How should one view coincidence?

What is coincidence? Is it something important or an annoyance about something we don't quite understand but which will be explained later on? Is coincidence a result of our engineered world, the world that man has created and can see or measure, or is there something that goes much deeper?

Some authors claim that coincidence is normal and that our world is somehow small or getting smaller, that we should be able to see coincidence a not much more than an engineering phenomenon resulting from purely physical laws. The problem with this logic is that it begs a question as well as throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

One of the great steps humans have made is to understand the nature of such phenomenon as electricity, radio and microwaves. We now have a strong body of science that shows how things work at the minutest level. Along with this growth of knowledge and technology, there is growing scepticism about unseen forces. We only have to look around us to see that humans engineer unseen forces all the time, that man has become master of a world of unseen capabilities allowing computation and control. What we cannot see, many will not believe. What their parents did not see, they can't either.

Along with realism and inherited habits is a flood of scepticism. We have not got to the point where the human mind seeks to know for the sake of knowing. We think and say that we have an inclination to understand a greater reality, but in everyday reality our scientists confine themselves to small enclaves of scepticism within which all is comfortable and tidy, even when our reality tells us that nothing is comfortable for long, nor neat and tidy for long. This blinkering of our willingness to be out of the box confines most human minds to the box.

It is normally too much effort or costs to much in one's career to try, even try, to think out of the box. It is easier to be told what to think, not have to think. We want to believe a reality in which we are with the majority. Most people, for example, cannot believe in a reality that has not be condoned by their parents. They say for example that smoking is good because Dad or Mom smoked therefore it will do me no harm. By not thinking out of the logic boxes of their parents, people lose their longevity. They die sooner than they should. They give up sooner than they should and they are less than they can be! I am reminded how hard it was to get people over forty to use microcomputers in the 1980's.

I am not saying that people should not try to see behind coincidences. I am say that the observation of inexplicable coincidences should not be reduced to mathematics. Coincidences are not mathematics they are physical events that happen for very real reasons. They point us in the direction of forces we don't believe in or which we would never have conceived.

In the practical world all this about coincidence has relevance when we cope with coincidences that are the result of strong physical forces. Think how hard it was to get economists to use non-linear modelling techniques even though the world is almost totally non-linear. Think how hard it is for ordinary people to see the work of inflation and understand its implications.

Our reality is that we see coincidences, but fail to understand them as the work of cooperative or competitive underlying forces. We see people dying from the effects of smoking cigars, but don't connect this with people dying from the smoking of cigarettes or pipe smoking. Because not so many people die from cigars relative to cigarettes, the deaths from cigars may be enormously underestimated. The reality is different and the coincidence of a relationship is of a stronger association than our minds lead us to believe.

Associations are coincidences that we observe most of the time. Factorial or canonical, geometric, indirect, and non-linear associations we don't observe and they don't appear as coincidences. Such associations can be deadly yet we ignore them because our minds do not see the coincidence.

The coincidences that we can see provide us with opportunities to understand associations between things or realities and non-things or non-realities, such as abstractions. For example, God is an abstraction to most people. What we associate with God reveals many things about how we approach our realities. If there exists a force that is an abstraction, we may or may not be aware of it because we do not understand the coincidences that this force produces. Thinkers such as Arthur Koestler and Rupert Sheldrake are controversial to those that think of the universe as being very tidily physical and a result of natural engineering.

Associations that include messy associations such as hidden unknown forces do not conform to existing physics and prevalent ways of thinking in institutions earning their bread and butter from salaries of patrons convinced that physical truths are the end of the story.

Although mathematics is used to dismiss coincidences, often the mathematics is flawed and about as good as the mathematics of hedge funds, and you know what happened there. Mathematical statistics itself has multiple schools. The improbable does occasionally happen and when it does it changes everything. Yes, California will get its massive earthquakes and Florida its great floods even though you or I may not ever live to see either.

What is meant to be may very well be!

When I say that strange things can happen to me, I mean very strange. One as myself thinks of these strange things in terms of mathematical statistical probabilities. Then there are those events that blow statistics out of the water because they should not happen yet do happen.

For example, I gave my cousin John my telephone number in Florida. He misdials the number with one digit a 5 instead of a 3. He asks for me, and the person at the other end, a complete stranger in a state where I rarely travel tells him that he knows me. My cousin remarks that this is a strange coincidence, and that he is hot on the trail to locating me. However, this coincidence does not really help him because the person he is talking to does not know my telephone number nor how to reach me. He just knows that I exist from a relative of people who are staying with him and that they have spoken to him about me. End of story, or perhaps you would think. My cousin has to give up because there is no way to reach me. I have changed telephone numbers and no one knows the new number.

Meanwhile, I thinking that I must get into contact with my cousin do not know his number either, but he is staying with friends who send an email to me. I do not receive the email until Saturday, a few days later because I have not had a telephone number nor internet access. When I finally get a phone number and email address I open up my email to find that my cousin is looking for me urgently. I phone the number in the email and get in touch with thy cousin, John. I give him my new address and tell him to come stay a while. You would think the story would end here, but it doesn't.

On arrival, at my new address, my cousin, John tells me that he tried getting me, and that he had somehow misdialed my telephone number and had spoken with someone who knew me. This is very strange because the people he spoke with who knew me are from England and the only reason my cousin spoke with them was because he misdialed my temporary number by one digit.

All the above, I have verified. Its coincidence enough that I should be in Florida from Canada at the same time as people I know are in Florida from England, but that my cousin, who knew me, and was on a short visit from Michigan should talk to complete strangers who knew me. Well that is a second coincidence. It is strange that these people should actually have talked about me to their friends, the people they are staying with in Florida. It is a third coincidence that he should misdial bby accident and get a working numbner at all. He could have dialed the number correctly and just given up. It is a fourth coincidence that the number he should misdial would be one digit different from the number that I gave him by email more than a week earlier. It is a fifth coincidence that the numbers in Florida should be so close and the locations where I am visiting and my English friends are visiting should be so close.

I never spoke to my English friends that I was staying in Florida temporarily and they did not book a vacation to see me. That I am sure. However, by a sixth coincidence they had a meal with cousins of mine from Sidmouth in England about one hundred miles away from these friends and one of the friends is a niece of my cousin, Dorothy. Dorothy sent me an email guessing that the place where we were vacationing in Florida was the same as her niece aand husband had chosen to vaction at the same time as me. When I looked at the email from Dorothy this morning I noted that the Florida telephone number Jenny had given her was one digit different, but this not after I had phone Jenny's number in Florida.

That is the final coincidence because I had little intention of phoning that number thinking that Dorothy's email message was a very long shot and that in any event these people would have returned to Engl;and already.

Something this morning got me to read my emails, call Jenny's number in Florida. I had no idea that it was her friends that my cousin John had spoken with. Jenny was surprised to hear from me but less surprised than John to hear I had someone in Florida who knew me. She immediately told me of John's call to her firneds.

So the circle was completely until I checked for the coincidence of the telephone numbers and tied the whole thing together.

I have now to cope with the strangeness of these events and try to interpret some meaning if any. As you know, I do not think that things happen coincidentally, but that there are unseen reasons, unseen physics behind everything. Nothing is by chance. What we don't know is the extent to which events happen because of serious forces that are hidden from view until revealed by our meager logics.