On Coincidence

Note: I drew this picture with colored pencils and permanent markers I bought from the dollar store down the street. I used a uniball pen for some of the detailing. I used a huge nut I found on the side of the road as the shape for the abode/structure on the bottom left and I used an old spicy pickle jar to help draw the circular shed on the bottom right.

(Golf ball incuded for size reference)

I drew on paper I pulled from a doodling book called “A Collection of Paper Options.” The paper was printed with random shapes. I stared at the page which was empty of any of my input. After a while the random patterns started to shed their randomness. First layers of sections, conglomerations of the individual shaded random shapes presented themselves. I used the patterns to strictly guide the shape of all aspects of the picture (except the structures at the bottom of the page which were shaped by the objects pictured and described above). To make the grey clouds at the top I cut along the outline of two individual shapes. To give them their color I laid the picture on top of a grey oven board and took the photo so the color was transposed as if part of the clouds. This, the grey input that embodies teh cloud is meant to symbolise the unknown, the forces that operate outside the context of what’s accessible to humans. I used the man made objects as guidance for the homes to demonstrate that despite the randomness of the shapes and in life we infuse meaning intentionally. The entire project was an ode to 'apophenia', the human tendency to perceive meaningful patterns within random data. Intent is not just the truest form of meaning in a literal sense, it also registers as the most meaningful.

“The word coincidence exists in order to stop people from seeing meaning where non exists.”

- Chuck Klosterman, 'Eating the Dinosaur'

Coincidences are abnormal. Maybe that’s what makes them interesting. The intent of a symbol is to convey a message, often as some form of guidance. The inherent desire to get better, to heed advice, is necessary for evolutionary progress. I think that's why people credit coincidences with meaning imbued guiding symbols.

A symbol is a relative thing; that is, a thing is conditionally symbolic. The meaning of a symbol wholly depends on your point of view. Does the virtue of something being a coincidence infuse meaning in the event? Is a coincidence a symptom of some other meaningful causality?

By virtue of any event’s coincidence-ness it demonstrates its meaninglessness, in that, a thing that is a coincidence is merely demonstrating a statistical absolute. And statistical absolutes are not relevantly meaningful (unless you, the reader, is an oddmaker or works with odds in some proffessional or amateur matter).

I.e. Meaningless coincidence?

The Birthday Problem (source unknown):

Given a set of n randomly chosen people, some pair of them will have the same birthday. The probability reaches 100% when there are 367 people (given 366 possible birthdays including February 29th).*

* - Interestingly there is a 99.9% probability of a pair having the same birthday when n=70 people and 50% probability when n=23 people. These results assume that each day of the year is equally probably for having a birthday (that is controlling for weather related procreation patterns, et al).

Like art (refer to my other post “Intent is a necessary component of art!"), meaningfulness depends on intent. That is, either the active or passive auditer of the event must intend to infuse the event with meaning.

At any given time there are coincidences occurring; observed and unobserved. An observed coincidence is interesting, an unobserved coincidence is uninteresting and meaningless.