14 DAY TRIAL // Finding a subject to talk about every week, pondering about it, as something meaningful and worthy enough to share with everyone else on an Internet site, is a difficult job indeed. This is because, for example, you don't always find something interesting, appealing and meaningful enough to write about.
I must admit that, having been under a mass media siege lately, regarding the current state of the roads in Romania and Bucharest, in particular, I was slightly drawn into writing about it, but then I thought this is a problem that everyone is really tired of?just like any other political, social or economic issue our country is going through at the moment.
People hear about and experience them every single day, so there's no need for someone else to complain about them. Then, having no other idea what to write about, I thought maybe I should explore nothingness, and attempt an all-side philosophical approach on the concept, but this requires more in-depth research, pondering, and so on, and I will probably leave it for next week.
While taking a "stroll" on the Internet to see what's new and interesting, I found my next topic, which I believe is something we confronted at least once in our lives: coincidences. I must say that I've always asked myself about what coincidences are and what they mean and, why not, whether or not they are meaningful enough to take into consideration. Are they a meaningless stream of unrelated events from an objective point of view and we subjectively place them into contexts that connect them?
Should people give a higher meaning, purpose or guidance to everyday coincidences, close calls and statistical impossibilities, or think that everything that is going on around us is the result of lucky accidents of evolution, and deliberately not choose to categorize a fundamentally random world?
For those who go for empirical pieces of evidence, a coincidence is probably a clash between two events that have no connection between themselves, and the clash itself presents no special significance since it obeys the laws of probability.
John Allen Paulos, a professor of Mathematics at Temple University in Philadelphia and the best-selling author of "Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences" stated that probably the most incredible coincidence of all coincidences would be the absence of all coincidence, and THAT would be dreadful for humans, since the belief in the significance of coincidences makes people think they are more important. Lack of coincidence, or lack of meaningful coincidences (let's face it, people think all coincidences are meaningful, they must mean SOMETHING) would plunge people into despair. For those who have a mystical inclination, coincidences probably run on the synchronicity principle, the occurrence of two seemingly unrelated events that has a meaningful impact.
Although this is not the type of subject to find resolution anytime soon, it seems that mathematicians, cognitive scientists and paranormal researchers are using statistics to understand where exactly do coincidences lie in our everyday life and determine if we really are genetically inclined to connect anomalies in a meaningful way, through the remarkable features of our brain. So, can coincidences be explained in an easy manner or they are so improbable that they have to mean something?
MIT cognitive scientist, Josh Tenenbaum, says: "On the one hand they (coincidences) seem to be the source of our greatest irrationalities - seeing causal connections when science tells us they aren't there. On the other hand, some of our greatest feats of scientific discovery depend on coincidences." He claims that we, humans, could not learn language and syntax if we didn't have the capacity to notice strange coincidences (children between the ages of 1 and 5 learn an average of five words a day), like for example the word "dog". In order to understand what this word means, you first have to understand the name of the dog, the type and then connect them: all dogs, all mammals, all animals, all Labradors (for example), all (black) Labradors, all running creatures, all furry creatures and so on.
Moreover, Tenenbaum demonstrated that humans can meaningfully generalize from just an example, or examples of a new word: "Coincidences drive so many of the inferences our minds make. Our neural circuitry is set up to notice these anomalies and use them to drive new learning. There is an old saying that neurons that fire together, wire together. So you could say that coincidence operates at the level of the synapse, whenever neurons fire at the same time". So if we're somewhat programmed to see connections all the time, then maybe sometimes we see them where they don't exist. But aren't we sometimes fooled about this all too often?
If you ask mathematicians who study the laws of probability, they will tell you that there are 5 million minutes in 10 years, which means that there is a lot of time for seemingly remarkable things to happen during such a long time. Statisticians build on that, adding that there are 6 billion people on this planet, which means increased chances that events that can be put in the "coincidence" category might happen. To that you may also add the environment of modern life, which is rich with information and in itself, a source for coincidences. Paulos says that even so called "prophetic" dreams can be explained by probability, if we take into consideration how many people in the world sleep and dream, for that matter, at the same time. Some of their dreams are bound to coincide with real events.
Although we are famously inaccurate at predicting probabilities, from a mathematical point of view, we're actually very good at deducing probabilities, as long as the data is presented in a way that people can relate to: "Asking people for an arbitrary number in terms of probability - such as 'What are the odds that three people share the same birthday?' - is asking them to perform a strange calculation. But we are extremely good at noticing data that might have an underlying common cause", said Tenenbaum.
He performed an experiment with Stanford University undergraduates, showing them 14 sets of birth dates, which were either random (unrelated birthdays) or coincidence (like 3 or 4 birthdays in one day) and asking them to rate, on a scale of 1 to 10, how big a coincidence each set of birth dates would be. The results showed that there was a strong correlation between human intuition about coincidence and the correct probability, which means that if we change the way we shape questions about probability, we would realize that humans are quite very good at sensing the uniqueness of an event.
