convergence

tl,dr: you run into people you know in a small town

What is convergence?

A common topic of conversation in the latter part of Trinity term has been the idea of "convergence" in this town. It has also been called, perhaps more beautifully, entanglement.

The core idea is that the small size and interconnectedness of Oxford make you run into people you have met in disparate places all the time, to the point of surprise and discomfort. Now, this is not something unique to Oxford at all, only the tendency of having your personal and academic life mingled here does give it a unique flavour.

Convergences became an exercise of pattern recognition with Carmen. We would sit down at breakfast and ask each other, I know it's 08:35 but guess how many people I already ran into. Or, we would give each other the look on the street and silently smile as we walked on. We laughed at ourselves for a while, saying isn't convergence just recognising three people on the walk from your accommodation. What is so special about that?

We decided that infusing a bit of sense into this menial thing might be amusing. Taking time to be curious about the mundane and trying to squeeze some meaning out of it. Making things into Things.

Convergence isn't just running into people you know around town, it would be unreasonable to be surprised at this. It is only natural to see familiar faces in college and in the main arteries of town, especially in standard situations like getting coffee in the early afternoon, walking to the central library or buying groceries from the supermarket. Convergence is rather the unusual set of properties of some of these encounters, and the associated reactions they elicit.

So we thought to describe it from different perspectives people would use to account for it.

How the STEM student would describe convergence

Convergence is a fallacy of the human brain that illustrates its limitation at probabilistic thinking. Convergence is just another instance of the Birthday Problem, describing that you only need 23 people in a room to reach a 50% probability of two people sharing the same birthday. In statistical tests, this would amount to failing to correct for multiple comparisons.

In essence, we are brought to over-estimate the unlikeliness of an event, and our surprise at its occurrence is statistically misguided. Even very crude calculations would recognise that the localisation of an individual i1 at time t0 is highly non-random, and that the distribution of this location overlaps to a large extent with that of other individuals. A Mathematical Theory of Convergence could include parameters like the size of your social circle (s) and the time of year to adjust for term-time population distribution (y). It would invariably lead to the conclusion that any minimally social person who spends time outside of their room interacting with other humans is highly likely to experience at least one convergence during the day.

It is said that a great mathematician drafted a general demonstration to the problem of convergence in the margins of his notebooks, however, he ran out of space, and the secret has been lost to the centuries :/

How the Freudian would describe convergence

Convergence ([Konvergenz]) is a neurosis arising from the coalescence of conflicting identities. The typical human subject partitions his identity into several persona, which exist in parallel in his behavioural repertoire. These narratives include the kind-hearted friend, the student, the budding entrepreneur, the boyfriend, the well-disciplined member of college. These narratives fluctuate latently in the background of his life and the one that emerges in a given context is appropriately sampled depending on the immediate social environment.

The fundamental neurosis arises when the narratives coalesce, in a place like Oxford which knowns no boundaries between private and public, personal and professional. The famous case of Anna-O in the MCR is illustrative of this psychological trap. Sat between her graduate advisor and the roommate she has friction with, the subject experiences an uncomfortable clash of identities. No synthesis of identities able to accommodate the impulsions of the id ([Es]) and the imperatives of the super-ego ([über-ich]) can be possible in this situation.

Every convergence produces an anxiety that stems from the conflicting choices of identities to sample from, knowing that no union is possible. The pathological response to convergence takes many manifestations. Of these, locking oneself forevermore in one’s room to never bear the burden of unsolicited encounters. Another, obsessively peeling the faces of every passer-by in the street, falsely recognising convergences at every roundabout.

How the Buddhist would describe convergence

Convergence is simply a glimpse into the one-ness of all beings. It is the palpable realisation that we are all made of the same fabric, woven together into an infinite mind. Convergence is the breakdown of the first person narrative and the coming together of two finite localisations of consciousness, who, one the side of a pavewalk, become aware of their fundamental connectedness.

How the poet would describe convergence

Convergence is carving the sculpture of a person from the stone of anonymity. In the formless mass of uniform faces, each bare as stone, rest embryos of human beings. The sculptor, chipping away at the crude in betweens, progressively pulls someone out of namelessness and facelessness. Each encounter chisels at the unknown, progressively focusing into a clear picture. Each prolonged glance is a reciprocal gaze, carving the seen out of the unseen.

The development of convergence follows the organic pace of fate but bears the signature of the artist.