The I Ching and Synchronicity

I have a small ritual before decisions that matter. Three coins, thrown six times. The resulting pattern is a hexagram, one of sixty-four that tells me something. Not about the future. About the present state of my own thinking. The I Ching is, at its mechanical core, a sampling device. The traditional yarrow stalk method generates lines through a procedure weighted so that not all outcomes are equally likely. The coin method is simpler: three coins, each heads or tails, combined to produce one of four line types. Do this six times and you have drawn a point from a space of sixty-four possibilities. A 6-bit binary string. A hexagram.

What strikes me about this is not the mysticism that has accumulated around it over millennia, but the structure underneath. You are not choosing. You are sampling. And the question you bring to the coins acts as a constraint on how you interpret what you draw, which means you are, without knowing it, doing something very close to what Edwin Jaynes spent his career formalizing.

Jaynes argued that probability is not a property of the world but a property of your state of knowledge. Maximum entropy (his central principle) says this: given what you know, assign probabilities that make the fewest additional assumptions. Don’t pretend to know more than you do. The distribution that satisfies your constraints while assuming nothing else is the honest one.

This is not a mystical idea. It is a discipline. It is, in fact, a form of intellectual honesty that is surprisingly hard to practice, because the mind wants to fill gaps. We over-specify. We build models that know too much. Maximum entropy is the corrective — a formal way of staying inside the boundaries of your actual knowledge.

The I Ching is the same corrective, applied differently.

When you throw the coins, you are not asking the universe for an answer. You are asking yourself a question under conditions that prevent you from cheating. The randomness is the point. It breaks the loop of motivated reasoning. The hexagram you receive is a constraint; not on reality, but on interpretation. You must now find meaning within this shape, not the shape you would have constructed if left alone with your anxieties.

Carl Jung called the moment of fit when the hexagram lands and something clarifies synchronicity. Meaningful coincidence. A connection without causal chain. He meant it seriously, and I think he was pointing at something real, even if the metaphysics he reached for were the wrong container.

What actually happens, I think, is this: the external structure makes internal knowledge legible. You already knew something. The coins gave it a shape you could see. The synchronicity is not between you and the cosmos, it is between two parts of yourself, one of which needed a strange likelihood function to speak.

Bayesian updating with a very strange likelihood function. That is what the I Ching is. And that, I would argue, is not so far from what any good model does.

I don’t throw coins instead of thinking. I throw them when thinking has reached its edge… when I have done the analysis I can do and what remains is genuine uncertainty. That is the correct use of any probabilistic framework. You don’t reach for maximum entropy when you have strong prior information. You reach for it when you don’t, when the honest answer is that several possibilities remain live and you must act anyway.

The coins don’t resolve the uncertainty. They make me sit inside it long enough to hear what I already know. That is, I think, the masterclass. Not in prediction. In the discipline of not pretending to know more than you do and in the strange, rigorous, ancient art of making decisions anyway.