death of the individual per the signage of contemporary culture.