4/8/2023 0 Comments Carl jung i chingTherefore it appears when one selects a hexagram through the use of 6 chance events (e.g., coin toss), these chances enter into the picture of the moment of observation and become a part of it which seems very insignificant to us but not to the ancient Chinese mind. The matter of interest seems to be the configuration formed by chance events in the moment of observation and not at all the hypothetical reasons that seemingly account for the coincidence.” Thus, unlike the western mind that tries to carefully make sense of events by only letting one, two, or a very few factors vary while keeping the rest constant in order to discover a causality, the Chinese mind looks at the event as a whole and tries to account for every nuisance and nonessential factor that is involved in making up an observed moment. The moment under actual observation appears to the ancient Chinese view more of a chance hit than a clearly defined result of concurring causal chain processes. According to Jung, “The manner in which the I-Ching tends to look upon reality seems to disfavor our causalistic procedures. It feels that this ideology has accepted human mind limitation in understanding the jumble of laws and factors affecting an outcome (the whole picture), and instead of focusing on limited causal explanations, it focuses on the actual outcome itself. It seems that the actual form and the actual outcome are more appealing to the minds behind I-Ching than the ideal one predicted by scientific theories. What makes each crystal different from the other is what we call chance. However, it is almost impossible for one to find two quartz crystals that are exactly the same. This is also true for natural phenomena for example, consider a crystal of quartz which is a hexagonal prism. There are too many factors affecting the outcome with too few effects to make them detectable and measurable. We may have some educated guesses for the rest of the factors, but that’s about it. For example, we know from the Technology Acceptance Model that ease of use and usefulness of technologies are the two most important factors in them getting adopted and used by a target population at the same time, we know that this only accounts for less than 50% of factors affecting a technology adoption decision. To illustrate, most of the psychological theories can explain 45% to 60% of the variance in results. This is especially true with events that involve human (or animal for that matter) interventions. In many events taking place in the natural world, chance has more effects in determining the outcome than the discovered causality. But considering the immense amount of human effort that goes into controlling and fighting the dangerous effects of chance in what we set forth to do, tells us that chance is not trivial and inconsequential after all. It probably makes sense from our perspective to regard the chance aspect of events as trivial and inconsequential and thus dismiss it instantly. The eastern man's mind (e.g., Chinese) seems to be merely concerned with the chance or unknown aspect of events, unlike the mind of the western man, who is primarily concerned with controllable aspects of events (causality). Thus, as Jung puts it, “if we leave things to nature, we see a very different picture: every process is partially or totally interfered with by chance, so much so that under natural circumstances a course of events absolutely conforming to specific laws is almost an exception.” We call these unknown factors chance since we cannot really make much sense of them. We can not and do not know all factors that are contributing to the occurrence of a phenomenon, and unless we conduct an experiment in a highly controlled laboratory environment, we cannot fully guarantee the outcome of the experiment due to factors that are unbeknownst to us. Jung in the foreword of the Book of Changes by Wilhelm, in science, causality is considered to be self-evident and unquestionable when observed however, we know that what we call observed causality (natural laws) are basically statistical truths and naturally they must allow for exceptions.
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