Your Sunday Sermon

I keep thinking I'll read that doozie of a pre-vacation recess speech of the Little Prince's and parse it. But the further away it gets, the less interest I have. Something I read this morning is far more fascinating to me, so I'm going to share that. Maybe the speech will come later.

Science break...

As you know, a spinning disc in a computer records information in bits and bytes as they arrive, and spinning, files them scattered around the disc (hence the "defrag" function to collate bits when things slow down).

"What modern computer scientists have now recognized is that ordering by time and space is the worst possible way to store data. In a large computer-based information system, no attempt is made to place related records in sequential physical locations. It is much more convenient to sprinkle the records throughout storage as they arrive, and to construct an algorithm for retrieval based on some type of keyword.....

[...]

If there is no time dimension as we usually assume there is, we may be traversing events by association. Modern computers retrieve information associatively. You "evoke" the desired records by using keywords, words of power: you request the intersection of "microwave" and "headache" and you find 20 articles you never suspected existed. [...] If we live in the associative universe of the software scientist rather than the sequential universe of the space-time physicist, then miracles are no longer irrational events."

[-- Jacques Vallee]

  Rigorous Intuition

Jeff uses that quote to explain conspiracy theorizing:

There are conspiracies, and mysteries, and horrors. But if you feel like you're in a Thomas Pynchon novel, then congratulations: you wrote it.

[...]

Some things - some stories, places, and names - are simply strange attractors. Invoking them is to create a gravity well, a distortion of reality, in which everything else seems to run towards them.

Possibly. But what this idea very nicely explains to me is what people know as answered prayer and coincidence - "That's the third time today that name has come up." "I was just wondering about that this morning, and here it shows up this afternoon." "I prayed for a week about it, and my prayer has been answered." That kind of thing.

The experience of coincidental events has become so commonplace for me that it's no longer surprising or weird, but the mechanism behind it has remained mysterious. I've been certain for some time that there really is no such thing as coincidence - that there is some force controlling and creating synchronicity, but I only had vague theories and ideas about what it might be or how it might work.

An idea that has seemed most likely to me is that when you think about something which then happens or appears shortly, it's because events and objects have an energy field that extends beyond them and is stronger the nearer to the object or event you are. As that energy field approaches you - or vice versa - you become aware of it. Some people are more sensitive or able to pick up on it than others, and so they become aware of the event sooner, at the leading edge of the energy field. But that doesn't explain how multiple seemingly random but related things happen within a short period of time.

I don't know what the latest scientific ideas about this are, but I'm liking the computer storage and retrieval analogy. I know of someone who calls coincidences "cosmic winks". Maybe I will start calling them "defrag moments".

Now, watch for them. Or should I say, create them.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.