Presentation time:
40 min
Discussion time:
5 min
Lead author:
Peter Holland (CGJISF)
In the opening paragraph of ‘Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle’, published together with a monograph by the quantum theorist Wolfgang Pauli in 1952, Jung wrote that modern physics has shattered our deterministic world view, replacing causal certainty by statistical truths. He saw a need to posit another type of connection that is not part of the system of causality of natural laws, to explain the actual events we see around us. Jung proposed synchronicity as a principle of connection arising from psyche’s search for meaning, with an archetypal basis. There are parallels to this psychological hypothesis in atomic science. For a hundred years, modern physics has wrestled with the question of what makes the reality we perceive solid and definite, even though quantum mechanics shows it is based on chance. This is connected to the problem of measurement, or the collapse of the wave function, in which one reality is selected from many; Ernst Schrödinger gave a vivid example of the wave function of a cat that is a superposition of dead and alive, leading to the question of how it is always found to be one or the other. In what is still the dominant interpretation of quantum mechanics, associated with Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in and shortly after 1925, there are limits to what we can know of ultimate physical reality. An act of observation yields only a partial truth. There are different features, such as position and momentum, that are complementary; to know one is to be uncertain about the other. This principle of complementarity was clearly attractive to Jung, owing to its emphasis on opposites, and the importance of the individual observer. Physicists were also influenced by psychological ideas: Bohr acknowledged a debt to William James' description of incompatible kinds of thought processes in our stream of consciousness. Jung's concept of synchronicity has a relation to a speculation of theoretical physicist John Wheeler, that events in the psyche, associated with choices in our acts of observation, create the universe, not just the future but the past, back to the origin, the Big Bang.
Jung emphasized that his acausal connecting principle was not constrained by the usual limitations of space and time. A physical event far away or in the future can be meaningfully linked to a psychological event in the present. In 1964 the physicist John Bell showed that probabilities of distant events are inextricably entwined, in a way that defies the expectation that causes are localized in time and space. It turns out that at a microscopic level, objects, or particles, are not separate entities, but connected to each other, even when very far apart, with no possibility of a signal passing between them. In this presentation, I explore the fascinating overlap between contemporary physics and one of Jung’s most important ideas, a correspondence in the last century that may be considered an example of cultural synchronicity.