Synchronicity: The Universe as a Unified Web of Information

The other day I had a strange urge to get some root beer. So I headed to the grocery store and picked up a 6 pack of A & W diet root beer in 16.9 oz bottles. I hadn't had any in a long time so it sure tasted good.

The next morning at work, I noticed my office mate drinking a 16.9 oz bottle of you guessed it-A & W root beer. I said "thats funny, I just got some last night". 

At first sight the skeptic might suggest, after yelling out the word "coincidence", that I had previously seen my office mate drinking A & W root beer. Then I filed it away in my subconscious, where it languished until surfacing in my strange desire to get root beer. But, after telling my office mate about my purchase, he said "yeah yesterday my wife went and got me some, I hadn't had it in years".

Funny little coincidences like this fill our lives-if only we would be aware enough to look for them. But while we might brush them off as having no meaning-as being nothing other than random events-it might pay to learn something about the phenomenon of synchronicity. 

According to the Wikipedia entry on synchronicity, the definition is as follows:

"Synchronicity is the experience of two or more events which are causally unrelated occurring together in a supposedly meaningful manner. In order to count as synchronicity, the events should be unlikely to occur together by chance."

Scientists are generally skeptical of this notion. To them, causality is a rigorous A ---> B phenomenon where A and B have to be in physical contact. To them, the universe has no meaning, its just a machine-a cog in which we find ourselves experiencing our lives, and that experience is just an illusion.

Of course most of us know better and what's really interesting is that science itself-although its slow to recognize this-is actually coming in line with what people experience as synchronicity. The mechanism? Quantum physics.

Within the branch of science known as quantum mechanics there exists a curious phenomenon-perhaps the most important discovered in the 20th century-something called entanglement. 

When two particles interact, they become connected. But this connection doesn't exist in the conventional sense of science. The particles are not connected by some kind of light or radio signal. There is no "force" between them. They can be separated across the universe and the connection will hold. What has happened is that two particles-once separate-have become one. Their separate identities have vanished and in their place, there exists a unified whole.

If subatomic particles can become entangled then there can be no doubt that its possible for anything that exists in the universe to become entangled-including minds. But what is it that flows between entangled particles? Its information. And that is what synchronicity is all about.

Synchronicity is the flow of information through the universe. Sometimes the information might be clear, sometimes it might be fuzzy, sometimes it may be symbolic or at other times it might have trivial meaning. That's how conscious decisions like two people, not in direct contact, come up with the same "coincidental" idea-buy root beer. 

The universe exists not as a collection of separate entities, but as a continuous, unbroken whole. The most important part of the universe is not the materialistic world of subatomic particles and mindless forces, no-its information. When it boils down to it information is all there is. Indeed what is a person? As Lee Smolin pointed out in his book Three Roads to Quantum Gravity, a person isn't an object- a person is a story. And what is a story? Its nothing but information.