to and fro.with no permission.

TO :



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June 30,2008.
I always believed in serpendity and coincindences ...some of my senstive moments in my life have been great coincidences I think these episodes have been happening to all of us and we always used to feel "It couldn't be just coincidence."

I was wondering are these events sheer coincidence or because of our mental telepathy or psychic stirrings?


Rational
I feel there are two features of coincidences not well known among us.First,we tend to overlook the powerful reinforcement of coincidences, both waking and in dreams, in our memories. Non-coincidental events do not register in our memories with nearly the same intensity.
Second, we fail to realize the extent to which highly improbable events occur daily to everyone. It is not possible to estimate all the probabilities of many paired events that occur in our daily lives.We often tend to assign coincidences a lesser probability than they deserve.

Reason
Our brains are fantastic pattern recognition engines, a characteristic which is highly useful for learning, but it does cause the brain to lend excessive importance to unremarkable events. Considering how many words, names,people and ideas a person is exposed to in any given day and we sometimes encounter the same information again within a short time. When that occasional intersection occurs, the brain promotes the information because the two instances make up the beginnings of a sequence. What we fail to notice is the hundreds or thousands of pieces of information which aren't repeated, because they do not conform to an interesting pattern.

Coincidences themselves are usually just an artifact of perception. We tend to underestimate the probability of coinciding events, so our expectations are at odds with reality. And non-coincidental events do not grab our attention with anywhere near the same intensity, because coincidences are patterns, and the brain actually stimulates us for successfully detecting patterns… hence their inflated value. In short, patterns are habit-forming.

Logical

Proablity says in a random selection of twenty-three persons there is a 50 percent chance that at least two of them celebrate the same birthdate.
The calculation is straightforward. First find the probability that everyone in a group of people have different birthdates (X) and then subtract this fraction from one to obtain the probability of at least one common birthdate in the group (P), P = 1 - X. Probabilities range from 0 to 1, or may be expressed as 0 to 100%. For no coincident birthdates a second person has a choice of 364 days, a third person 363 days, and the nth person 366 - n days. So the probability for all different birthdates becomes
365!
--------------------- = Xn
(365-n)!*(365^n)

With its factorials the last equality is not especially useful unless one possesses the capability of handling very large numbers.When n = 23, one finds X = 0.493 and P = 0.507. This shows that the probability of at least two people sharing a common birthdate rises slowly, at first passing just less than 12% probability with ten people, rising through 50% probability corresponding to twenty-three people,reaching 90% probability in a group of forty-one people. This means that on the average, out of ten random groups of forty-one persons, in nine of them at least two persons will celebrate identical birthdates. No mysterious forces are needed to explain this coincidence.

Experimental

In a experiment of asking people what was more likely from a lotto draw (6 numbers 'randomly' drawn from 40):
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
or
4, 13, 18, 23, 31, 37 (or any arbitrary non-sequential set)

Invariably they went for the second option (unless they already understood the concept or were second guessing their 'answer')
A summation of the reasoning was along the lines of "I'd remember if those numbers came out, but they never have"
how often do you look at strangers who were same dress or same car as yours on the road? You always notice it.



More to write.

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FRO:
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July 1,2008.
your articulation is impressive.
possibly that is what i struggle with as well...i mean the fight
always seems to be building the language which can allow me to
communicate what i can sense.
i have ended up building multiple vocabularies to only a little beyond
the natal stage unfortunately.hell,but the effort is on,and is
sometimes so deceptive it feels like I'm actally doing nothing at all.
lol...
anyway,yes, i believe we choose to give importance to only the
coincidences that appeal to our present state of mind.part of what i
found vexing earlier because i knew there was a lot happening,many
signs,many entry points open which i could not see because i possibly
hadn't reached a conclusion of thought on some other subject.
this is what some film makers do while making films as well...
as in for example if the indian music composers like an a r rehman did
not copy from western classical music,or an anu malik from popular
western music,then there would very be very few chances that an
indian public would be able to get an entry to tthe new sound. you
can't just give them the concentrated sound and expect them to give it
a listening.you get it to sound like from their context and then they
can start digesting it.some might even take it ahead and trace the
particular sound to its source. most just wait for more from their
identified sources of kitsch.
but all of this bridge making is important.we have one life,and not
many people have the luxury of exposing themselves to other
contexts.so cheers to anu malik!

so with co incidence,i think we actually pile in a lot of data
floating in the intertext and when it falls into our direct context we
draw personal connections and claim for example that we are haunted by
a word we happened to come across just the other day,we see it on
billboards,in ads,on TV,everywhere. truth is it's always been there.
like the tao idea that all the solutions are as clear as the problem
and as available.



this isn't complete,will write soon.
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