137 - Arthur I. Miller [95]
The scientific basis that Jung proposed for synchronicity lay in one of the most dramatic implications of quantum physics: that the coordination in space and time of any atomic process and its causal description are mutually exclusive. One can choose one or the other, but not both. As we saw above, the reason lay in the measurement process itself, in which the measuring apparatus and the “system being measured” (for example, the electron) were inextricably linked. This resulted in unavoidable errors and was at the root of the statistical basis of quantum physics. Moreover, the characteristics of the “system being measured” underwent an unalterable change in such a way that all its individual features were lost. Deriving his knowledge of science from Pauli, Jung interpreted this as showing that there could be other connections of events in space and time besides the causal connection. Perhaps the same applied to the psyche.
Rhine’s experiments in ESP
Jung was also intrigued by the experiments that Joseph Banks Rhine, an American psychologist at Duke University, North Carolina, performed in the 1930s and recorded in a book called Extra Sensory Perception. It was Rhine who coined the acronym ESP.
Rhine conducted a series of experiments in which a person drew a card from a shuffled deck and a test subject in another room tried to guess what it was. The subjects often achieved astounding results, guessing the correct cards 40 or 50 percent of the time. One subject was 100 percent correct.
Jung examined the archetypal basis for Rhine’s experiments. One thing that was striking was that the number of successes decreased sharply after the first attempts and eventually disappeared as the number of tests increased. Rhine attributed this to the subject’s lack of interest as time wore on. But when interest and enthusiasm were revived, along with the subject’s belief in ESP, the number of successful guesses rose.
Pauli suggested that the decline in the success rate of Rhine’s subjects was due to the “pernicious influence of the statistical method,” by which he meant that the statistical approach only dealt with large numbers of successful and unsuccessful tests. The size of the sample was so huge that the fact that some subjects had achieved an extraordinarily high success rate simply disappeared in the welter of figures and “the actual influence of the psychic state of the participants” became imperceptible.
Added to this, the mechanical nature of the experiments meant that the participants eventually got bored. As their interest in the experiment decreased, so did their psychic power, thereby blurring the initially exciting valid results. Nevertheless, this was clearly another example of complementarity, in that “any connection between causality and synchronicity can never be ascertained,” the two by definition being mutually exclusive. Acausal—that is, synchronous—events were certainly rare, in the realm of single figures. But they existed nonetheless.
Jung and Pauli were impressed by the quality of Rhine’s professed scientific standards and marveled at how his data had stood up to criticism. Pauli could see that this was important for Jung’s theory of synchronicity, based on the claim that scientific causality was not the complete story. But he could not “see any archetypal basis (or am I wrong there?),” he wrote.
Jung took up the challenge.
Jung’s astrology experiment
Around this time, Jung was conducting an astrology experiment.