Moons ago I wrote that when we encounter interesting coincidences there seems to be a tendency, on the subject’s part, to interpret the situation in terms of quasi-causal agents (“the universe is trying to tell me something”) which are understood, however, to not be causal agents: they are stand-ins for what would play the role of a causal agent, if there was causation, with the simultaneous assumption that there is none, however — which seems to be precisely what makes them seem “meaningful” (for once an actual causal agent is discovered, the need for explanation is satisfied, but the scenario no longer appears “meaningful”, nor “interesting”, or even a coincidence).
Now, with the terminology I’ve developed more recently, we can account for this tendency more precisely. What stands in for causality, in these cases, is something similar, but distinct from causality: namely, a local nomic constraint. The similarity lies in the character of necessity (robustness under counterfactual scenarios) which both exhibit. What is distinctive about nomic constraints, however, is that their necessity cannot be construed in terms of a succession between events (the causing and effected events). And being specifically local constraints (as I have hypothesized), they also lack the generality that we associate with causality.
It thus seems that the subject’s sense of “meaningfulness” amounts to an intuitive perception that a local nomic constraint governs the situation. Nomic constraints are more abstract than causal chains, which is perhaps the reason that the sense of meaningfulness collapses once one of the latter can be discerned. (Correspondingly, we no longer have an “interesting coincidence” here, which congruence was of course intended when I constructed the terminology.) Of course, the “sense of meaningfulness” is just as vague a subjective criterion as the “felt need for an explanation” — nothing more than a phenomenological clue to initiate our reflections. And if I’m right about the local nomic constraints, there may well be cases of interesting coincidences (involving a felt need of explanation, and counterfactual robustness) where no such sense of meaningfulness is experienced. In other words, the sense of “meaningfulness” might not be necessary, much less criterial, for there to be a case of interesting coincidence, but simply an occasional by-product (perhaps restricted to some types of situations, or specifically disposed subjects).
