Last night, right before I was getting ready to go to bed, one of my step-sons came home from work and turned some teenage stoner movie on the television. It might have been Dazed and Confused, although I am not certain. In any case, the last thing I heard before turning in was the soundtrack playing Bob Dylan’s Hurricane. I thought it was an odd choice to serve as the backdrop for kids rolling around in their muscle cars, smoking pot, and having furtive backseat hook-ups. It was my last real thought of the day.
Then I woke up to discover that Ruben “Hurricane” Carter has passed away. I guess one term for this is “serendipity,” although that word usually carries a positive connotation that is completely lacking here. Maybe the word “synchronicity” is neutral enough to capture the moment.
It’s hard for the human brain not to impute some kind of cosmic meaning onto such concurrences, although it may be true that there are no big coincidences or small coincidences, just coincidences. But, then, one considers the odds that you will hear a song about a man who has just died without that song being played for precisely that reason. It seems like a big coincidence.
But it’s really just a trick my brain plays on me. Two unlikely things happened at roughly the same time. I want them to be related, but they’re not.
You’re just human. Connecting two possibly unrelated events was just a precaution in our species’ hunter-gatherer days. It served as a learning device and possibly kept you out of dangerous situations, even if more than 50% of the time it was a spurious correlation.
It’s also the neurological basis of religion/superstition, an unfortunate side effect.
News was received here before nightfall. A very nice compilation with Bob Dylan’s protest song and the Canadian documentary:
Fifth Estate – Rubin Hurricane Carter.
○ Eerbetoon aan ex-bokser ‘Hurricane’ – symboolslachtoffer rassenjustitie VS
This happened to me recently when the man behind Oderus Urungus died. I only rarely think about GWAR, but I happened to be talking with my brother about how musicians make money nowadays and GWAR came up. Then Oderus died.
Another different but similar coincidence happened when I was in my early 20s. I was walking home from work on a snowy evening in Madison, WI. As I watched cars go by, I thought about the increased chances of an accident when it snows and how, if there were an accident, I’d have difficulty seeing the plates of anyone who fled the scene of an accident. So I started practicing by trying to decipher the plates of the cars as the passed me by. And lo and behold, as I was nearly home, a 70s era Camaro pulled out and got t-boned by some other vehicle. The Camaro went sliding and came to a stop near me. And even though it was the fault of the Camaro-driver (who was ok), the other car took off. The moment I had been practicing for! I quickly looked to get the info off the plates and when the officer arrived, I gave her the plate numbers and went home feeling like something must have been going on there. Something gave me a premonition. Maybe angels?
I never heard about the accident again. The police never contacted me. Presumably the info I gave was bad and they never located the other driver.
So if it was angels or God or whatever, they were just messing with me.
Good chance it was “Dazed & Confused”. I believe that song is blasting when Wooderson first enters and struts through the pool hall.
Meant to remove the “I believe” part after I found the clip.
About this:
Sure it does. It is a big coincidence. But reality and probability are structured that way.
At any given point in our life’s spacetime travel, there are a huge number of things that could occur that would seem like these improbable coincidences. But because there are so many possibilities for what could occur, it is probable that more than one would occur in our lifetime. It could be that a particular bird sits outside one’s window the morning after the death of a parent. It could be that on the day one wears a particular shirt given by the spouse, the football team wins really big. It could be that there are 4 recent, new cases of cancer on one’s block. The odds of any one of these occurring is low. But the odds that we experience one or more of these at some point in our lives is very good.
That’s a good way of looking at it. And of course the more people hear of Ruben Carter’s death, the higher the probability that one or more of them will have had some random encounter with the word or name “hurricane” the night before.
I just learned of his death myself, and I can report no such coincidence.
Add in that many of those events perceived as improbable occur not infrequently and go unnoticed for a variety of reasons and the odds of seemingly improbable events increases.
exactly. and the birds at the window before a given event may have simply gone unnoticed or unremarked upon until that event made the day significant for unrelated reasons.
at this second, like all the 435,431,765,000,000,000 (±1,167,631,200,000,000) seconds before it, there are an essentially infinite number of events occurring everywhere at every scale of existence. only a fraction are related by cause; only a fraction of that is witnessed; witnesses are notoriously unreliable. so how do we separate cause from error, bias and hallucination?
through direct observation under controlled conditions, repeated and recorded for analysis using the empirical method to draw our conclusions.
which is awesome if those tools are at hand and there is time to use them, but the rest of us usually have to rely on only logic and experience. usually that is enough. still, most people imagine that a world with secret knowledge and significance hidden just behind the mundane drudgery our material senses is much more exciting than one without such prizes waiting. such wishful thinking helps explain why most people are attracted to woo of one sort or another. it’s a difficult temptation to resist when our brains are hardwired to pull patterns out of random data; where it cannot find patterns it invents them. voila, woo!
it is my hope that one day people will learn and desire to live in a world without woo.
There is little doubt that we are pattern-seeking creatures. It seems to be the default condition of our human brains.
My world became so much more fascinating and full of wonder when I came to the realizations which you describe. But it also became exponentially more maddening, as I now notice just how much woo has infiltrated the human mind, even pertaining to the most mundane and cursory events in our daily lives. And people do not want to give up the illusion that there is some guided but hidden purpose to everything that has ever occurred. But I have learned to get along just fine without these unfounded beliefs. And I also have to say, it has made me infinitely more content.
you can always find wisdom in Seinfeld or My Cousin Vinnie