Your Coincidences/Synchronisities etc....

[ArizonaWill]

And I urged my mother to marry her wealthy boyfriend and get us the hell out of that area. It worked! She married, we moved to Brentwood, and the rest is my personal history.

Minor note: I actually met OJ Simpson one day while walking in the "new" neighborhood. I yelled his name (he was a hero THEN), and he gave me a politician style big wave and smile.

 

[BrandonD]

..Chaos, happenstance, coincidence, chance, random, these are all terms used to give people license not to think, to remain ignorant. When these things come up as the answer to a question it's the equivalent of saying "Because".

I agree with what you're saying. I would go further and say that this type of thinking is motivated by the wish to remain ignorant, but beneath that wish is the innate psychological drive to keep one's tidy world intact. This represents a worship of the existing 'artificial self'.

Aggrandizement of the self is the cause of ignorance. Or at least one of the causes.

That said, I don't think that people using terms like chaos are necessarily using them because they're motivated by self-imposed ignorance. I think that some terms are passed around without recognition of what sort of harm they might be doing to our understanding and communication.

Who knows what sort of words I might be bandying around that in essence don't mean anything? It always appears (from the point of view of the artificial self) that one is making perfect sense in his arguments.

 

[Chuckleberryfinn]

Leave the dead.

 

[MADMANMIKE]

..That said, I don't think that people using terms like chaos are necessarily using them because they're motivated by self-imposed ignorance. I think that some terms are passed around without recognition of what sort of harm they might be doing to our understanding and communication.

..Uhmm.. that sounds like ignorance to me.

..I don't mean to imply that it's self-imposed. Rather I see it as institutionalized. An ignorant public is much easier to control...

-Mike

 

[Chuckleberryfinn]

You have absolutely zero evidence to support this psuedo-mystical point of view of yours, that "there is no such thing as coincidence, chance, happenstance," and so forth. You are not the authority on the nature of reality. You do not have the answers. And you have not bothered to explain any of these assertions. Why exactly are these concepts just crutches that people use in order not to think? How is the desire to think related to these concepts at all? These are all very broad and poorly conceptualized assertions you're making.

And I'm not just trolling and playing symantics. All arguments begin with defining terms. Chaos is a theoretical state of total disorder. That's the definition of the word. Perhaps it's only a make believe concept and thus there isn't any such thing as chaos. Do I know? I certainly do not. All I am saying is that if we are to posit the existence of genuine chaos for the sake of argument, then there is absolutely no order involved in chaos. If there was order present, it wouldn't be real chaos.

Have you read Plato? Often Socrates would ask definition questions, such as "what is love?" Then the listener would give him an example of love. But Socrates was not looking for an example of love; he was looking for a definition under which all examples would fall. What I am doing is defining chaos so that examples aren't even necessary.

Your synchronicities are fascinating, and I enjoyed your story about your family members. I didn't mean to come off as such a butt. I, too, am fascinated by synchronicity, but to assert that there is no chance because synchronicity exists makes zero sense.

I was a bit short with everyone on this thread. Forgive me, the last 3 days of my life have been perhaps the most stressful and trying that I've ever had.

 

[ArizonaWill]

Forgive me, the last 3 days of my life have been perhaps the most stressful and trying that I've ever had.

And I am sure this was no coincidence!

 

[MADMANMIKE]

I was a bit short with everyone on this thread. Forgive me, the last 3 days of my life have been perhaps the most stressful and trying that I've ever had.

..No skin, dude, that's cool.

..In my life, I have nearly drowned under ice twice, been struck by lightning, lost two homes to fire, been shot at, stabbed, beaten down and beaten up, molested as a child, been responsible for the death of my favorite pet, loved and lost, and more.

..Currently I'm a route salesman with about 830 customers I call on over the course of ten days; in the fourteen months I've had this job, I've had 39 customers die.

..I have Asperger's Syndrome, a highly functional spectrum of Autism, which affords me 20% more sensitivity in every physical sense and started me off in the world with obsessive-compulsive tendencies, manic-depression and paranoid schizophrenia. Today you'd never know I grew up like that if you met me in person.

..In short, I have suffered and learned from many different situations. And in my experience, everything happens for a reason. When something bad happens, something good comes from it. I hate to resort to religious terminology as there's so much baggage attached to it all, but simply put, everything that happens is part of God's plan.

..My mantra is as follows; At all times, everything is as it should be. If I'm in disagreement with current happenings, it's time to change my perspective.

..Oy, rambling. time for sleep...

 

[Aaron LeClair]

Ah, the search for a hidden variable that brings order to the chaos. David Bohm's holomovement helps with that. For those inclined, check out a book called Bridging Science and Spirit by Norman Friedman sometime. Closest thing to a grand unified theory imo and it deals with randomness or a perceived randomness in physics.