Synchronistic Experience as Salience Alignment in Biosemiotic Feedback Systems

Jung’s concept of synchronicity describes meaningful coincidence as an “acausal connecting principle” linking inner psychic states and outer events through significance rather than efficient causation. Although phenomenologically compelling, this formulation remains difficult to integrate with naturalistic accounts of life, cognition, and meaning. This paper proposes a qualitative biosemiotic theory of human synchronistic experience, shifting attention from synchronicity as an ontological claim to the experience of an event as meaningful, unexpected, and causally opaque. The Jungian term “synchronicity” is applied here to human symbolic affairs, not to nonhuman organisms or ecosystems. More-than-human biosemiotics provides the broader theoretical background for understanding sign processes, salience, Umwelt , and organism–niche coupling. The central claim is that a human synchronistic experience is most likely to arise when three conditions converge: a sign-event is experienced as personally or symbolically meaningful; it is surprising relative to the subject’s anticipations; and its causal pathway is not apparent to the subject. This reframes a significant class of apparently acausal meaningful coincidences as the experiential surface of hidden, delayed, distributed, social, or technologically mediated feedback. Jung’s scarab case illustrates how a classic synchronistic event depends not merely on iconic resemblance or indexical timing, but on symbolic interiority within the analytic situation. Internet recommendation systems provide an engineered analogy for synchronistic-like experience generated through opaque feedback, while niche construction, trace-bearing environments, social mediation, and symbolic recursion provide natural analogues in human life. The paper offers a middle position between reductive scepticism and metaphysical inflation: synchronistic experiences may be psychologically and semiotically real without requiring acausal explanation.