 Hello and welcome to yet another philosophical improvisation. Today we will speak about serendipity. Now the concept of serendipity is often confused with the concept of synchronicity. Serendipity occurs when you discover something that you were not trying to discover. It is a sort of collateral result, lucky result, of a quest, a knowledge quest. And it has often been the case in science that people discover lost properties out of serendipity, meaning that they were not really trying to formulate the hypothesis or the theory that has been proven by the event of serendipity, the lucky event. For example, take the discovery of penicillin, I think. Now serendipity can also be an existential discovery. If you're writing a novel, for example, you can follow a precise outline and fill in the boxes or you can have a general frame of events and then use your everyday experience encounters, occasions to govern and to navigate in the story as it unfolds. Synchronicity, on the other hand, is this idea that mind can have a causal effect in the world. Certain patterns of our psychology can be intense enough, energetic enough that they will materialize physical phenomena that are in direct relationship with the thought process. Now having said that, of course, we could categorize serendipity as a subset of synchronicity. The luck factor might actually be a superficial characterization. It might be in fact that the discovery was subconsciously expected and that the accidental events, actions that led to the discovery by serendipity were in fact planned by a higher level of consciousness. It is very common today to marvel at synchronicity, a bit less at serendipity, but most of the time there is a contradiction there in the sense that people use a epistemic concept but then they react to it very emotionally. They are not really trying to understand those phenomena with a scientific epistemic or philosophical mindset. They are doing it in a negotistic mindset for their own interests. Regarding serendipity for example, it is not enough to say that these events do not occur simply out of luck, out of coincidence. One must realize that the paradigm of coincidence, randomness and luck has become in the last 200 years a dominant mode of explanation. For example in Darwinism, in other words things are not aiming towards a definite direction and the lack of general direction is in fact what is at stake in the attractive concepts of serendipity and synchronicity. We are a species that has not yet found its one general direction, its shared cosmology. That's it for today. This was yet another philosophical improvisation. See you tomorrow!