patterns in the music, arts and sociology (Ward, 2001).
Ward, Mark (2001) Universality: The underlying theory behind life, the universe and everything, Macmillan, London.
seriality ~ physical, synchronicity ~ psychical
Seriality is a concept coined by Paul Kammerer in 1919 with the publication of his book Das Gesetz der Series. Kammerer viewed seriality as a “law”, like gravity or entropy, and the recurrence of same and/or similar events was so regular as to negate the term coincidence.
Synchronicity is a term coined by Carl Jung in his essay Synchronicity: An A-Causal Connecting Principle.
there were three main categories in Kammerer’s classification: typology, morphology and systematisation. Typology refers to similar names, numbers, events and so forth in a series. Morphology refers to the number of consecutive sequences. And systematisation is what Koestler (1971, p. 139) refers to as ‘homologous and analogous series, pure and hybrid series, inverted series’ and so on.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Austrian biologist Paul Kammerer (880-40 le 1 imix* I) advanced his little-known but thought-provoking theory of seriality. Kammerer supposed that events, objects, or occurrences of a like kind assemble together in space and time through unknown and acausal means. Kammerer defined seriality as “a lawful recurrence, or clustering, in time and space whereby individual members of the sequence-as far as can be ascertained by careful analysis-are not connected by the same active source.”(1) Where Jung’s synchronicity deals with the relationship between subjectivity and the external world, Kammerer’s seriality is more concerned with patterns and groupings of objects that occur in the environment. Many of us have had the experience whereby we encounter a new word for the first time and, surprisingly, we encounter it numerous times after its initial introduction into our lives. For instance, someone rolls off a particularly mellifluous sounding word in conversation, “insouciant,” that piques your curiosity but you have no idea of its meaning. Shortly after hearing it the first time, you read it in a book, someone else uses it in conversation-and someone else.
Kammerer suggested that these events revealed a heretofore unrecognized law of nature which tended to bring like and like together
DJ Spooky at Rhythm Science 2004, p13: “Kammerer was looking for the algorithms of everyday life – how patterns appear, and how their structures can affect all aspects of the creative act.. Kammerer’s idea of sequential reality and process-oriented events was one of the first systematic attempts at figuring out a rhythm of everyday life in an industrial context.”
The process of becoming intuitively aware and acting in harmony with the synchronicities is what Jung labelled “individuation” (process by which components of an individual are integrated into a more indivisible whole)
Some think that a scientific basis for the phenomena of synchronicity may be related to the principle of correlation, since a more precise scientific term for Jung’s expression ‘acausal connecting principle’ is ‘correlation’.
It is a well-known scientific principle that ‘correlation does not imply causation’. Yet, correlation may in fact be a physical property shared by events without there being a classical cause-effect relationship. This is most clearly seen in the correlation effects of quantum physics, where widely separated events can be correlated without being linked by a direct physical cause-effect.