#29 - Synchronicity: your mind is entangled with the world

welcome back to the show that tells you you are a quantum computer with free will experiencing meaningful coincidences with the world around you my name is Justin riddle and this is episode 29 of the quantum Consciousness series in today's episode we'll be discussing synchronicity a coincidence that occurs between your thoughts and the physical world but seemingly Without a deterministic Cause by the end of today's episode we'll ask the question is synchronicity the physical manifestation of quantum entanglement at the human scale this episode is available on YouTube and an audio only version is available on Spotify and apple podcast if you like what you hear today then please like this video subscribe to this channel leave a comment below or for the audio listener write a review [Music] consciousness all right welcome back let's talk about synchronicity so to begin today's episode I'll just give a little background on this channel so this channel evolved from a course I taught at UC Berkeley and really this is sort of an extension further exploration of that material with a wider audience in my day job I'm a cognitive neuroscientist and I use electric and magnetic brain stimulation in human volunteers to better understand the role of neural oscillations in human cognition and hopefully develop novel treatments for psychiatric illness all right so let's get started on synchronicity so to give you a quick outline for the the episode I will introduce the idea of synchronicity first and then talk about possible mechanisms for how synchronicity might be implemented in quantum mechanics namely quantum entanglement which I'll introduce and potentially through other means that go beyond entanglement alone and then after that I will give a personal story about my own experiences with synchronicity and then a word of caution about psychosis and some of the the implications of thinking about synchronicity and just sort of dealing with some of the the counter arguments against it all right so I'm going to start off by reading to you a classic story from Carl Young who is A psychoanalyst from from our past and he coined the term synchronicity and there's this classic story that's told about him dealing with one of his patients that really just highlights synchronicity and really in his own experience was very profound to him all right so it goes as follows my example concerns a young woman patient who in spite of efforts made on both sides proved to be psychologically inaccessible the difficulty lay in the fact that she always knew better about everything her excellent education had provided her a weapon ideally suited to this purpose namely a highly polished Cartesian rationalism with an impeccable geometrical idea of reality after several fruitless attempts to sweeten her rationalism with a somewhat more human understanding I had to confine myself to the hope that something unexpected and irrational would turn up something that would burst the intellectual retort into which he had sealed herself while I was sitting opposite her one day with my back to the window listening to her flow of rhetoric she had an impressive dream the night before in which someone had given her a golden Scarab a costly piece of jewelry while she was still telling me this dream I heard something behind me gently tapping on the window I turned around and saw that it was a fairly large flying insect that was knocking against the window pane from the outside in the obvious effort to get into the dark room this seemed to me very strange I opened the window immediately and caught the insect in the air as it flew in it was a Scarab bead Beetle a common Rose chafer whose golden green color most nearly resembles that of a golden Scarab I handed the beetle to my patient with the words here is your Scarab this experience punctured the desired hole in her rationalism and broke the ice of her intellectual resistance the treatment can now be continued with satisfactory results so I think there's many things that this highlights one this really highlights the the core definition of synchronicity which as young puts it synchronicity is an a causal principle that can be defined by a meaningful coincidence which appears between a mental state and an event occurring in the external world and so in this story you have the beetle just appearing out of nowhere this random coincidence that perfectly matches the the moment in time that this woman is talking about the the Scarab dream right but I think what's most important here is that there's something deeply meaningful occurring where this was exactly what this woman needed to be able to sort of break through this hyper rationality which was preventing her from kind of opening up with her therapist here Carl Young in order to to more fully Explore her psyche and to just kind of tap into these human aspects of reality um as young puts it and being a scientist I experienced these types of people very commonly in my in my job right so just like young is describing this woman who's Super Hyper rational all the time in Academia and in science there's these people that just have this idea that everything needs to be deterministic and Hyper rational in this very structured simple way and they're just very close closed off to any sort of experience or any sort of explanation that goes beyond just this very deterministic causal physicalist framing of everything where everything in the brain is electricity and chemicals and just this this complex pattern of activity and everything is just emergent you know there is no inherent meaning there is nothing deeper going on it's just sort of this uh fun game of our of Our Lives where you know there is nothing really inherently meaningful and you're just along for the ride you disappear when you die and and that's that's it you know it's just very um this causes that this causes that this causes that and this causes that and it's so complex this complex chain of causality and then um and then we sort of emerge from that on on some level right and so I think a lot of this series is breaking down that when you actually dive into science Beyond just this superficial level you realize that fundamentally there is so much more mystery and unknown than you're being told you know and there's a lot of these um sort of Pop science figureheads in our mainstream culture and they're sort of selling to you this uh this science Narrative of yeah we got it all figured out we're just crossing the t's dot in the eyes you know we we understand the solar system it's just a bunch of deterministic forces and we're just this emergent chaotic property but life is fundamentally chaotic um and so I think we have been sold this narrative but diving into the science itself you realize it's a lot more mysterious and quantum mechanics is sort of at the core of this mystery and so even when quantum mechanics came out there was a lot of resistance to it so for example Albert Einstein never really bought into the full quantum mechanical wave of thinking because it invokes a lot of strange properties and so one example of this is quantum entanglement and so quantum entanglement is basically the principle that you can have a system and within this system there's two parts of the system that are then separated and when these two parts of the system are separated in space when you measure one of them you instantaneously change the other one right so let's say there's two photons they're separated when we interact or we you know measure it but really a measurement in quantum mechanics is just any sort of interaction with that Photon when we interact with it it instantaneously changes something about that other photon okay and this is sort of mind-blowing because prior to quantum entanglement the idea was that everything was local there was this local realism this local determinism where things had to cause one another sort of like billiard balls in in a pool table they need to bump into each other and interact physically and here we have this weird property where yeah this system is separated in space and they're simultaneously interacting so they're able to communicate non-locally right and this feels like telepathy between the photons the two photons are telepathically in communication with each other and so they know immediately when the other the other photon is having something happen to it right and so this kind of made a lot of scientists uncomfortable when quantum mechanics was coming out because it kind of flew in the face of this sort of local deterministic reality which was the status quo for for Science and I think even today you know the digital computer framework is very much this local realist way of viewing reality so when you talk about the the human brain as a digital computer or Consciousness as a digital computer you are using 100 strictly local realism in that description all of the fundamental moving Parts within a digital computer are local are deterministic and are just completely based in this early 1900s framing of the universe prior to the introduction of entanglement and superposition and these other wacky Quantum properties and so I think we still haven't updated our model of mind to fit within the modern quantum computer systems that are emerging in Quantum biology that's emerging and so we're gonna have to start grappling with these ideas of entanglement and so Carl Young got really fascinated by this new science that was emerging and he had experienced these meaningful coincidences that didn't seem to have an explanation that could be possible in the physical world so for that Scarab what are the chances that the Scarab is going to try to get into the room right when they're having this this really meaningful moment and that would be the exact thing that pushes you know the woman to to having a more receptive experience in this Psychotherapy this is exactly what needed to happen at that moment and so this kind of defies All Odds right and there's not really a way that the physical world would make that happen right either it's just the most wild coincidence ever and you know you lucked out um or there's something that could actually be driving synchronicity and so Carl Young went on this Quest where he was observing more and more synchronicities and this is sort of a reported experience that once you sort of open the door two experiencing synchronicities um you start experiencing more and more of them and so he reached a point where he was fully convinced that synchronicity was real and so he was looking for an explanation in modern physics or in science that could explain the occurrence of all these synchronicities and so he learned about quantum entanglement and he had conversations with many different um famous scientists in that era but he really hit it off with this guy Wolfgang Paulie and him and Wolfgang Paulie entertained the idea that synchronicity could be some sort of entanglement phenomenon right and so the idea is that you are entangled with the world around you and in a previous episode we talked about the quantum entanglement circuit where it's fairly easy to create quantum entanglement however it's difficult to sustain it's difficult to maintain in biological noisy systems but if there was some way to create entanglement relations between yourself and other people out in the world or other you know animals I guess or other you know organic systems then maybe making a measurement locally in your brain having this thought within your brain is going to change and alter some of the systems internally and if that system was entangled with something in the outside world then that thing in the outside world would also simultaneously change or vice versa the thing in the outside world changes and then suddenly something in your mind changes and you have a thought related to this event out in the external world right so this is sort of a in some ways like a mechanism for telepathy or some sort of uh non-local sharing of of information but it wouldn't be like digital information would just be like these weird coincidences Maybe so under this quantum entanglement model of synchronicity entanglement or the quantum information that's shared instantaneously has the experience of being a coincidence experience a coincidence and somehow this event occurred and it relates perfectly to what you were thinking about at that moment and there's no other explanation of some third thing causing your thoughts and causing the thing in your reality so that that's sort of a simple model and I think it this model might capture some elements of synchronicity and so I'm going to talk about a couple simpler forms of synchronicity so a simple form of synchronicity might be you think of a person and then they call you right and it's one of these things where you just you're thinking about that person that day and then suddenly they call you or you're thinking about someone in particular and then you run into them on the street coincidentally and you know out of the whole month of all 30 days in this month this was the one day you were really thinking about them and then this was the day you ran into them and it truly seemed like a coincidence right so how do you explain that well if we were to accept that your mind is a quantum computer therefore it has the ability to be entangled with other quantum computers out there in the world um you could theoretically have some sort of entanglement relation with a pass friend a past colleague and then measurement of your own mind would then change something in their mind and then and then this coincidence is brought upon upon itself um of course there's you know a million challenges to how this could ever be be possible um so in the laboratory we're getting better and better and better at generating quantum entanglement and making it sustainable for longer periods of time and across larger distances um however you know interacting with another person in the physical world doesn't seem to allow for any sort of like meaningful exchange of particles that would be entangled between two people right so that seems a little rough it seems a little um maybe overly simple and also just not really feasible to to have these these sister particles shared between your brain and their brain second I think there is a form of synchronicity that is more on the complex end of the of the synchronicity spectrum and it seems to go beyond just this sort of like non-locality aspect um which to me implies that there's something more than just non-locality via entanglement which is required to make these more complex forms of synchronicity actually occur and so Carl Young has this cool diagram that he puts out um where he has sort of this like Cartesian grid and on one dimension he has the space-time Continuum and on its polar opposite he has indestructible energy and then the other dimension here is causality and synchronicity and so young was kind of viewing his metaphysics as having this local causal deterministic structure and then in addition the opposite of local causality was this synchronicity and he viewed this as an a causal sort of connecting principle this force that that unifies things via meaning itself right and so I think this is really key because when we think about entanglement it feels very just simple causality right you have two particles you separate them yes they're interacting on locally yes there's some you know time dilation some some ignoring of of time causal causal structure here so a bit of timelessness a bit of non-locality but it still kind of feels like a one-to-one causal interaction it just is a causal interaction that defies locality right so in a way like traditional forms of entanglement don't really seem that special and they don't really seem to capture the essence of what Young is looking for where synchronicity is is more of a meaningful push or a meaningful connection so what then is the driving force of synchronicity if it's not just some sort of entanglement and I think something that could be really interesting to sort of pull into this conversation is Roger penrose's idea of non-computation and so Roger Penrose pitches this idea that you know based on the observation of girdle's incompleteness theorem where if you try to set up a deterministic physical system that obeys all this like local realism you cannot describe mathematics human understanding of mathematics actually defies simple physicalist framings of the world you actually cannot use Simple physical like first order logic if this then that this is true that is false this sort of like digital framing of reality is insufficient to capture human mathematical understanding and Roger Penrose says humans are not using a knowably sound algorithm to ascertain mathematical truth and so Roger Penrose proposes that there's got to be some form of non-computation that is tapping into mathematics and is is allowing humans to understand mathematics and he is kind of vague on this and doesn't really describe what non-computation actually is except by defining it as not being simple digital computation but inherent in non-computation is this form of meaning and Mathematics and he refers to platonic forms and platonic ideals just this world of Concepts this world of meaning that exists within our universe and so Roger Penrose pitches a three World model where there's this physical deterministic reality there's the world of our minds in our world of Consciousness and then there's this third world of mathematics and meaning and that world of meaning is non-computable it sort of defies the physical description entirely and humans are able to tap into that meaning um but it's still Universal there's something Universal about that meaning where it's it's shared and it allows us to communicate meaningfully with each other through the fact that it is universal and um yeah fundamentally conceptual and mathematical so young does not you know go down this road per se but what if synchronicity is more so just you know simple entanglement between physical systems where you're just kind of taking local deterministic causality and then stretching it between particles that are separated in space or separated in time but instead you're infusing some sort of non-computable geometric meaningful Force aka the platonic realm this land of meaningful constructs is finding its way into our physical reality and so yes events are driven forward by local deterministic factors but maybe events in our lives and in the world around us are actually driven by these more platonic mathematical meaningful forces and so in a cool way maybe Carl Young's synchronicity is something like Roger penrose's non-computation being manifest into the world around us and so we're seeing some meaningful coincidence out there but really it's that your mind is tapping into some meaningful construct and then that meaningful construct is a influential force in the world around us and is somehow and yeah this is definitely speculative right that meaningful force is like causing events to happen in the world around us either through some connection to other people or some connection to you know directly into the physical world so in the three World model we often think about the human mind tapping into the platonic domain through thinking through knowledge through academics and reading and having conversations with other people but there's also this direct line at least in the Penrose model between the platonic World forcing itself into the physical world and would that appear more so as this sort of connection between our thoughts being connected up with the physical world around us and if you've been uh watching this channel a bunch in the past um then you'll know that in this platonic realm I also discussed these ideas of fractal computation or these fractal forces within the world around us the idea that we live in a multi-scalar biology and there's sort of this connection between our mind with ourselves with our proteins and maybe there's a connection upward with this more I guess social level of human beings and so through you know these meaningful constructs mapped into the sort of fractal nature of our biological system this could also be another way that we're sort of seeing you know hey my thoughts are here but they go up and then down the fractal and they end up somewhere else in the world around me and so then there's this connection that's formed meaningfully between me and the world around me via some sort of you know resonance or or computation you know within these multi-scales of reality all right so now I'm gonna talk about sort of why synchronicity is in this world according to me and this is purely speculation and sort of TAPS into a bit of meaning and personal experience but it's one of those things where only you can experience synchronicity and everyone around you will always tell you that it's a coincidence and you can't really convince anyone else that synchronicity is real they really just have to experience it for themselves and I think if you're open-minded you can go have a synchronistic experience and you can be hyper rational hyper scientific and you can push you know you can push it so that you don't believe it until you've seen your own evidence of it you know and I totally encourage you to not take anything at face value but uh you know not believe it until you see it right so just to tell you a story about myself and this is sort of a bizarre synchronicity but I feel like it Taps into maybe the deepest level of meaning that I have come across in my life and and it it seems to just be really core to my own experience and it's also just so weird and it's like hard to believe that this um is even possible so here it goes so when I was young I lived in this um this apartment complex and our apartment of my family was apartment number 343 and that number was just sort of random when you're a kid you just kind of like remember a bunch of random details and so even after we left that apartment complex I sort of always remembered this number sequence three four three and it just sort of like didn't really mean anything per se but it was just like you know a number that would come to mind and so I would you know use it in if I had to say what a number I liked was I would I would say 34 or 343 and it would find its way into my usernames and stuff like this right and so you know fast forward a little bit and I'm in junior high and I'm obsessed with this game uh this video game Halo which is a first person shooter game and I was just obsessed with this um to an absurd level this was sort of the early days of online multiplayer gaming and so I would spend an ungodly amount of time playing Halo um and and and it doesn't really relate to the story except that um Halo was made by this company Bungie and Bungie got sold and they got bought out and so when Halo 3 came out and I turned it on for the first time on the opening screen it said 343 Industries and because the number 343 is just such a large number it was just shocking to me that my favorite game that I was obsessed with for so much and you know it sounds kind of dumb to say out loud but it was like so important to me as a kid and then to see that this was like now made by three four three Industries I was just like oh my god well like my favorite number is now my favorite video game and just like that was a huge part of my identity um as a kid you know playing this game and so that would just totally blew me away and as I got older I learned about synchronicity and it came to my life uh in a time when I was sort of going through this hyper scientific phase in my life you know where I had been raised Christian and I was just trying to dive into science as much as I possibly could and I was like resistant to spirituality and resistant to sort of anything that I could even perceive as being new age in any way shape or form and I started seeing this number 343 around me in my everyday life um and I was with um a friend at the time and she was also really into into synchronicity and kind of showed me or told me about a lot of these a lot of these ideas um and so I read Carl Young and I was I was seeing like three four three um around me and sort of coincidentally meaningful ways right and you know that's all good and well and you could just chalk it up to coincidence and you know confirmation bias and self-fulfilling prophecies and and all of that sort of you know easy cognitive strategies of just discounting someone's experience but then I got really into Roger Penrose and the three World model and I was reading Plato and I got really into this idea of the three worlds and this metaphysical description of life as these three different aspects of reality and in Reading Plato I learned about how he framed these three worlds as sort of when they come into alignment you get this Phantom fourth world that emerges right and so that fourth world that emerges from the alignment of the three worlds is called the world of Justice and Justice is you know my name Justin is sort of a sort of a reference to Justice and so three four three to me started to mean you know your three elements come into alignment and you have this Divine moment of inspiration this moment of awe you have an epiphany you just have some connection to some sort of deeper meaning you're kind of like in a flow state or you you know you come into contact with something really profound and so you're in this three World reality you enter into the state of epiphany and then you fall back down into scattered triple World reality once again and so three four three to me represented this sort of moment of Epiphany this moment of awe this moment of inspiration right it's like when things come together and so yeah this was like very weird for me because I've had become obsessed with this three World model and then suddenly my synchronicity number for when I'm a little kid you know having coincidences with video games suddenly is now related to you know sort of my metaphysical reality of how I conceptualize myself in the universe you know itself and then I Googled 343 and sure enough you can Google it and you'll find that this is a Angelic number um and 343 was thought to be like the number of the Archangel Michael and it means like literally the same thing that we live in this you know trialistic reality and then you get a message from God when those three worlds come into a lineman and you enter that that fourth state of of justice and then you fall back into into the the chaos of of the three worlds and what's also kind of synchronistic there is that my middle name is Michael meaning the messenger so I just feel like there was just this moment this week where all these kind of pieces came together and it just really solidified to me like you know I want to be a messenger in my life I wanna you know speak to people and talk with people and I'm Seeking Justice I'm seeking this this deeper knowledge and my last name is sort of representing the the mystery the riddle of the universe and it was just sort of this like alignment of Who I Am The Coincidence of my my name um The Coincidence of just you know my first middle last name sort of lining up with a lot of you know what drives me and what what is related to my core passion and then this random number for my childhood being a part of like historical Angelic numbers and just kind of being a part of numerology itself and then me coming into the framing of this number through my through my reading and then you know learning that that is like actually a part of what people have been thinking about this number as representing so anyways sort of a long ramble and a bit revealing to be honest but I hope this means something to you and I think it is really hard to sort of come out you know and and talk about these experiences because they are really personal and weird and just kind of random um but for me it was a really good sign or like a source of meaningful connection with the world around me where it's easy just to get swept away with uh the concept that nothing matters that that there's no point of us being here um and to me it just gives me a lot of Hope and it gives me a lot of you know restored I guess faith in in reality around me and that and that there's there's something going on here that's worth you know thinking about worth interacting with other people about um and Carl Young talks about synchronicity as a very profound source of spirituality and of meaning and of deeper connection to the world around you so if that's something that you are craving out there I think yeah go read Carl Young's um book on synchronicity I'll reference a couple books at the end of this episode but yeah it really is a transformative sort of way of diving into this and this is really just kind of scratching the surface of personal experiences that I have had that in my own experience have proven to me that this is worth thinking about and that it really couldn't be explained by some dumb coincidence and so yeah I'm not gonna convince you out there that this is real but for me I have been convinced and you know I have moments of Doubt where I'm like oh come on and then you just realize or you remember those experiences and it's just so hard to to get around that just being a reality um and so I want to just kind of end with a word of caution you know psychosis is a very real problem um where you sort of lose touch you lose grounding with uh with yourself with your identity with the world around you and you can really spiral and so what's I think is interesting here is Carl Young spent all of his days or a lot of his days with psychiatric patients in particular those suffering from psychosis or schizophrenia and so I mean it is just so fascinating that someone who is surrounded by patients experiencing schizophrenia where in the in the delusional pathology there you start seeing meaningful coincidences everywhere you know so in a weird way like synchronicity can be delusional and could be you know pathological and and there are cases and you know in my lifetime I've unfortunately had friends or people I know or acquaintances that have gone into psychotic episodes and you see this tendency to hyper attribute meaning to things that are not meaningful to things that really are just coincidences or or really don't have have a deeper meaning there so Carl Young even within his profession of seeing all these patients with schizophrenia you know in his day job he still believed in synchronicity and still believed that it was something deeper and meaningful about a reality and it wasn't just delusional it wasn't just sort of a soft form of of schizotipi um so yeah I definitely want to leave you with a word of caution to not lose yourself in the in the rabbit hole of YouTube videos out there um to kind of keep your grounding keep your scientific mind be skeptical be radically empirical take everything with a grain of salt and really do your due diligence to to seek answers and to validate your understanding but I will encourage you I truly think there's more to this world than what meets the eye and synchronicity for me has been a profound source of Truth and of deeper meaning so I'll leave you with that and I will talk to you again very soon foreign [Music] [Music] foreign

Channel: Justin Riddle

Views: 45,445

Keywords: synchronicity, carl jung, wolfgang pauli, roger penrose, stuart hameroff, quantum consciousness, collective unconsciousness, quantum mind, quantum physics, quantum entanglement, non-locality, physicalism, spooky action at a distance, quantum computer, meaningful coincidence, acausal connecting principle, freewill

Id: G1_GlpJTsys

Length: 39min 55sec (2395 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 05 2022