Probability, chance, synchronicity and mathematics

I loathed mathematics as a child. Certainly once I'd got into secondary (high) school. It was taught so badly. That was really it, I think. I was once hauled in front of the headmaster for my grades in school, and the fact that I was doing so badly, and he asked me why it was. I told him that I found it all too boring. When he asked me if I was some kind of genius, I told him I was! Yet the truth of the matter was that I still didn't actually understand mathematics.

What I loathed about school was the sense that I was being prepared, even at that young age, to function as a cog in a wheel. I could just feel that a performance target was being set for me, that I was being evaluated, and my role in society was being mouled for me. I'd learn the stuff that was expected of me while I was at school, I'd get the grades I'd get (the higher the better) and then I'd do a job, probably within some corporation. Then I'd earn a certain amount of money, have standards that I'd live by, accept those standards, want to achieve more, reach some exitential crisis in middle age, then discover what I knew I already knew, there and then.

So learning didn't really interest me unless it really interested me. I couldn't be bothered to jump through hoops just to prove I could jump through hoops, and I still don't.

So why I got on to maths, eventually, I'm not certain. It happened naturally, I suppose. Which is, you might say, the way everyting occurs...

Which really brings me on to probability.

Perhaps it was through watching the TV series "The Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy" that I first got on to probability. At one point, someone steals a spaceship that runs on an infinite improbability drive. The spaceship originally appeared out of nowhere, seeing as it ran on this drive that was, of course, self creating, as the chances of it doing so were infinitely unlikely.

synchronicity's been another fave for me. That's tied up with probability, too. In some respects, it's the reliance on a "force" that's linked to IMprobability, just as the spaceship drive was.

Having the fertile imagination I had as a kid, my life as it was was so painful that I sought refuge in the impossible. I always had my head stuck in some fantasy novel such as Michael Moorcock, rather than the realities of the mundane. So anything that was to do with space, metaphysics, magic or psychic phenomena were far more interesting. And why not? I mean, so many people talk of psychic stuff as being some sort of nonsensical escapism - self delusional fantasy - but what is reality? How many of us live fantasy realities, keeping illusions for lovers, bosses, children, parents, employees, voters and fellow citizens?

We use illusion and fantasy and lies all the time. So it hardly seemed that I was exploring something that was concerned with fantasy. On the contrary, I was purusing a greater truth. That's what anyone does who follows a spiritual path, surely?

So anyway...I found myself looking more and more at these abstract referrals to mathematical concepts that I didn't really understand, at least using all the algebra and stuff. So I realised that there came a time that I needed to.

What amazed me was all the hidden surprises in mathematics.

Mathematics, to me, is just full of so many eddies and currents and dimensions and hidden places, paradoxes and apparent absurdities, that it's glorious to just wander around.

Look at the assumptions we make about some really basic things: take a penny at the first of January on any given year and double it daily for one month. So, on the second of January you have 2 cents, the third of January you have 4 cents, fourth of January you have 8 cents, fifth of January you have 16 cents and so on. Now take a quick guestimate at how much you'll have by the first of February. Just take a few seconds.

Now get a calculator and work it out.

surprised? A lot of people are.

And this kind of fact got me thinking about a whole chain of things. First of all, isn't it amazing what our belief systems tell us about reality? I mean, there you are with that figure on your calculator. How different is it to the reality that you imagined you existed in? What other beliefs do you think you have that might be similar?

How many people do you think are constrained by their thinking in similar ways? How alone do you think you are in your own limited thinking?

But more on probablity:

Look at the chances of what the genders of any offspring will be in any family. If two parents have four children between them, many people will assume that the laws of chance dicate that the four children will most likely be two boys and two girls. They think that's how the law of averages works. What they don't understand is that probablity sees things differently. Probability - the true mathematics - tells us that the chances are that there will be an imbalance. There will be three of one sex and one of the other.

The universe is full of examples of this kind of surpising, yet mundane mathematics, yet what really grabs me, as it does everyone else, is that which is truly rare. The stuff which exists on the edge of probability is really where all the beauty is.

Look at a simple example: diamonds. Diamonds require such a particular combination of factors to produce them that the chances that they might occur naturally are so rare that diamonds themselves are rare.

So this got me thinking, too.

If this planet, and all the phenomena that take place on it are just manifestations of mathematical improbability, then doesn't that mean that there must be some events so rare that we observe them far, far less than we might ever observe diamonds?

And what might those phenomena be?

If I put the two things I've just talked about - our erroneous belief systems and probability - doesn't that make for an interesting cocktail, even if just a philosophical one?

What about if it were a practical one?

And that's how I got into my study of synchronicity.

I'll continue with this later. What I'll do now is a little dice game, which you can all witness. I'm going to make some choices, throw a dice to see which choice the dice make for me, then I'm going to follow it. You're going to see what happens.

You need to understand the principle of dice decisions. If you haven't done so already, then go back to the relevant entry in this blog.

The choices I've just written down are:

1 I go out now and take photos of the homeless, for my "homeless" blog
2 I start a sculpture
3 I write a poem (hope it's not this one!)
4 I start writing a play
5 I write a short story
6 I build "superbody" (work out like it's really important to me, and get my abs back)

So, lets get the camera on, and let's roll the dice...

Click on this link for the video:

http://www.jacklee.biz/diceman1.wmv