Synchronicity: The Epic Quest to Understand the Quantum Nature of Cause and Effect by Paul Halpern
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

How To Mistreat An Idea

I have always favoured Jung’s psychology, mainly because he has much more to say about how his mind works than mine. This is important because in the quest to get language to conform to reality (that is to say science) Jung knew that there really wasn’t anything else to understand than his own mind.

For Jung the Unconscious, specifically his own, was reality. The contents of the Unconscious are fundamentally indistinguishable from the world at large. His hypothesis that others share some of the unconscious ‘stuff’ is confirmed most notably by language, but also by the persistent (and consistent) descriptions that are found in legends, dreams, and moral tales of heroic figures, gruesome tragedies, and unbearable fears. His psychology merely suggests looking for these in oneself as a possible source of inspiration, consolation, or hope.

So I don’t think it is correct to say that Jung was attempting to map reality with his idea of synchronicity, except that this reality was a part of his own psyche. I don’t think Halpern appreciates this about Jung’s thinking. Synchronicity is a linguistic description of a component Jung’s mind not the cosmos. It is the process of imagination in which cause and effect simply does not take place; or rather, if it does take place it has nothing to do with the outcome of the process - typically an instantaneous, irrational, often counter-intuitive glimpse of a unification or reconciliation, or alteration of the contents of one’s head.

The crucial thing about the Unconscious, however, something even Jung didn’t fully recognise, is that it is allergic to language. In fact it seems to have a great antipathy to language, undermining it, distorting it, and abusing it in ways that serve the ends of the Unconscious not the demon language. This applies a fortiori to scientific language, including mathematics, as it is constantly revealing that language can never conform with non-language. Imaginative leaps we may see as ‘progress’ are really the message from the Unconscious that words are not really things to be trusted.

So to criticise Jung for being unscientific in his views about synchronicity is wrong. Halpern thinks he was positing a law of nature analogous to cause/effect. I think the term was meant to relativise not just the concept of causality but all pretence about our ability to correlate words with things that are not words. It is clear from Halpern’s own historical survey of physical theories that all attempts to do so have been fundamental failures, not simply inaccuracies or approximations but complete fictions.

Synchronicity is not some newly discovered force (force as a concept is in fact in general retreat in physics; it may soon be relegated to the scientific junk room of mythical entities). Neither is it an inspiring metaphor (what could it be ‘like’ after all). Synchronicity is a fiction. Its distinguishing characteristic is that it is explicitly so. And its referent is not the cosmos but the mind. If it meant anything else, the Unconscious would suggest some other term to replace it.

I do not have the intellectual capacity to judge either Halpern’s physics or his history of science. But I think he seriously misconstrues Jung. Jung makes this easy for him because he desperately wanted to be considered ‘scientific.’ So he sometimes says things in the genre of physics rather than psychology. But he is perfectly clear that synchronicity is a psychic not a physical phenomenon when he says in his 1950 treatise, “Synchronistic events rest on the simultaneous occurrence of two different psychic states”. It doesn’t occur ‘out there’ but ‘in here.’ In his exposition on synchronicity, he in fact distances himself from physics entirely: “The so-called ‘scientific view of the world’… can hardly be anything more than a psychologically biased partial view which misses out all those by no means unimportant aspects that cannot be grasped statistically.”

Jung did fall for the suggestion of the quantum physicist, Pauli, to ‘generalise’ his concept. This, I think was unfortunate and dragged Jung away fro his most important insight. Nevertheless even then Jung continued to treat the matter as purely psychic through the use of Pauli’s dream material. I suppose what I object to most in Halpern’s book is the suggestion that synchronicity, properly considered, is a concept on which to build new science. It seems to me that this is precisely the opposite of Jung’s original intention. Synchronicity is not a scientific concept but a warning against the perceived finality of any scientific concept. It is not meant to halt science, just make it a bit more humble by indicating that its results must never be confused with reality.

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