the frequent coincidences :)...

okay...aside from my bouts of sleepless nights (no matter how tired or sleepy i am!), one weird thing has been happening to me for the past whole week. okay, some of you may not find it weird but to me, it is weird in a sense...it's happening much too often for my sake hahaha.

the weird thing i'm talking about here is my frequent run in with....taa daaa ..'COINCINDENCE' (well, it should be plural since it has been happening quite a lot hehe) :). yeah yeah, i know it's not a big deal and there's isn't much value to it for me to announce it to the whole world through my blog hahaha (then again, since when did my blog has any value? hahaha), but i just find it quite interesting for its frequent happenings haha.

the coincidences are just minor...it just so happens that whenever a person suddenly comes into mind..even the most unexpected ones, i would likely get a call or a message from them. now tell me, how weird is that?! hahaha.

i was trying to look for a simple coherent or comprehensible explanation on this topic but didn't find anything much (then again, only browsed through 2 pages in the search engine before stopping hahaha). the closest i got was this: 'Why do we need to explain why coincidences occur?'.

according to the author:

'Back in the large group, the discussion opened with the claim that it is impossible to know whether or not there is any real cause for coincidences, because they are by definition unrepeatable. But does this lack of scientific proof mean that coincidences cannot be meaningful? To answer this question, Guy suggested a distinction between objective and subjective modes of perception: science (objective perception) may be just one among many “narratives” we use to explain the way we experience the world. I suggested that, if the science of coincidence is taken to relate to objective perception, then the proper focus of the philosophy of coincidence would be subjective perception. The important question, then, is not “is something really happening when we perceive a coincidence?” but rather “why do we attribute meaning to some events but not to others?” This is not merely a psychological question, but a question asking for philosophical justification to back up such attribution of meaning.

The scientific criteria for a coincidence to be meaningful is for the event (or set of events) to have a low probability. But there may be alternative ways of providing philosophical justification. One person aptly suggested that such justification depends on a person’s perspective. For example, is the outcome of a lottery “coincidental”? In the most general sense, no, because there is always a winner. Yet to the individual who wins, it will probably feel like a meaningful (statistically improbable) coincidence.

One member who was clearly in favor of seeing as many coincidences as possible opined that coincidence are God’s way of masking miracles. He followed this with an interesting question: do we feel good because we experience a coincidence? Or do we experience coincidence because we feel good? I thought that was a potentially fruitful question. However, nobody followed up on it.

Instead, we concluded on a rather pessimistic note. One person reminded us that anecdotes do not make good philosophical arguments, since they can be used to prove almost anything. Another reminded us that some coincidences can be bad, making us feel worse about ourselves, not better. Yet another added that some people might even blame God for certain types of (unwanted) coincidences. Fortunately, Guy ended the meeting on a somewhat lighter note, by telling a story Jung relates, about a time when he was helping a client interpret a dream about a certain type of beetle, when just such a beetle flew in the window of his office and landed on his desk!'

come to think of it, the above doesn't have much relevance to this entry hahaha. so, enough talking...and have a good weekend peeps :).

ps: as usual...still sleepy...hahaha