Synchronicity:
A Philosophical View

By Harald Atmanspacher, Honorary Member of the IAAP

Abstract
The concept of synchronicity was first coined by C.G. Jung early on in the 1920s, and later published in his article “Synchronicity – An Acausal Connecting Principle” of 1952. However, the reception of the proposal remained somewhat mixed, since it did not match crucial methodological criteria of established science. In recent work, synchronicity could be refined to a highly potent concept within the metaphysical framework of decompositional dual-spect monism, as presented in a monograph by Atmanspacher and Rickles in 2022. Other readable texts on synchronicity are due to Cambray (2009), Halpern (2020), Main (2004, 2007), Mansfield (1995), or Peat (1988).

Psychophysical Correlations

The comprehension of the concept of synchronicity is crucially facilitated by the metaphysical framework of dual-aspect monism. Historically pioneered by Spinoza (1677) and Schelling (1809), it conceives the mind-matter distinction as an epistemic split of a psychophysically neutral domain, arising from its decomposition. The result is a tripartite picture of reality with the mental M and the physical P as two aspects of a psychophysically neutral domain PPN that is neither mental nor physical.

The Pauli-Jung conjecture (Atmanspacher and Fuchs 2014) reconstructs, develops, and refines a modern version of decompositional dual-aspect monism proposed by Jung together with physics Nobel laureate Wolfgang Pauli. The emerging tripartite conception of reality widens the scope beyond the limitations of traditional single-partite (physicalist, idealist) and bipartite (dualist) ways of thinking and offers space for phenomena eluding those traditions.

The psychophysically neutral domain is the arena populated by universal dynamic patterns, neither mental nor physical, that Jung called archetypes. Their manifestations co-create decomposed mental and physical events together with correlations between these events. These psychophysical correlations are the core for a systematic understanding of synchronistic experiences. They provide an explanatory framework for synchronicities; a unique benefit over and above their experience as such.

Pauli and Jung discussed such correlations extensively in their correspondence preceding Jung’s article on synchronicity in the book they published jointly (Jung and Pauli 1952). In compact form, two (or more) seemingly accidental, but not necessarily simultaneous, events are called synchronistic if the following conditions are satisfied. (For detailed discussion of related definitions see Main 2004, part 1.)

1. A synchronistic experience links internally conceived mental and externally perceived physical events.
2. Any presumption of a direct causal relationship between the events is absurd or even inconceivable.
3. The link between the events is substantiated by a common meaning, often expressed symbolically.

 

The first criterion expresses that synchronicities are intrinsically relational psychophysical phenomena, intractable when dealing with mind or matter alone. The second criterion emphasizes the inapplicability of causation in the narrow sense of a conventional cause-and-effect-relation between the mental and the physical. And the third criterion suggests the concept of meaning rather than causation as a way to substantiate psychophysical correlations – a proposal by Jung that appears as brilliant as radical. No one less than the outstanding logician and mathematician Kurt Gödel accentuated the role of meaning as an extension of causation in a worldview broader than that of science alone (Gödel 1961):

The idea that everything in the world has a meaning is an exact analogue of the principle that everything has a cause, on which rests all of science.

Since the mental and physical events whose correlation establishes synchronicities are not necessarily temporally simultaneous, the term synchronicity may be worthy of amelioration. For this reason Pauli preferred to speak of meaningful correspondences under the influence of an archetypal acausal ordering. He considered synchronicity as a profound expansion beyond the standard scientific view of causally grounded correlations, exactly as expressed by the Gödel quote.

If acausal psychophysical correlations between M and P are substantiated by meaning, they satisfy the definition of synchronicity. A proper understanding of their origin, however, relies on archetypal activity in PPN which orchestrates – enables and constrains – events in M and P. This implies that synchronistic experiences are not arbitrary (thus, not random) but depend on the activation of some archetypal pattern with its associated symbolic density (Hogenson 2005). The range of possibly attributable meanings is always limited by the specific archetypal activity from which a synchronistic experience arises.

Structural versus Induced Correlations

The development of Pauli’s and Jung’s views about archetypes and their role in orchestrating synchronicities suggests a distinction between two basically different kinds of psychophysical correlations: “structural” ones versus “induced” ones (Atmanspacher and Fach (2013).
Structural correlations refer to the role of archetypes as ordering factors with a unidirectional influence of PPN upon M and P (Pauli 1948). They originate from psychophysically neutral archetypes and are manifested as correlated mental and physical events. Structural correlations are a straighforward consequence of the basic structure of dual-aspect monism. They are persistent and empirically reproducible, such as psychosomatic correlations.

Induced correlations refer to the backreaction that changes of conscious men-tal events in M induce in PPN and from there, indirectly, in P as well. (Likewise, physical events in P can induce backreactions in PPN, which lead to changes in M.) In this way, the picture is extended to bidirectional influences (Pauli 1954). In contrast to structural, persistent correlations, induced correlations depend on all kinds of contexts. They occur only occasionally and are elusive and generally not reproducible.

While structural correlations define a baseline of ordinary, robust psychophysical correlations, induced correlations entail deviations above or below this baseline. Induced positive correlations, above the baseline, are experienced as excess correlations. Synchronistic experiences in the sense Jung originally proposed belong to this class. Induced negative correlations, below the baseline, are experienced as deficit correlations.

The distinction between excess and deficit correlations leads to two different ways in which mental and physical events are experienced as connected or disconnected above or below ordinary baseline correlations. In coincidence phenomena ordinarily disconnected elements of M and P appear connected; in dissociation phenomena ordinarily connected elements of M and P appear disconnected.

1. Coincidence phenomena are experienced as acausal meaningful links coupling mental and physical events. Meaning is attributed to a physical event in relation to a particular mental state. Spatiotemporal restrictions may appear as inefficacious, so that correlated events in M and in P may not occur simultaneously (as in Cassandra-type prophecies).
2. Dissociation phenomena are experienced when autonomous behavior occurs without being deliberately set into action, such that subjects lose control over their bodies and P appears decoupled from M. Out-of-body experiences, sleep paralysis and forms of involuntary behavior are among the phenomena in this class.

This taxonomy follows from the dual-aspect model and yields options to investigate psychophysical correlations based on the phenomenology of their experience. Couldn’t this be an excellent theoretical fundament for the classification of non-ordinary experiences? The intensity of a synchronicity increases with its distance from the baseline, up to numinous experiences that are not reproducible almost by default. By contrast, baseline phenomena as in psychosomatics or psychophysics are largely reproducible as distributions reflecting the variability of the phenomena.

Such an approach to reproducibility relaxes the standard scientific criterion of reproduciblity from a binary one-or-nothing principle to a graded continuum. This is in line with Pauli’s insistence that attempts to establish synchronistic experiences by the statistics of large numbers are doomed to fail: a category mistake that abuses laws relevant within the physical for phenomena relating the physical to the mental. In this spirit, he sardonically wrote to Jung about the astrological study in his synchronicity article that its inconclusive outcome “totally meets my expectations” (Pauli 1950).

A Door to Spirituality

This is not the place for an in-depth review of the numerous empirical studies of psychophysical correlations supporting the taxonomy just mentioned. For details see the voluminous dissertation by Fach (2024) and many analyses of empirical material from clinical psychology, conducted by various research groups; for examples see Atmanspacher and Rickles (2022). Moreover, psychophysical and psychophysiological follow-up studies with selected samples of subjects show details within the taxonomy that further support its validity.

We owe all these promising results to the fact that synchronistic experiences, viewed as psychophysical correlations between the mental M and the physical P, can be empirically investigated in terms of their taxonomy. However, how about the link from both M and P to the psychophysically neutral PPN as their common ground? Both Pauli and Jung basically were hesitant, in neo-Kantian fashion, about any direct empirical access to the neutral domain. However, the late Jung overcame this reluctance in his Mysterium Coniunctionis (Jung 1963). At the end of his magnum opus Jung discusses the unio mentalis, a conjunction between the mental M and the neutral PPN whose experience can have deep transformative impact on the life of the experiencing subject. In addition to synchronicities as psychophysical correlations between M and P only, the unio mentalis realizes an entry into archetypal dynamics itself, the ground from which all our mental activity arises.

It opens the door to a topic that has been addressed in the history of mystic experiences over many centuries, from Plotinus to Master Eckhart and Nicholas of Cusa and many others – not to mention numerous Eastern traditions (com-pare the comprehensive account by Stace 1961). Experiences of unio mentalis transcend the mental and the physical with their correlations. They offer a conceptual locus for spirituality in the profoundly expanded worldview that dual-aspect thinking proposes.

In addition to the M-PPN coupling, another link, not so obvious to Jung, was addressed by Pauli early on: the relation between P and PPN. Archetypal activity is not only correlated with mental events but, according to Pauli (1948) would also have to put forth, create, condition anything lawlike in the behavior of the corporeal world. The laws of this world would then be the physical manifestations of the archetypes.

Exactly this topic stimulated the mathematical physicist Wigner (1960) to talk about the “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences”, an effectiveness that he recognized as almost miraculous. It becomes intelligible if mathematical structures as such are conceived as psychophysically neutral, as many first-rate mathematicians believe. Then their link to the physical domain P establishes the P-PPN coupling, exactly as dual-aspect thinking suggests – a kind of unio physicalis that may be a complement to Jung’s unio mentalis.

Summary

The philosophical framework of dual-aspect monism `a la Pauli and Jung stipulates that experiences based on psychophysical correlations are misconstrued if they are reified physically (plus some mental context) or mentally (plus some physical context). Genuinely psychophysical phenomena are most properly regarded as relations between the physical and the mental, not as entities in the physical or mental realm.

This challenging idea elucidates why meaning as an intrinsically relational concept is so essential for synchronistic experiences. Although the meaning of a synchronicity is experienced mentally, it is important to realize that its conceptual location is that of a correlation linking the mental and the physical – something which might be seen as a meaning field.

The dual-aspect model entails a taxonomy of such correlations that by now is supported by a huge amount of empirical data. Moreover, it opens the door to a psychophysically neutral domain of reality that may be subject to experience as well. This is the realm of mystical experiences, as they have been reported in much spiritual literature East and West.

At the end of this essay, I cannot resist the temptation to finish with a remark on the cautionary side. All the recent progress in support of the Pauli-Jung conjecture and all future progress to be expected are no invitation to gullibly proclaim every coincidence that science does not explain as a synchronicity. A most effective way to spoil a precious concept is its inflationary misuse, lacking the prudence of recognizing its limitations.

References

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