Hidden Connections

In Socrates Cafe philosopher Christopher Phillips remarks:

"In a way, it is startling to me that otherwise rational people can give in so easily to the temptation to see a connection between independent phenomena that happen to coincide in time".

Until precisely 100 years ago when Albert Einstein published the last of the four scientific papers of his annus mirabilis (1905) on the photoelectric effect , anyone with a penchant for regarding themselves as rational was safe in the basic assumptions that underly the quotation above.

Now it surely remains the case that the less a person understand probability the more likely they are to perceive and infer meaning to strange coincidences. Yet the prohibition on hidden connections can no longer be said to be absolute. Such is the guilty secret of all contemporary men of reason. Einstein himself realised that he had opened Pandora's Box and spent the rest of his life trying to sit on the lid.

To no avail - spookiness is here to stay. Many of his peers came round to accepting (or at least parking) the notion that the cosmos is configured to be perceived as solid when essentially it isn't, and that classical causality floats on the surface of a soup of contingency. Today most scientists accept that Quantum uncertainty is not simply the result of imperfect knowledge with the implication that at a fundamental level our world is much more ambiguous than meets the eye; in fact it's especially so when it doesn't. Unobserved reality is a miasma of connected disconnectedness, where the whole notion of independence in space and in time is incoherent.

When our ability to see is limited to events affecting large objects in four dimensions, how can we be absolutely sure that we aren't catching fleeting glimpses of connections between these at the indefinite micro-level or indeed between the dimensions we see and the ones that we don't?