Lothar Schafer - What is Synchronicity?

Synchronicity makes an extraordinary claim about reality—events may be linked in diverse and strange ways that defy all physical law, causality and common sense. What would it mean if events may relate to each other only by some kind of meaning, however obscure, not by some kind of physical interaction? This type of extraordinary claim demands extraordinary evidence.

Lothar Schafer is a quantum chemist and Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at the University of Arkansas.

For more videos on ESP and new realities: https://shorturl.at/aWw1I

A very interesting topic. This little phrasing for example, "events may be linked in diverse and strange ways that defy all physical law, causality and common sense". I was trying to think of something useful to add, because sometimes I find synchronicities in my life which feel perfectly natural and do make sense. Perhaps I'm meaning to say, common sense may need to be re-understood by including synchronicity within its scope, so that these things are accepted. As for the mention of physical law and causality, in my life I do see a kind of causality, just not one which follows mundane rules.

All of this is perhaps me musing on the nature of existence, of being, of living. These ideas don't make much sense if we separate them from living beings, they somehow describe what we are, in the context of a connectedness, so we aren't apart from the world we inhabit, but are a part of it.

[Laird]

I haven't watched the video in the OP, but this thread seems like the best place to post a link to this article without creating a new thread. Its author is perhaps best described as a "sympathetic skeptic".

Coincidences in My Life Have Me Wondering
June 25, 2026
George Musser
Nautilus

After college, I went backpacking through Africa, and at the Khartoum airport in Sudan I met an American guy named Chris. We explored together for a few days and went our separate ways. A month or two later, I stopped by the main post office in Nairobi, and there he was again: Chris. We chatted and parted. A few months on, I was playing soccer with some boys in a village in Malawi, and who should show up but Chris. A few weeks after that, I was trying to hitchhike and having no luck, when a car finally stopped. I need hardly say who was in it.

I feel the force of arguments that coincidences are probabilistic happenstance—but don’t feel entirely assuaged. A one-in-a-billion event may happen to someone somewhere several times a day, but it’s still unlikely that it will happen to you

But to question the skeptical arguments is not to accept ESP. We don’t need to swing between the extremes of spurious correlation or supernatural occurrence, because there is a third option. Some coincidences might be caused, or at least their odds shortened, by actual hidden structures in the world.

He floats a couple of ways in which this could occur:

• "Contagion", in which "ideas spread like a contagious disease", and "Unable to see the early stages of propagation, we think the idea has popped up in multiple places spontaneously, in what looks like sheer coincidence."
  
• "Stigmergy", in which people leave trails like ants, making it easier for others to follow, like when tourists visit a location, encouraging locals to set up hotels and restaurants that draw more tourists.