The science
of coincidence
I'm sure all of you know what I'm
talking about, we've experienced coincidences before on different scales and
heard stories about big meaningful coincidences and probably once exclaimed
"What are the odds of that?!"
Well that's
exactly what they are; odds, not oddities.
If you're out with a group of
friends and someone else has the exact same birthday as you and your first
inclination is to say "What a strange coincidence!" and begin
wondering "what it all means." The odds of someone having your same
birthday is a 1 in 365. You have a 99% chance of being in a room with someone
with your same birthday if there are 57 people and a 50% chance if there are 23
people.
Those super rare events with one in
a million odds occur more often than you think in a population of 250 million
people. Let's say a super rare coincidence happens to at least one person in a
million every day, that's 250 coincidences each day, 100,000 coincidences every
year, and would only take approximately 6.8 years to completely recycle through
all 250 million people giving each person a day to have a one in a million
coincidence.
What you're looking at here is
randomness and probability.
You have to look at every other possibility in order to properly assess the probability of the event that did occur.
However, quacks like Deepak Chopra would have you
believe otherwise, that there is no such thing as a coincidence, that whenever
you experience one it is because it bears a direct relationship with a prior
event and was "supposed" to happen. It is easy to walk around saying
that events that have already occurred were "meant" to happen and
look like you know what you're talking about. No one can prove you otherwise or
say it wasn't meant to happen because the event has already happened. This is
the new thing for psychics, it has become too difficult to predict future
events so they will state the obvious about past events and still be convincing
you they have some sort of supernatural ability. It seems that because of the
odds, determinism isn't a one way street, it has several different available
paths, but proving whether or not there is some driving force behind it, meaning,
or that it only appears to have multiple options while we're observing it alone
is going to be a difficult task. There is no such proof and until then, your
coincidence is just a coincidence.
Why do we feel as though our
coincidence isn't just a coincidence?
Cognitive failures are no stranger
to the human brain, patternicity; or seeing patterns and meaningful connections
is a purely subjective experience for the observer.
A type 1 error; believing something
is real when it is not, type 2; believing something is not real when it is. It
is the same evolutionary process in our brains that aided our distant ancestors
for survival, (it’s better to err and assume the sound is a predator in the
woods than to err by assuming it’s just the wind, even if it is just the wind)
It is the same cognition error that explains why there are conspiracy
theorists, religious people, superstitions, and pseudoscience.
For instance, a Buddhist probably would not see the Virgin
Mary in a puddle of water, the same way a conspiracy theorist more often
believes in all or most conspiracies than just one, similarly a Christian may
experience a coincidence only a few hours after praying and think it's a
"sign."
This means
that every day there are coincidences that you don’t notice and patterns that you
don’t see. While the patterns you do notice may not actually be patterns but
associations made in your brain based on your memory and beliefs.
So maybe our life’s
events are not governed by a master plan having a specific meaning, perhaps it
has as much meaning as you create in your mind. One thing we do know, the fact
that you can create meaning and patterns in your mind is governed by a force
known as natural selection.
While that explains
why we in general believe things that aren't true and deny things that are, the
causing factor in why we assume meaning in something easily explained by math
is probably because of math phobia and a general ignorance of the numbers.
( but that will
be a later post.)
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