A coincidence is a remarkable concurrence of events or circumstances that have no apparent causal connection with one another. The perception of remarkable coincidences may lead to supernatural, occult, or

paranormal Paranormal events are purported phenomena described in popular culture, folk, and other non-scientific bodies of knowledge, whose existence within these contexts is described as being beyond the scope of normal scientific understanding. Not ...

claims, or it may lead to belief in fatalism, which is a doctrine that events will happen in the exact manner of a predetermined plan. In general, the perception of coincidence, for lack of more sophisticated explanations, can serve as a link to

folk psychology In philosophy of mind and cognitive science, folk psychology, or commonsense psychology, is a human capacity to explain and predict the behavior and mental state of other people. Processes and items encountered in daily life such as pain, pleasure ...

and philosophy. From a statistical perspective, coincidences are inevitable and often less remarkable than they may appear intuitively. Usually coincidences are chance events with underestimated

probability Probability is the branch of mathematics concerning numerical descriptions of how likely an event is to occur, or how likely it is that a proposition is true. The probability of an event is a number between 0 and 1, where, roughly speakin ...

. An example is the

birthday problem In probability theory, the birthday problem asks for the probability that, in a set of randomly chosen people, at least two will share a birthday. The birthday paradox is that, counterintuitively, the probability of a shared birthday exceeds 5 ...

, which shows that the

of two persons having the same birthday already exceeds 50% in a group of only 23 persons.

Etymology

The first known usage of the word is from c. 1605 with the meaning "exact correspondence in substance or nature" from the French ''coincidence'', from ''coincider'', from Medieval Latin ''coincidere''. The definition evolved in the 1640s as "occurrence or existence during the same time". The word was introduced to English readers in the 1650s by Sir Thomas Browne, in ''A Letter to a Friend'' (circa 1656 pub. 1690) and in his discourse '' The Garden of Cyrus'' (1658).

Synchronicity

Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung developed a theory which states that remarkable coincidences occur because of what he called "

synchronicity Synchronicity (german: Synchronizität) is a concept first introduced by analytical psychologist Carl G. Jung "to describe circumstances that appear meaningfully related yet lack a causal connection." In contemporary research, synchronicity e ...

," which he defined as an "acausal connecting principle." One of Kammerer's passions was collecting coincidences. He published a book titled ''Das Gesetz der Serie'' (''The Law of Series''), which has not been translated into English. In this book, he recounted 100 or so anecdotes of coincidences that had led him to formulate his theory of seriality. He postulated that all events are connected by waves of seriality. Kammerer was known to make notes in public parks of how many people were passing by, how many of them carried umbrellas, etc.

Albert Einstein Albert Einstein ( ; ; 14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist, widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest and most influential physicists of all time. Einstein is best known for developing the theory ...

called the idea of seriality "interesting and by no means absurd." Carl Jung drew upon Kammerer's work in his book ''Synchronicity''. A coincidence lacks an apparent causal connection. A coincidence may be synchronicity—the experience of events that are causally unrelated—and yet their occurrence together has meaning for the person who observes them. To be counted as synchronicity, the events should be unlikely to occur together by chance, but this is questioned because there is usually a chance, no matter how small and in truly large numbers of opportunities such coincidences do happen by chance if it is only non-zero, see law of truly large numbers. Some skeptics (e.g., Georges Charpak and Henri Broch) argue synchronicity is merely an instance of apophenia. They argue that probability and statistical theory (exemplified, e.g., in Littlewood's law) suffice to explain remarkable coincidences. David Lane & Andrea Diem Lane, 2010
Desultory Decussation: Where Littlewood’s Law of Miracles meets Jung’s Synchronicity
www.integralworld.net

Charles Fort Charles Hoy Fort (August 6, 1874 – May 3, 1932) was an American writer and researcher who specialized in anomalous phenomena. The terms "Fortean" and "Forteana" are sometimes used to characterize various such phenomena. Fort's books sold ...

also compiled hundreds of accounts of interesting coincidences and anomalous phenomena.

Causality

Measuring the

of a series of coincidences is the most common method of distinguishing a coincidence from causally connected events. To establish cause and effect (i.e., causality) is notoriously difficult, as is expressed by the commonly heard statement that " correlation does not imply causation." In statistics, it is generally accepted that observational studies can give hints but can never establish cause and effect. But, considering the probability paradox (see Koestler's quote above), it appears that the larger the set of coincidences, the more certainty increases and the more it appears that there is some cause behind a remarkable coincidence.

References

Bibliography

David Marks David Lee Marks (born August 22, 1948) is an American guitarist who is best known for being an early member of the Beach Boys. While growing up in Hawthorne, California, Marks was a neighborhood friend of the original band members and was a freq ...

: '' The Psychology of the Psychic''. pp. 227–46 * Joseph Mazur (2016). ''Fluke: The Maths and Myths of Coincidences'', London: Oneworld Publications.

Etymology

Synchronicity

Causality

See also

References

Bibliography

External links