Abstract
Discussions of synchronicity tend to focus either on the meaningful content of the experience, or on speculation about possible mechanisms underlying the phenomena. The present paper suggests that the symbolic or meaningful content of some synchronistic phenomena are themselves governed by identifiable dynamics associated with the emergence of symbol systems generally. Specifically, these dynamics are associated with complex dynamical systems theory and give rise to phenomena governed by power laws such as Zipf’s law. It is suggested that synchronicities, which display distinctly symbolic features, behave in ways that conform to power-law distributions in which highly coupled systems form rare outlier aggregations referred to as "dragon kings". This terminology is explained and related to the experience of synchronistic phenomena.
:mao-shining:
Conclusion
Let me finally return to the remarks I made about Jung’s interest in scarabs, as well as the patient’s dream and the advent of the chaffer. The scarab beetle event, in essence, resembles a tightly coupled, homogeneous system thatis about to undergo a process of catastrophic self-organization: a synchronicity. As Sornette (2009, p. 11) remarks regarding the emergence of dragon kings: “The key idea is that catastrophic events involve interactions between structures at many different scales that lead to the emergence of transitions between collective regimes of organization.” These interactive processes, as Sornette and Ouillon (2012) explain, create amplifying feedback loops in the aggregate system that push the system into a global phase transition.
In the case of the scarab, we have Jung and his patient evidently under considerable pressure – she is very rational, the work is not progressing, they are stuck. In this situation, the dream introduces a symbolism that captures not only the patient, but, importantly, Jung as well or even in particular. With the appearance of the chaffer, the aggregate system of Jung-patient-symbolism produces just such an undamped tightly coupled amplifying feed-back loop that pushes the systems into a global phase transition. As Jung remarks, this rearranges the entire structure of the analysis. This is the process, I would suggest, that makes at least this synchronistic event, but perhaps others as well, into a dragon king.
References
Bak P. (1996): How Nature Works: The Science of Self-Organized Criticality, Copernicus, New York.
Bishop P. (2000): Synchronicity and Intellectual Intuition in Kant, Swedenborg, and Jung, Edwin Mellon Press, Lampeter.
Deacon T. W. (1997): The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain, W.W. Norton, New York.
Deacon T. W. (2006): Emergence: The hole at the wheel’s hub. In The Re-Emergence of Emergence, ed. by P. Clayton and P. Davies, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 111–150.
Ferrer-i-Cancho R., and Sole R.V. (2003): Least effort and the origins ofscaling in human language. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA100(3), 788–791.
Hendricks-Jansen H. (1997): The epistemology of autism: Making a case for an embodied, dynamic, and historical explanation. Cybernetics and Systems28(5), 359–415.
Hogenson G.B. (2001): The Baldwin effect: A neglected influence on C.G.Jung’s evolutionary thinking.Journal of Analytical Psychology,46, 591–611.
Hogenson G.B. (2004): Archetypes: Emergence and the psyche’s deep structure. In Analytical Psychology: Contemporary Perspectives in Jungian Analysis, ed. by J. Cambray and L. Carter, Brunner-Routledge, Hove, pp. 32–55.
Jung C.G. (1971): Psychological Types or the Psychology of Individuation,ed. by H.G. Baynes, Harcourt Brace, New York.
Jung C.G. (1952): Synchronicity: An acausal connecting principle. InCol-lected Works Vol. 8, transl. by R.F.C. Hull, Princeton University Press,Princeton, pp. 419–519.
Main R. (2004):The Rupture of Time: Synchronicity and Jung’s Critique of Modern Western Culture, Brunner-Routledge, Hove.
Main R. (2007): Ruptured time and the reenchantment of modernity. In Who Owns Jung?, ed. by A. Casement, Karnac, London, p. 19–38.
Mandelbrot B. (1981): Scalebound or scaling: A useful distinction in the visual arts and in the natural sciences. Leonardo14, 45–47.
Mandelbrot B. (1997): Fractals and Scaling in Finance: Discontinuity, Concentration, Risk, Springer, New York.
McLaughlin B. and Bennett K. (2011): Supervenience. In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. by E.N. Zalta. This article is accessible at plato.stanford.edu/entries/supervenience/.
Rebeiro B.T. (1994): Coherence in Psychotic Discourse, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Sornette D. and Ouillon G. (2012): Dragon kings: Mechanisms, statisticalmethods and empirical evidence.European Physical Journal: Special Topics205, 1–26.
Sornette D. (2009): Dragon kings, black swans and the prediction of crisis. International journal of Terraspace Science and Engineering2(1), 1–18.
Sornette D. (2003): Why Stock Markets Crash: Critical Events in Complex Financial Systems, Princeton University Press, Princeton.
Spitzer M. (1992): Word-associations in experimental psychiatry: A historical perspective. In Phenomenology, Language and Schizophrenia, ed. by M. Spitzer, F.A. Uehleinand, M.A. Schwartz and C. Mundt, Springer, NewYork, pp. 160–196.
Vogt P. (2004): Minimum cost and the emergence of the Zipf-Mandelbrotlaw. InArtifical Life IX, ed. by J. Pollack, M. Bedau, P. Husbands,T. Ikegami, and R.A. Watson, MIT Press, Cambridge, pp. 214–319.
Zipf G.K. (1949):Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort, Addison-Wesley, Cambridge.