Abstract

Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind that looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10000 years ago.” - John Maynard Keyes, Address to the Royal Society Club (1942), as quoted in A Dictionary of Scientific Quotations (1977) by Alan L. MacKay, p.140 The Age of Reason [Enlightenment] began in the late 17th-18th centuries as a direct, rational extension of the Scientific Revolution [roughly 1543–1687]. It started when methods like empirical observation and deductive reasoning, pioneered by eminent philosophers and people of science like Francis Bacon, Galileo, and Isaac Newton, were applied to society, politics, and religion, challenging traditional authority. At the core of this intellectual shift was the application of the cause-and-effect chain [or causal reasoning] to everything from physics to social structures, asserting that the universe operates according to natural laws rather than arbitrary miracles. However, the brain’s cause-and-effect reasoning often fails. Synchronicity is a concept introduced by Swiss psychologist Carl Jung that challenges the linear view of cause-and-effect [causality]. Synchronicity is a phenomenon in which people interpret two separate but seemingly unrelated experiences as being meaningfully intertwined. Generalizations are deductions about the nature of things, derived from examples and instances. That is an inductive step, and the process steps back from reality into a model of reality. Science attempts to coerce the relationships among various experiences into this model of reality. Synchronicity may lie in the liminal space between psychiatry and spirituality where joy can be found as coming from knowing, feeling, or doing that which matters most. People need to trust other kinds of knowledge, not only that of science, to stay in touch with reality. Poetry might matter more than physics, intuitions more than theories.

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