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Those are themes for thought experiments more than things the author defends (as one would expect with a foreword from Martin Gardner who was a strong skeptic):
by nestorD 5y ago
Those are themes for thought experiments more than things the author defends (as one would expect with a foreword from Martin Gardner who was a strong skeptic):
> This, finally, is the essence of synchronicity: the world we live in is filled with harmonies and coincidences that have no explanation in terms of cause and effect. It is fruitless to seek after hidden forces and occult powers. The world is a given — it is just as it is, full of cause and effect, full of synchronicity.
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> Some people have taken these new developments to mean that such psychic feats as telepathy and psychokinesis are now firmly established scientific realities. This is not correct.
- skhm 5y agoThanks for pulling this quote out - I just skimmed the epub and it's actually a really lucid and grounded set of claims for something I've often thought, that just as there's causal influence going forward in time, so might there be patterns in arbitrary other dimensions of automata-like processes in higher dimensions. Something like a time crystal, but in other dimensions of higher space. Anyway, such things are probably unstable at the scale we'd need to perceive them as meaningful coincidence (I think of them as atomic coincidences) and in any case the book goes on to argue that the world is simply overloaded with symbolism and in such an environment, synchronicity abounds, and that's all you need to explain it. Somewhat sadly I agree, though I'd like to think there's a slight nudge toward coincidence from the laws of physics, and that not everything we'd deem meaningful is purely emergent.