2021-12-30 | Synchronicity

Hello, Charlie here.

I took another walk, a much shorter one this time with less awkwardness. I went the route I was originally going to take on my last walk only this time I ran into people before even reading the first lane. It was a couple with a pram, they were speaking about Blackberry Lane so I assumed this was the name of the lane we were walking along. I sped up so as not to invade their personal space too much. I decided that I would continue walking until I ran into some kind of "interesting" landmark. As I walked I passed by a lady who kindly asked how I wasn't cold in the clothes I was wearing (just jeans and a t-shirt) after I said hello to her. This mirrored a viral video I saw earlier (before the walk, not earlier today) in which a lady was asked by a man in a suit to help him with his tie and she made a similar comment after rubbing his hands. She gave him a heat pack to keep him warm. The guy had been asking strangers to tie his tie as a social experiment. I eventually reached a house and there were several people gathered a little further down the road. This was a double whammy of wanting to turn back so I did so and passed two groups. First there was the couple I saw earlier. I said hello to them and the guy asked if it was flooded up ahead. I still find it a little weird that he asked this. Like seriously what was he thinking why a flood it wasn't even raining. Anyway after that I passed a women and her two children, a boy and a girl. I said hello to all of them. As I approached a farm near to the bypass I saw a father with a child up ahead travelling in the same direction as me. I then turned left back towards the house and passed a couple. As I got near to them I put on my mask and they gave me a bit of a weird look as they passed me. Anyway that was really just a test of my memory though I could have likely remembered more. Not sure how interesting a story about an uneventful walk will be in the future. Only interesting part was the guy asking about the flood but even that isn't that interesting, just an odd topic of conversation. Much like this story as a whole.

Anyway I also discovered Romanesco cauliflower  (pictured left). It's weird that the word Romanesco is capitalised in the name of a vegetable though it kinda makes sense on further reflection because Romanesco is a proper noun. It's very cool/interesting looking, I discovered it on a drugs subreddit. It was there due to its trippy, fractal appearance. I definitely plan on buying some if possible and perhaps even growing some in the future. I also think it could be good to plant a new tree in the garden here. I think it's a real shame that two have been chopped down with no replacement.

I had an interesting experience listening to my playlist 'a' on Spotify. I was lying in the dark with headphones and it honestly felt like I was tripping as I listened. I didn't see any visuals but my headspace felt altered and I felt massively increased appreciation for the music. It is a playlist of my best music but all the same it sounded better than usual. There were a few songs which didn't quite match the rest but I will leave them for now and remove any which I am still not enthusiastic about on my next listen. This feeling began not as I started listening but during, perhaps I just got into a good mood hearing some of the really good music I know about.

'Big Fish Theory' album cover

Speaking of music I find it interesting how the artists I listen to are so interlinked. Today I finally got round to listening to Vince Staple's album Big Fish theory. I got onto it when Mick Jenkins said something about talking to a big fish in his album The Waters. Being the weirdo I am I went over to the track Big Fish from the album (the only song from the album I had saved) and tried to talk with it. It didn't work at first and I figured this was because I had already listened to it and with me knowing the lyrics there was no way I could get any kind of response. Right after I thought this Mr Staples says "Know what I'm saying?" which was an interesting experience. I decided to listen to the rest of the album and there was one song (Yeah Right) which I noticed sounded similar to another I know called Faceshopping by Sophie. I tried to find the sample used and it turns out that Sophie produced on that track.

I went back to check whether Sophie produced the album or the track and then, realising that Vince was using other producers on that album, also wanted to check whether the track Big Fish was produced by Flume since their music is similar in sound. I first clicked on the track Yeah Right from Sophie's profile and saw that it was produced by Flume as well as Sophie. I then went to Big Fish and it turned out to be produced by somebody else called Christian Rich. At the time of writing this post I was listening to 50 Shades of Grey in the background (one of the main characters is called Christian Grey and he is very rich). This is what my existence is like now. This guy Christian Rich could've been named anything but of course he had to be named something related to my current situation.

When I was writing the previous paragraph I first wrote "their music" referring to Flume but changed it to "her music" thinking that Flume was female. When I went to change it to "her" Christian Grey from the movie said "stay still" just as I was about to change it. I noticed but went through with changing it. However, doubting myself I looked up Flume as I wasn't really sure about their gender. It turned out that they present as male. As I was typing this part of the paragraph about hearing the movie talking to me Grey asked "everything okay with the phone call?" as though I were having doubts about the whole synchronicity thing. I rather like it overall now that I'm used to it. Sometimes it can be frightening but other times very enjoyable. I was reading back over this paragraph to see how crazy I sounded and was thinking about something and then experienced synchronicity from my own writing. Also after writing this entire post I came back to add some images and make some minor changes only to experience synchronicity again from this same paragraph only now there was a line talking about experiencing synchronicity from my own writing immediately after it happened, crazy right? I was going to write about the synchronicity (from when I was first writing this post) but figured I could probably write about synchronicity all day at this rate. As I decided not to write about it I heard "I just figured that you forgot to tell me about it" from the film. I forgot what it was exactly but also didn't "tell" my blog (a.k.a. the outside world) "about it". Then the film said something about writing a thesis on something. Again I don't remember the specifics but it was talking about this blog and how this part especially is serving as a fairly detailed explanation of the synchronicity phenomenon (i.e. a thesis)
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I haven't watched any more of Squid Game recently but I have enjoyed what I've seen so far, especially the allegory. It's probably painfully obvious and perhaps I will cringe looking back on this at how simple the things which impressed me were. Nevertheless I am going to detail the two instances I have noticed so far.

Midway through the previous paragraph I started listening to music. I started with some Charli XCX and Nicotine by Sycco then listened to a new album by Low Roar. I experienced some synchronicity with this album the title had some low level stuff. I had started writing a paragraph about my use of lowercase text but decided against it. The album is called "maybe tomorrow...". Some of their albums use capitalisation and others do not. To break this down the text is lowercase and therefore raised the scrapped paragraph to the front of my mind and the content of the text indicates a possible intention to revisit the topic later (which I may do). Another similarly weak synchronicity was the title of the first track of the album which reminds me of some more links I have noticed. The track was titled "David". David is the code name of a certain person I met a few years back. The reason I say this was a weak synchronicity is that it was a seemingly random choice of name which related to my internal world but not anything specific I was thinking about at the time I read it. I see many of these but generally do not classify them as full synchronicity (though the song I was listening to at the time of writing [Do It by Charlie XCX] said "Do it!" as I wrote that, other lyrics as I wrote that also make me feel like I should continue to chronicle my experiences of synchronicity to amass proof and this does seem like a good format for gathering evidence) for two reasons. Firstly they happened before my perception of strong synchronicity began and many normal people report the same phenomenon. Secondly there is no good reason to believe anything supernatural is happening since it was purely my brain noticing a word or phrase I think about or have thought about recently. There was nothing else synchronic in the track titles and though there was a question which seemed somewhat topical (though most definitely weakly synchronic) nothing else particularly supernatural happened.

It seems to me that other people listening to or viewing a piece of art has little to no effect on its ability to be involved with synchronicity. There is a little difference when I have personally experienced the art before. A video I made myself that very few people if any are likely to have watched is equal to a pop song listened to by millions. If it is my first time experiencing something then synchronicity may be more specific and more frequent though it is not more likely to actually happen (i.e. it may happen more times but it may still not happen often if at all). This makes sense since there is less restriction on the words which can appear. If I have forgotten the words used then pre-experienced works may be somewhat specific. For example recently I was trying to understand something while listening to a Hip-Hop playlist. I asked for an explanation and then skipped to the next song which was Never Catch Me by Flying Lotus feat. Kendrick Lamar. Though I had listened to the song already the very first lyric gave a complete, accurate and immediately understandable answer to my question. I have no idea what the question was and listening to the song didn't jog my memory. I think it's unlikely I could recover the explanation through synchronicity and got two confirmations of this from the same song which I listened to as I wrote this first from the lyric "you will never ever catch me" and then from the lyric "You're right." which appeared as I was writing that. The reason I skipped a track was to reset the context.

Since most speech follows a logical train of thought it can be more difficult to get useful information from synchronicity in the middle of a context. If somebody is midway through a sentence then the possible words they can move to and directions they can take it are limited. If you skip a sentence or two (e.g. skipping a song or covering one's ears for several seconds) then there is a much wider available context space. I thought after writing the previous sentence that my terminology might be a little opaque and my eyes glanced up to earlier in the paragraph where I wrote the lyric "You're right." This doesn't seem like even a weak synchronicity to me but rather a message from my own subconscious since I went immediately to those words without reading any of the surrounding text right as I had the thought. It doesn't seem impossible that my brain's working memory contained at least some of the content of this paragraph and where it was on the screen though this would require me to anthropomorphise my subconscious a bit. I'm not sure if that is something which people tend to do but it could explain many aspects of synchronicity and the other seemingly supernatural phenomenon.

One aspect of synchronicity which I have seen people mention online and have certainly experienced myself is that sometimes it feels as though the outside world (e.g. music, film or even conversations happening nearby) is describing my life, both my history and the present moment. To anybody who hasn't experienced this I'm sure it's easy to dismiss as coincidence and I agree that if it happened just once in one song then the most likely cause it an overactive imagination. For me it goes deeper than that very often. Sometimes there are many references in quick succession. The Australian TV show Utopia's first few episodes were nigh-on life-changing when I first watched them. I believe I was already in a good mood and a fairly suggestable state with strong feelings of synchronicity going into it. I watched it out of curiosity after seeing there were more programmes named Utopia than I thought when searching for the US version of the UK show. The format of the show was ideal for synchronicity. Each scene was very short, almost all of them under a minute. The different scenes were largely unrelated conversations between varying numbers of characters. These short unrelated bursts of linguistic content allowed for synchronic events to take place seconds apart. Every thought I had would be reflected by the show. Some of the undertones of the show also reflected my mental landscape at the time of viewing. I had been thinking about religion and heaven at the time and there was an episode about building a garden which gave the writer plenty of opportunity to have characters speak about gardens (garden referring to a person's heaven). I had been thinking about what the ideal heaven would look like for me and for the universe as a whole so I would consider their comments about how the garden should be constructed to be strong synchronicity along with the multitude of undocumented instances of instant responses to thoughts throughout the early episodes. The synchronicity is still somewhat strong though I am saving the rest of the show for times when I think it will be useful (though I'm not sure exactly what its best use is just yet) or am told to watch it by other synchronic events.

The cast of Utopia

One explanation for synchronicity I have come up with so far was 'Algorithm Theory'. The basic idea requires that the human brain is in a sense programmable. Essentially a person's brain would synchronise with the outside world in some way to adhere to an algorithm. Everybody, or almost everybody, on Earth would be affected by this but not necessarily conscious of it. Things would be orchestrated unconsciously to occur in a certain order at a certain time. A writer writing a script for a show would structure it in such a way that a person watching could synchronise and then further responses would follow some kind of ordered pattern so the person's brain could think thoughts that would line up with the show. The directors and editors could insert the appropriate pauses and so on.

The easiest way to imagine algorithm theory would be live television with one channel. At a certain time each day (e.g. 16:04) there might be an affirmative. This could be the word 'yes' outright or a code word with similar meaning like 'eye' (which is a homophone of 'aye' the Scottish word for 'yes'). People could naturally learn to think of a question in their life which their subconscious thinks would be best answered affirmatively at that exact time of day while the television is on.

Since real life is more complex than everybody watching a single TV channel all day every day synchronisation would be necessary. If your brain was planning on streaming a certain TV show later it might try to delay actually starting the show. In a post-singularity world the stream could buffer for several seconds to aid in synchronisation. Obviously live television would be no problem to synchronise. Books might require the reader to memorise what part of the algorithm had been reached when they last stopped reading and pick up from there. Books, however, are where I see one of the biggest flaws in this idea (though it's possible that it could be adapted to accommodate this). Sometimes if I leaf through a book I can practically converse with it. It seems insane to think that my brain could know what page and word to go to in order to have a synchronic experience though obviously this whole synchronicity thing probably seems insane to anybody else. One experience I had was in Wells when I leafed through a fairly short romance novel with a red cover written by an author named Maggie about a female writer. I asked various questions and got comprehendible answers, as far as I can remember, every time the first time I leafed through it. This effect seemed to be reduced later on when I was asking for answers to quiz questions around other people. Of those two factors I think the quiz part is more likely to be the problem as I have experienced plenty of synchronicity around other people and since answering quiz questions consistently could kill the fun of quizzes (though I have gotten correct answers to quiz questions before from synchronicity and linguistic morphology it was not consistent nor repeatable enough to call it anything other than coincidence).

Algorithm theory is very different from artificial synchronicity. Artificial synchronicity can be consciously perceptible to the subject or not and may be an intentional inclusion by the author or not. It is essentially where some idea is planted in the subject's mind and later in the context a reference is made to a common response that could be appropriate to whatever was incepted. I've found it tough to think of an example off the top of my head (though I'm sure I could do so with a little more practice and that there are writers out there employing this technique) but I will be sure to find an example and include it in a later post.

I've written quite a bit today. I feel like my description of algorithm theory could be confusing so maybe I'll try to write more about it tomorrow. I think it's an unsatisfactory explanation overall mainly because it just doesn't feel right when thinking back to the myriad experiences I've had with synchronicity and linguistic morphology. I'm happy to leave it here. I hope you enjoyed reading, whoever and whenever you are.

By the way the song Bye Bye was playing from the Low Roar album I mentioned earlier just as I was about to write my signoff. Literally as I was about to start writing it the words "This is goodnight." were sung followed by "This is goodbye." so I guess I was right to finish when I did.

Bye!