Synchronicity is a concept co-created by Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung in the 1920s. They wanted to explore the gap between the recently discovered ideas of quantum mechanics and our understanding of the human mind. They believed their explorations could help develop the tools needed to examine the relationships between patterns in the universe across time. These could also be called coincidences.
Say for instance you're walking down the sidewalk and a newspaper blows into your legs. You pick it up and you notice the name of a childhood friend you lost touch with has won an award. Some would see this as a sign, or maybe it's just a random coincidence.
Of course a rational explanation is that the human mind is somehow at a loss to determine whether an event occurred by random chance or for an explainable reason. A coincidence triggers some thought to occur that links two physically distant moments in time. In most situations we might not ever be able to rationally explain the event we witnessed. Although to a person experiencing the coincidence, these situations can have deep and impactful meaning. By extension, the coincidence may have huge consequences if some part of history depended on a coincidence occuring for a specific person.
There's an interesting relationship between evolution and coincidence. Evolution in nature needs randomness to progress. The universe essentially generates randomness at the lowest levels, and does so in discrete specific amounts of energy. How does evolution utilize randomness? It does so by creating the opportunity to 'try out' infinite variations. I think it's reasonable to presume this is happening across the entire universe. Every galaxy is a giant pool of elementary particles, each one in a unique part of space and each with different amounts of particles than any other. Just one tiny variation in the configuration of a galaxy and the whole outcome changes dramatically over time. Galaxies can join and merge, creating larger galaxies! Gravity creates a connection between all the parts of the universe that respond to the gravitational field. This draws particles together, over time the particles clump up more and more and get bigger and more complex and dynamic. They get so heavy they start to crowd in on each other, forcing dynamic and strange interactions at high temperature and pressures. We get stars and planets, and asteroids, and blackholes. Yet somehow, out of all the variations in possible galaxies, humans popped out. Our minds seemingly able to do so many incredible things. We have such rich complex emotional lifes. People have a gravitational pull to one another. Not many people desire to live all of their lives alone. We've only sustained our species thus far through cooperation. Is it a coincidence that evolution and coincidence both require randomness?
Life seems to require the ability to process information, and somehow use that information to enhance survival and reproduction. Understanding causalty is a natural task for us, because consciousness seems to draw a line between the present and the past. So why would consciousness feel causal? Either because the universe is causal, or because the universe is not causal, but representing the universe as causal has an evolutionary advantage. Information is the distillation of an input through computation. Of course the brain quickly managed to figure out how to encode huge amounts of information into a small format that could be managed and manipulated. Objects that our brain distinguishes are physically coupled, because for the most part that object stays physically coupled. For example if you shove someone, you effect their whole body. In reality our push imparts force at a specific point that ripples out to the rest of the body. Our brain interprets this as a single event, not constantly imagining the complete rippling event. It makes sense to interpret events and characterize them through comparison and contrast. If we think of measurement as the only way to gain information, then what are living things measuring? A microbe may be gathering and responding to chemical gradients in it's environment, whereas a person is measuring to deal with the complicated psycho-social world most of us live in. What types of reasoning involve a self, and a conception of a self? A self or an identification of the boundary where the world meets us. Us being the body and the mind existing within it. The mind is able to make decisions consciously. Learning evolved as a way to deal with a rapidly changing world. Imagination seems to be a key ingredient. Rote learning involves repeating a subject over and over until it is memorized. Associative learning is where we apply a concept from one situation to another different situation. As we practice with the concept, we can use it to establish our understanding of situations in which the concept would be helpful. Integral learning is where we build on a concept with an extension. Such as extending the concept of addition with multiplication. Strategies for gaining knowledge quickly are useful to life. Nature can massively distribute information throughout it's body to induce change. We are the only narrative based life.
We are invariably going to need to reconcile various disciplines in order to explain the natural world. Moving towards the truth will require more and more resources.
Why are most societies patriarchal in nature? Male humans cannot get pregnant. Female humans can. This distinction creates the core difference between sexes in society. It seems likely that this difference is a large factor in the creation of patriarchal societies. Large societies are responsible for managing resources to feed people, and women hold the power to create more people. Men are not forced by nature to raise young, and women are not forced by nature to obey men. Patriarchal societies are not a given. It would seem that on average men have a physical advantage in some ways, but they can not create children. Women alone can also not create children. Our bodies require physical contact. Women go through life fearing violence in a different way than men do. An intelligent stance is required to operate in relationships with people that can physically overpower you. Women rely more on their social intelligence and their own bodily intuition to make judgements about the safety of partners. Men are afforded the freedom to copulate and run, have little fear of physical violence from women, and don't have to make as many concessions in their lives to survive among women. Women and men have had to persuade men to give up power for more human freedom.