I stumbled across this paper while doing some research related to an insight I had the other day regarding synchronicity. Basically I realized that synchronicity is the most elemental association possible: two events, synchronous in time, are associated in a meaningful way. This association must derive from the most elemental interactivity of biological systems with the environment. Further, via natural selection this has been refined and reconfirmed through numberless generations of life almost impossible to contemplate. This was an experimental rather than rational process.Scientific Speculation
For the most part the most interesting speculative models seem to have been given short shrift in the major popular works on synchronicity. David Peat touches on, but does not elaborate on, the flatland metaphor originally articulated in the classic work by Edwin Abbot. The core of this idea is essentially that a being who understood only a two dimensional reality would encounter points which would seem totally disconnected, much as columns appear in an architectural floor plan. But seen from a higher dimension these would be seen to be part of a coherent integrated structure. We can elaborate this idea in at least two or three different ways. First we might simply posit space as a higher dimensional manifold. If super string theory currently requires a twenty six dimensional model, then one could in some sense infer twenty three enfolded dimensions in which to embed hidden interconnectedness. This numerical example is far too literal and simple minded and is only meant to illustrate the concept. The next step would be to infer that dimensionality might somehow refer to the conceptual space of consciousness interpenetrating with spatial reality such that not only spatial dimensions, but also virtual dimensions of consciousness were somehow inter-enfolded. I am not sure exactly what this implies, but it is an interesting model for potential thought experiments.
The final extension of flatland is the one I find most interesting. It has frequently been stated that we live in three space dimensions plus time, or in a four dimensional space-time continuum. But this is not in fact the case. We understand time as having only one direction and therefore one sign. Thus, it is really only half of a dimension. If you wanted to say something to someone in flatland to make them realize that they in fact live in a larger and more interconnected reality you would say, "hey look up." "Up" would be in the direction of the next higher dimensionality. But we don't have to go a whole dimension higher, only half a dimension. If we actually live in a three and a half dimensional space time continuum, "up" to us would be into the future to meet that other half a dimension coming backward toward us. This suggests that the direction a higher level of interconnectedness might come toward us would appear to be from out of the future. This bears a startling similarity to many (but by no means all) synchronicity phenomena, which appear to us to be violations of our conventional view of temporal causality.
This idea becomes more rigorous in the form of work done by John Wheeler and Richard Feynman in the nineteen forties and recently extended into quantum mechanics by John Cramer. This work essentially points out that the most consistent interpretation of the mathematics underlying quantum mechanics is to interpret certain lines in the Feynman diagrams as illustrating virtual particles moving backward in time. As Cramer points out, in his transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics, one may essentially trade acausality for negative temporality. That is to say, if one is willing to accept virtual particles moving backward in time, one may avoid the conventional quantum paradoxes. Perhaps this may also be true of the paradox of synchronicity.
I see a parallel to the field of evolutionary programming. Some programs have been evolved to be more efficient than is possible to rationalize, and their operation has become a virtual black box of imponderables rather than a process that can be dissected into a sequence (rationalized). I think it is possible to visualize a similar process via the evolution of life. Certain associations are so refined, they convey meaning that defies rationality. In other words, synchronistic experiences convey meaningful information from transpersonal sources (and also, in so doing, hint at a hidden meta-structure of reality, but that is another issue). In regards to the above, one can surmise the potentiality that some of this information could entail signals from the future received in the present, or possibly from alternate realities or dimensions. I admit it is a bit mind-twisting, but it does provide an explanatory mechanism for certain aspects of precognition and insight that are otherwise quite thorny.
