Talking Carl Jung with Laura London
Quote:This week we welcome to the show fellow podcaster, Laura London. Laura has a background in neuroscience, astrology, kundalini yoga and Transcendental Meditation.
She is the host of one of my favourite podcasts, Speaking of Jung and joins us today to have a wide-ranging chat about -what else?- but Carl Jung himself.
Quote:Show Notes
'Historically, we may regard materialism as a system of dogma set up to combat orthodox dogma...Accordingly we find that, as ancient orthodoxies disintegrate, materialism more and more gives way to scepticism.'
- Bertrand Russell
Synchronicity, Causality, Acausality
Lance Storm
Quote:Much criticism has been leveled at C. G. Jung’s theory of synchronicity, usually as a result of misunderstanding certain key, but often obscure, concepts used by Jung in his major essay Synchronicity(1960). The issues of meaningfulness, causality, and acausality are discussed, since synchronicity is by definition “a coincidence in time of two or more causally unrelated events which have the same or a similar meaning” (Jung, 1960, para. 849). Synchronicity is contrasted with coincidence as a “meaningless chance grouping,” and the Law of Large Numbers is shown not to give account of all cases of ostensible synchronicity. Braude’s (1979) philosophical criticism against synchronicity stems partly from an incomplete consideration of Jung’s understanding of the word “meaning,” and the semantic quandary of what constitutes a cause, and what constitutes contingence. Quantum mechanics has forced the marginalization of historical (efficient) causality as the only cause-and-effect explanation of all phenomena, while scientific (sufficient) causality explains on pragmatic grounds both quantum effects, and paranormal phenomena (psi) because they have “consistency and repeatability” (Mansfield, Rhine-Feather & Hall, 1998, p. 20). Mansfield et al. argue that psi is historically acausal but scientifically causal, whereas synchronistic phenomena (also historically acausal) are too “sporadic and unpredictable” (p. 20) to be considered scientifically causal. Jung’s (1960) and Braud’s (1983) experiments challenge this latter assumption. Both synchronicity and psi are chance-like in mani-festation, but their effects can be determined statistically, while many forms of psi phen-omena are shown to be meaningful, as is synchronicity. It is suggested that generally psi and synchronicity are more alike than Mansfield et al. claim, and that synchronicity and psi are scientifically causal for another reason: synchronistic archetypal contingence is no different in effect than psi-permissive and psi-conducive conditions, which may all be described as meta-causal.
'Historically, we may regard materialism as a system of dogma set up to combat orthodox dogma...Accordingly we find that, as ancient orthodoxies disintegrate, materialism more and more gives way to scepticism.'
- Bertrand Russell
![[-]](https://psiencequest.net/forums/images/collapse.png)