Close Encounters with Placeness: The Odds

v.3.0 - 4/3/2024

Serendipity

Randonauting offers a gateway to wonder and the uncanny, allowing individuals to encounter the extraordinary just beyond their (reality tunnel's) front door. It's important not to dismiss the peculiarities and synchronicities reported by randonauts as mere psychological phenomena triggered by expectations and wishful thinking.

To clarify, 'synchronicity' refers to the occurrence of significantly related events that coincide in time, notable more for their personal meaning to the observer than their external impact. Sometimes synchronicities repeat or accumulate within a short period of time for one person, in other cases they happen to different people in the same social group.

In his forthcoming monograph Beyond Doubt: The Anthropocene and the Restoration of Faith. author, filmmaker, researcher, and co-host of the Weird Studies podcast J.F. Martel summed it up concisely:

Synchronicities differ from coincidences by the meaning they appear to contain. Often that meaning is inscrutable; once in a while, it seems clear and direct. Either way, synchronicities are marked by a sense that we are being addressed. The sense is sewn into the event. Synchronicities temporarily erase the boundary between world and mind, object and subject, chance and fate. You are free to dismiss the effect as a mere impression, a brief lapse of reason, but doing so won’t banish the synchronicity.¹

In Randonauting lore these 'synchros' can be as simple as encountering repetitive number sequences on clocks, speedometers, or street signs, in New Age circles often referred to as 'angel numbers.'. Prominent examples in Randonaut reports are 222, 333, 12:12, 4444, and so on. On other occasions such coincidences are unusual objects that are repeatedly seen by different people in different places, figurines or images of white rabbits or owls, the infamous "piss bottles", purple flowers, red doors, street pylons and so on. In some rare, extreme cases randonaut trips end up becoming encounters with 'high strangeness' events such as UFO or cryptid sightings.

// examples of randonaut trips

In a philosophical essay on the Netflix series Stranger Things, J.F. Martel explores the contentious nature of Jung's contributions to psychology, highlighting how they clashed with the prevailing scientific perspective rooted in Cartesian body-mind dualism.

it made meaning integral to the event instead of regarding it as a caprice of subjective interpretation. In other words, Jung saw the expression of meaning as a property of the natural world rather than a surface effect of human mentation. Synchronicity, for him, was a real psychophysical process, but one that the modern worldview could recognize only at the cost of abandoning certain rationalistic assumptions about how the cosmos functions.²

Considering the probabilistic odds of synchronistic occurrences, it's clear that their repeated appearances in the context of randonauting cannot be explained by mere chance, nor are they sufficiently addressed by the original Fatum Project theory of discovering novelty through randomness. Within our dualistic worldview, intersections between thoughts 'in our mind' and random events 'out in the world' are only allowed to be nothing more than highly improbable coincidences.

Having delved into the body-mind divide and acknowledged its shortcomings, as well as recognized our actual deep entanglement with the surrounding world, these insights serve little insight into accounting for the skewed odds of serendipidous encounters and synchronicities. This prompts us to question whether our current conceptions of 'randomness' and 'chance' are truly adequate.

The Odds

In his work Essay on the Foundations of Knowledge, the French philosopher and mathematician Antoin Cournot, renowned for his contributions to mathematics and philosophy, discusses the relationship between knowledge, probability, and the scientific method. In the introduction to her translation of Cournot's book, the quantum physicist and ballerina Merritt H. Moore makes an important observation about the nature of 'chance':

contingency and chance must not be equated with that which is unexpected, or with that which surprises us. What is unexpected or occasions surprise is a function of epistemological, psychological or cultural factors. Natural objects, processes and events, independent of our experience or knowledge of them, involve both order, i.e., intrinsic relatedness, and chance, i.e., intrinsic unrelatedness. Both order and chance have their foundations in the nature of things; neither stems from the conditions of our awareness and understanding however limited or extensive, incidental or necessary these conditions may be. ³

Note how both order and chance are described as two equal and fundamental principles of nature. Cournot's perspective on order revolves around the idea that the laws of nature and the patterns we observe reflect an underlying orderliness that allows scientists to predict natural phenomena with a degree of certainty. On the other hand, Cournot also emphasizes that chance events — those that appear to be random or without a discernible cause — play a crucial role in the unfolding of natural processes. This acknowledgment was particularly innovative at the time, as it challenged the deterministic view of the universe that was prevalent in the scientific community. Cournot believed that understanding the natural world requires acknowledging the interplay between these two principles. He argues that we must recognize the limits of our knowledge and the role that unpredictability and randomness play in the natural world.

The experienced derivative market trader turned philosopher Elie Ayache takes this even further and coins the phrase 'contingency as a medium'. In his works Ayache presents a profound philosophical analysis of high-speed derivative trading, exploring its relationship with our metaphysical understanding of reality. Derivative trading involves financial contracts whose value is derived from the price movements of underlying assets, such as stocks, bonds, commodities, or market indexes, allowing traders to speculate on future price changes without directly owning the asset. Ayache challenges the predominant statistical and probabilistic approaches that dominate the field, proposing instead a radical reconceptualization of contingency as a fundamental matière première.

Reality always exceeds fiction. We encounter the real without previous warning. We are made aware of the event and of the world that this event brings about, and then go looking for a partition of that world into ‘states of affairs' or ‘states of the world'. This conceptualization of the real is only a model that is derived from the real itself. Only after the states of the world are identified do we call them possibilities and retroject them into the past so as to narrate a nice story about how the event might have come about, or about the possibilities that will have led to it. By extrapolation, we project those possibilities into the future and imagine that the future world will be no more than a variation of those identified possibilities.⁴

Operating from a vantage point that perceives the observer as separate from the mechanical workings of the world, we employ probability theory as a key tool to predict the future states of the world. We assume that by analyzing existing patterns and data, we can calculate probabilities for different future scenarios, effectively turning the uncertainty of the future into a series of quantifiable risks. This approach reflects a deep-seated belief in the separability of the observer from the observed and underscores our inclination to view the future as something that can be controlled or managed through the application of scientific and mathematical principles. In light of our insufficient responses to unforeseen events, like the recent pandemic, it has become imperative to reassess and humble our confidence in our intellectual capacities to understand chance and contingency.

By elevating contingency to the status of a primary material Ayache is not merely offering a new methodological lens for understanding derivative markets. He is suggesting a paradigm shift in how we conceptualize the foundation of reality itself. This bold stance challenges readers to reconsider the basis of economic theory and the nature of market speculation and move beyond deterministic and probabilistic models to embrace the uncharted territory of pure contingency:

The real is an altogether different matter than the possible, without any possible communication or mediation between the two. What lies outside possibility or beyond the range of possibilities – literally, the im-possible, or the event – is real, because the procedure whereby we fabricate the possible out of the real is always incomplete and deficient and falls short of the real. [...] Radical contingency, or the event, shakes the range of possibilities and updates a whole new world, which may be incompatible with the previous one. Historic events are history-changing.⁵

Phenomena such as synchronicities but also 'black swan' events like the Covid-19 pandemic serve as 'smoking gun' that our current epistemological framework is essentially nothing more than a fragile construct of anthropocentric wishful thinking. Confronted by such phenomena, our conventional understandings of psychology and physics, our perceptions of self and the world, and our grasp on the fundamental principles of reality appear to be incomplete, at best.

Synchronicities are generally rare when judged from a probabilistic point of view. Yet they happen quite often when Randonauting. Why is that? How can visits to coordinates generated by randomness so frequently result in encounters of significant meaning? Could this phenomenon be linked to the coordinates' origin from a quantum random number generator (QRNG), a device that enshrines pure contingency? Embracing Cournot and Ayache's view that contingency is a fundamental and intrinsic aspect of nature, akin to a prima materia, it seems both striking and logical to consider that such mechanisms might indeed be at play.

For Ayache, a thing such as a 'random generator' doesn't exist:

What I am arguing for is precisely the superiority of contingency in terms of changing the context (or the range of possibilities) and the fact that a 'random generator' is always relative to a certain context and its perfectly identifiable states. To repeat, it is not 'random' that I am arguing against; it is 'generator'. There is no generator of contingency as such, because contingency is absolute and not relative; it is always the ultimate mover, even though we may not – almost by definition – frame it into an ultimate context. Hence the deep metaphysical challenge in overturning the ontology and putting such an 'open' category as contingency first.⁶

The absolutist, almost theological perspective on contingency of Cournot and Ayache prompts a fundamental question: does Randonauting essentially function as a form of divination? Isn't the practice of Randonauting essentially similar to consulting a form of supra-personal agency, seeking guidance, reflection, or insight from the powers of pure chance? This question reimagines the act of exploring random coordinates not just as a physical journey, but as a metaphysical engagement with forces and patterns that lie beyond the immediate grasp of human intention and understanding.

Divination

Quentin Meillassoux, known for his work in speculative realism, takes the primacy of contingency to the extreme, positing a universe defined by absolute contingency, where nothing is necessarily true or essential. His stance leads to a nihilistic interpretation of reality as fundamentally devoid of inherent meaning or purpose, thereby challenging the stability of knowledge and the possibility of a meaningful existence. Responding to Meillassoux's stark outlook, the writer Joshua Ramey introduces the concept of a 'divining cause' as addition to the four classic causes 'material cause', 'formal cause', 'moving cause' and 'final cause' that Aristotle defined as fundamental basis of determinism:

The divining cause is in some sense the cause of the occasion, equivalent to the contingent or chance element itself. The divining cause is linked, as it were, to the singularity of an event. [...] It demonstrates a reasoning that is by nature occasional, not so much subject to chance as taking chance as its subject.⁷

Ramey describes the divining cause as the fundamental essence of divination, not to predict what will happen, but as a means of interpreting chance events to uncover their unique, contingent potentialities.

In some sense divination exploits the fact that contingency itself is not the derivation of the actual from an arbitrary set of possibilities but an effect of a dynamic tension within the actual itself.⁸

Seen through the lense of divination the randonaut queries a Quantum Random Number Generator for a coordinate instead of throwing dice, shuffling cards, or sorting yarrow stalks. The answer is given in the form of the lived and embodied experience of venturing to a geographic coordinate, looking for answers or signs. Maybe it is the very act of submitting to the fundamental force of contingency that triggers contingency to manifest in synchronistic ways. Randonauts who journey to their target points often describe their experience of being hyper-aware of their surrounding.

Their consciousness temporarily finds itself in diviner's time, a term coined by professor of musicology and co-host of the Weird Studies podcast Phil Ford expanding on Joshua Ramey's concept of the divining cause:

The divining cause gives us the logic of occasion. It accounts not only for what things happen but when, and for the significance of their timing. [...] Unlike formal or final causes, the divining cause feels like something. There is a temporality proper to it that registers on the human organism much as musical time does. [...] Time organized by the divining cause I will call diviner's time. It is a peculiar temporality in which the sign, leaden with dread or effulgent with promise, announces itself in experience. Diviner's time is structured by repetition: an act of divination gives us the sign of something to happen in the future, and then something happens in our experience to manifest that sign. The repetition between these two occurences is exact — the omen and its realization chime together in perfect resonance. And yet, paradoxically, they are always varied, and in ways that cannot be predicted. Same guy, different wig. In a divinatory result, there is a feeling of inevitability — a promise kept, or a doom one has not managed to escape, in fact could never have managed to escape — and yet we are always surprised, somehow. Thus, for the diviner, the repetition of a sign in experience is always unexpected and yet, in the moment of its happening, feels foreordained and inescapable.⁹

In conclusion Randonauts are essentialy diviners, experiencing their journeys from within 'diviner's time', allowing synchronicities to unfold. Having delved into the concepts of chance, contingency, and time, we now circle back to the core theme that initiated our exploration: Place.

Elie Ayache provides a poignant reflection on this return:

Contingency is what happens, what occurs, what arrives (ce qui arrive), what takes place. What arrives has to arrive in a place. Events take place: they don't take time.¹⁰

In essence, Ayache distinguishes between the theoretical realm of possibilities, which navigate through the dimension of time, and the concrete manifestation of contingency, which requires a physical place for its occurrence. Unlike possibilities that oscillate between hypothetical alternatives and the actualization of reality within the bounds of time, contingency anchors itself in the spatial, in the tangible realm where events unfold. This distinction underscores the significance of place not just as a backdrop, but as an integral component in the fabric of occurrence, shaping and being shaped by the unfolding of contingent events.

Part 1 | Part 3