Hi!

Is there a word for ... when you're talking to a friend about someone you haven't seen in quite awhile and that evening the one you were talking about calls?

Serendipity isn't quite it, and deja vu doesn't cover it, either. Hope you can help!

Coincidence.

on a related note..

the worthless word for the day is: diegogarcity

[fr. Diego Garcia, Indian Ocean atoll; after serendipity]
"a term used [at Wordorigins.org] to denote the appearance
of another term in multiple sources shortly after you have
looked it up in the dictionary" (or first noticed it)

"I've heard "diegogarcity" suggested for this, which was
coined along these lines: the experience is a little like
serendipity. The etymology for the latter word relates to
the island, Serendip, in the Indian Ocean. Diego Garcia
is another island in those waters, providing a parallel
for serendipity if such be desired."
- Peter Moylan, alt.usage.english April 28, 2006

-joe (yet another neologism) friday

Synchronicity

My point is that you don't remember all the times you're talking about a friend that you haven't seen for some time and that friend doesn't call you that evening or the times the old friend calls when you haven't been talking about them.

There's a word in the world of skeptics for what Faldage is saying, but I don't remember it. The classic case is the mom who "had a feeling something was going to happen" when her child has a car accident. Of course, she discounts the fact that she has that feeling every time the child takes the car.

Synchronicity has the flavor of cause and effect at a distance that's missing from coincidence. The friend somehow caused you to think of him because he was thinking of you before he called.

My buddy Carl thinks differently:
According to its creator, Carl Jung. Synchronicity explains "meaningful coincidences," such as a beetle flying into his room while a patient was describing a dream about a scarab. His notion of synchronicity is that there is an acausal principle that links events having a similar meaning by their coincidence in time rather than sequentially. He claimed that there is a synchrony between the mind and the phenomenal world of perception.

How is that different from thinking about a person and meeting him/ her? Except for that a person does not fly? I think I do not understand the "meaningful". But...

I guess I don't see how that differs from what I said. Maybe I didn't express myself well enough.

Do you think communicating through thoughts is the communication of the future? Is it a bit one sided though? Only one person can hear the other? Can all people communicate mentally or some?

I guess I don't see how that differs from what I said.

Sorry bro! I read your statement:
Synchronicity has the flavor of cause and effect at a distance that's missing from coincidence.

As being opposed to:
There is an acausal principle that links events having a similar meaning by their coincidence in time.

But now I see where your comparison comes from.

@ Olly: And in looking at it again, I don't think I had it quite right. I'm going to have to dust off and re-read Jung to see how (his translators) express it.

@ Avy: Robt. Heinlein addressed this in one of his novels, where he proposes that the only practical form of communication between distant vessels and Earth would be some form of mental communication, which (again, he proposes) is instantaneous over any distance.

... which brings to mind the question whether one thinks in a language or in electric impulses. If language, then my thoughts in Tamil would not be understood by the Gorgonzolas who think in Gorgozolian.

Just my own unsupported thoughts on the matter: I think we think in electric impulses over which we lay our understanding of reality as represented by our language. I guess this means in the Tamil/Gorgonzolian example (or any translingual example) that the communication could be very easily misunderstood completely.

In this whole discussion I keep thinking about the movie
"Close Encounters of the Third Kind", musical notes.

What? Are there those who still think that "thoughts" are not physical? How can they (meaning "thoughts") be otherwise?

Cognitive bias.

This is more philosophical than biological. Imagine a modern astronomer sitting on a hillside watching the sun come up. Next to him sits a 7th-Century stargazer. Do they see the same thing? (Not my question, but I've long forgotten where I read it. And, curiously, "watching the sun come up" reflects what the medieval guy would see, not the modern astronomer.)

The physical things that are happening in their visual pathways are the same, but I don't believe they see the same thing. We see what we know. Likewise, I believe, we "think" what we know.

@jj: Thoughts may not be physical in the same way that heat is not physical. Heat occurs in the physical world, but it is our perception of the underlying movement of molecules or infrared photons that is what the average person means by "heat." Just like "purple" or "happy," we are not able really to know how another person perceives "heat."

Ah but yes, Beck. We really don't exactly know what another person feels about anything -including ourselves - with words we can only approximate.

Think Determinism. Act otherwise.

I'll tell you what I think, Faldage. I think (and bio/chemo/electronically I know) you are right.