Time: The Bergson-Einstein debate
Bergson's claim it's that time is heterogenous and continuous. We each experience time differently from others and within our own lives. Sometimes it feels fast and sometimes it feels slow. Sometimes it disappears or morphs into an extreme state, as when we we are unconscious or asleep, and then appears again when we wake up. We attempt to synchronized our experiences with clocks, but clocks are a synchronization mechanization, they are not real time.
In this video, Jimena Canales, author of a book on the same subject, outlines the differences in the metaphysical philosophies of Relativity and Duration. Though no where near the depth and insights if Stephen Robbins, still a good primer on the metaphysical issue of. The importance of Bergson's stance is that it is critical to understanding the nature of evolving life as it brings back the experience of duration into consciousness and doesn't externalize as is the persistent rhythm of materialism.
Bergson says: If we did not have a prior notion of time, then clocks would just be bits of machinery which we would use to amuse ourselves.
In this video, Jimena Canales, author of a book on the same subject, outlines the differences in the metaphysical philosophies of Relativity and Duration. Though no where near the depth and insights if Stephen Robbins, still a good primer on the metaphysical issue of. The importance of Bergson's stance is that it is critical to understanding the nature of evolving life as it brings back the experience of duration into consciousness and doesn't externalize as is the persistent rhythm of materialism.
Bergson says: If we did not have a prior notion of time, then clocks would just be bits of machinery which we would use to amuse ourselves.
Comments (181)
No, it is as I described it.
Yes. Time (duration) is the actual, personal experience of life.
That's right. What I am describing is denial. The thing is that mysticism in general is about denial. That's simply what it is. Why is it that meditation is the holy grail of mysticism? Is it not because meditation is a form of denial? It is a return to a more primitive way of thinking that is known as intuition.
Quoting Perplexed
Bergson is opposed to any conception of time as a succession of moments.
Bergson opposes spacialization of time. If you don't understand what I just said, you have to either think about it or read about it.
Or you can simply explain it to me so that I can be enlightened.
"Spatialized time" is precisely the kind of time that I am talking about i.e. the kind that can be thought of as a succession of moments. For Bergson, everything that is divisible is considered "spatial".
Time is exactly as you are experiencing it. Is time starting and stopping for you as a succession of moments? Mine is continuous.
Time for me sometimes feels slow, sometimes feels fast, sometimes exists without space (in my dreams), sometimes feels disrupted as when I am unconscious. Real time (duration) of life is heterogenous and is fundamental to the experience of life.
I believe meditation is a technique for focusing ones mind, no? I suppose it could be considered a denial that unfocused use of the mind delivers the truth, or perhaps there is the denial of the ascetic who runs away to live on a mountaintop. There's good and bad denial right. Denial of a lie could be pretty important.
Quoting Magnus Anderson
Are you sure it is not just the conception of time as only a succession of moments that he is opposed to? As this is a very simplistic and linear way of describing it.
What does it mean for time to be "starting and stopping"? The point is that my past is a succession of moments. You have one moment coming after another moment.
Meditation is a tool that we use to reduce mental stimulation. So yes, by eliminating distracting impulses, it can help us focus. It's a very useful too but in the case of those who consider themselves mystics it is a tool used to simplify their process of thinking to a degree that is quite astonishing.
Quoting Perplexed
No, he says that such a conception falsifies the reality of time.
I suppose meditation can also have quasi-religious interpretations which seek a way of knowing not captured by discursive, logical or linguistic methods.
Quoting Magnus Anderson
Would Einstein's relativity of simultaneity not put him in agreement with Bergson? ie. there are moments but they are subjective for different observers.
If the moments are continuous there are no moments. That was Bergson's point. This is what Zeno's paradoxes are all about. When you do away with points (the arrow never stands still) the paradoxes vanish. Whenever there are paradoxes there are problems with the ontology. Moments are the problem. Spacialization of time creates these paradoxes.
Right. Bergson thought that Zeno's paradox of the arrow demonstrates that time is not made out of points. But I don't agree. Zeno's argument is just a word game. Motion is a difference in position between two points in time. That's what the word means. The fact that we can say the object is at rest at every point in time does not mean its position is not different at different points in time.
Well then you have an expected paradox. It is an outgrowth of your ontology which brings us right back to my first question, if you think you are moments then do you feel each moment starting and stopping.
If you understand the paradox, then you understand why moments and spatiality yields it. As soon as I understood Bergson's perspective, I immediately gave up on spacial time. I'm very flexible. I have no agenda. Not wedded to any philosophy or science. Just looking to better understand nature.
You will have to define what it means for a moment to "start and stop". Moments do not start and stop, they simply follow one after another. For a moment to start and stop, it must have a duration. But moments are durationless by definition.
If a moment is without duration, exactly how many moments does it take to make one second? The stuff that the clock is measuring. That science it's measuring.
I understand the paradox. The paradox is a word game. In other words, there is no paradox. If an object is at rest at every point in time, it does not follow that it is not moving. The solution to the "paradox" is to understand what the word "motion" means.
There can be any number of moments within a second. Bergson claims that time is indivisible. I claim that time is not only divisible but also infinitely divisible.
Well apparently you are fine with this so nothing is going to convince you otherwise. For me, it is strange and doesn't coincide with every day experience.
I realize this. I asking the precise number. Scientifically speaking of course.
Maybe you should try to explain why you find it counter-intutive?
How does this issue keep recurring? A grasp of integral calculus is a very basic piece of mathematical literacy.
Since you don't understand the issue and why integral calculus has nothing to do with it, I guess we will be plagued by this issue forever. Maybe if you have it have it done thought, instead of just repeating what some teacher in college was paid to teach you, we might not have to revisit this issue. Or do you think Bergson didn't understand integral calculus? Or maybe you think you understand it better? Which is it?
That's poor form. It tells us about you, not about time and movement.
Whereas, I think what you are describing is ‘fear of religion’. Thomas Nagel described it in his essay Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion:
It ought to be noted that Nagel writes as a professed atheist.
There is no LAW. Just a mathematical symbolic tool that works ok in approximately solving certain types of problems. All created by our Creative Minds.
So that's a... Law?
No Laws here. I consider the concept silly, especially the way it is thrown around to achieve some ground of superiority. Law of Attraction is a nice one. Works well because people like Laws.
SO it seems your rejection of laws (rules?) is selective.
More relevant to the topic at hand, there's an essay from about a year ago on NPR Cosmos and Culture, on Einstein and Bergson, Was Einstein Wrong? It is a comment on the book the OP is about, by Adam Frank, who's a pretty good writer on science and philosophy.
[quote=Adam Frank] is there a philosophy — a "metaphysics" — that goes beyond what the math and the data support? And, if such background metaphysics exist, could it be wrong even if the theory itself is right in terms of experiments and data?
This question is at the heart of a fascinating book I've been reading called The Physicist and the Philosopher by Jimena Canales. It's a story about Albert Einstein (who needs no introduction) and Henri Bergson (who probably does).[/quote]
No. There are no Laws and I don't make them up for convenience or to gain the gravitas high ground.
You don't understand the problem, that's the problem which is why we keep revisiting it.
That's the problem.
The unfolding of our experiences happens within time as set out by physicist. So I think Canales reverses physics and metaphysics; physics provides the background for phenomenology, rather than phenomenology underpinning physics.
Brining this back to the topic at hand, integral calculus clearly explains instantaneous velocity. Is there a further issue, not explained by the mathematics, perhaps involving phenomenology, that needs addressing?
Quoting Rich
So what do you make of this, Wayfarer? We might agree that we each experience different events within time; but that is not the same as each experiencing time differently. Now if this were true, and we do experience time differently, how could this be discussed? IS the question different to "We each experience colour differently from others and within our own lives".
Rich is unable to set the issue out clearly. IS there an issue?
What time does the physicist set out. A clock? Something that moves in space. Would I not still experience duration whether or not I measure the some rhythms of a clock?
Duration is what we experience as the passage of like. During this duration events occur. So humans became curious (or for economic reasons) where events happen at the same time. As it turns out, as the simultaneity oof events on clocks became more difficult to determine, the limits were found. But where or not technology is able to keep track of time, the time of life as internally experienced, as felt, continues. This is what Bergson referred to as real time. Science is only concerned with trying to measure simultaneity of events. Totally different issue and had nothing to do with the evolution of life.
Quoting Banno
Easily,. "That play seemed to drag". "Funny, time seems to fly for me." "I thought that would never end". "That vacation went by so fast". 'It seems just as if happened yesterday". But more importantly than communicating the feeling of duration, is the experiencing of duration. How does duration change between awake, day dreaming, dreaming, asleep without dreaming, waking up? There is a qualitative feeling that is personal and defines ones life.
As I said, people make up Laws and change Laws. Nothing sacrosanct about them - except the Laws of God, of course. You see, Laws are handy but they don't solve any philosophical problem.
Einstein was a scientific realist. Obviously a genius, basically the byword for genius - but would he have understood Kant’s ‘Copernican revolution in thought’? I suspect not. Whereas, I think Bergson, being a philosopher, did (although I haven't read him yet.)
Recall that Kant regarded time and space as 'primary intuitions' - contributions of the mind in some sense. So they aren't entirely objective. But I think a huge amount rides on 'entirely' in this context. I mean, for you and I both, the distance from Earth to the Sun is the same, a kilo is 2.20462 pounds, and so on. All the vast array of scientifically-ascertainable facts remain as they are. But there is still a sense in which the mind itself furnishes the background within which all such judgements are made. Whereas for the scientific realist, the mind is generally an output, a result, of the forces that science studies. 'The background', for the scientist, is purportedly the physical Cosmos. Carl Sagan - 'Cosmos is all there is.' That is scientific realism. But it forgets the all-important role of the mind, it pretends that all of this exists independently of any act of cognition. Now, due in part to relativity, and the 'observer problem' in quantum physics, science has forced us to re-think this sense of separation or 'other-ness' from the Universe. It is becoming obvious that the scientist is part of the picture. And that is something Einstein would never agree with, or understand, I feel - for reasons that aren't strictly speaking scientific at all.
Now, I don't agree with a lot of Rich's posts, because I think he pushes this fact to the point of a very simplistic relativism - that everything is simply 'in the mind' or to all intents, a matter of opinion. I definitely don't agree with that. Facts are facts, a speeding ticket or the boiling point of water or the atomic weight of lead are what they are. Understanding the role or nature of mind is a very subtle thing, in my view. But I think that's the nub of the problem.
Right. My personal experience of life which goes on whether or not I have a clock.
Water boils. That's an observation. At what temperature? Oh, let's get together and make up some approximate measurement made by some device (which changes). That is what you don't understand. Approximations and consensus observations are not facts. Sometimes people agree, most often not. One cannot separate the observer from the system. Not philosophy, not technically. It is a thoroughly lost cause.
You think nobody has realised this before? If you actually study the Greeks, you would see that they were utterly dedicated to understanding the question of 'how do we know what anything actually is?' The Parmenides, which is the beginning of the Western metaphysical tradition, and then the subsequent dialectic of being and becoming that developed out of that, over centuries, really went into these questions in great depth. You're simply assuming the role of a Protagoras (although he was a pro!)
Right. There is a whole history. So it isn't Rich's ideas, is it? You are actually disagreeing with Pros! (Always seeking the high ground).
Science doesn't give insights. People do, like Bohm, Bell, De broglie, and Einstein's wife, Mileva Mari? Einstein, who did a substantial part of the work (maybe more) which she was never credited with (other than the Nobel Prize money).
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/the-forgotten-life-of-einsteins-first-wife/
Quoting Wayfarer
I don't disagree with this. I would ask instead what a mind is, especially in this context. I suggest that the background, the context in which our discussions take place, is quite public; indeed, that it is pretty much delimited by our language.
I would also not phrase the physicist attitude to mind in quite the same way as you do. I would say instead that sensible physicists will steer clear of issues of mind until physical theory can play a useful role in its elucidation.
Nore does science treat mind as only output; I suspect it is closer to a strange loop, with inputs leading to unexpected consequences.
The first lesson in physics is about errors. The students are given rulers and asked to measure the table in front of them as accurately as they can. They come up with different measures - 1000mm, 1001mm, 998mm...
Then it is explained that they are all correct - to within a certain error. The table is 1000+/- 3mm.
So here is the fact: the table is 1000mm give or take 3 mm wide.
Based upon what? Some consensus arrived at by a group of observers? Suppose the rulers are recalled?
If one wants to understand how "facts" are created and the problems with them, one only has to observe the process by which they are created. Observation is always the key factor because that is what the human mind does, observe and then create.
So you will doubt without reason.
And yet you are comfortable using the rules of English, as I pointed out before.
So you doubt selectively.
I understand. That is what I do.
There is very little evidence to support this.
You say there are no rules, while selectively following them. You attack your critics, rather than answer their critique. Your view is impractical and irrational.
Appart from that, Fine.
Nice bantering with you.
But you do; that's the point. You use the rules of English, no problem. You play lip service to rationality. You use the physics of the internet without a qualm. But you argue against the very physics that you are obligated by reality to follow.
Yours is a strange folly.
I thought v you might call it the "Laws of English". Anyway, language is formed by consensus, so you keep making my point - and it keeps changing.
Quoting Banno
So now I'm arguing against physics?
Really nice bantering with you.
So you have moved from
Quoting Rich
to claiming laws are mere consensus...
Quoting Rich
Indeed, your point does keep changing.
So let's go back to your OP:
Quoting Rich
IS this saying anything more or distinct from "we each experience different events"? If so, what?
What puzzles me is why Nagel thinks anyone would be afraid of something if they had no motivation to concern themselves with it. If I do have a motivation to concern myself with religion then that leaves the question as to just what is nature of the motivation. The motivation may be different for each person, but why fear in any case?
Tell me.
There really is no feeling of duration. What we feel is the division between past and future. We have memories of the past, and we anticipate the future. We do not feel duration.
This is what makes you think that we all feel duration differently, because we don't even feel duration at all. There really is no such thing as duration, we just make it up. We produce some arbitrary standards, some "rules", and by obeying the rules we can talk about duration. But there is no real thing which is referred to by "duration", duration is artificial, it has been created by the "rules".
The "rules", and this talk of "duration", produce a big illusion, making us think that duration is something real. But it's really just a distraction, drawing our attention away from the reality of time, and that is the division between past and future.
Yes, we feel ourselves, our memory pressing into the present. The future is possibilities that we are moving towards. This is the experience of life in duration. There are no divisions anywhere.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This is duration the time of life. The duration in which mind evolves by learning, experiment, and creating. The future is a virtual action of possible movement, of new creation. Duration is c the v experience of life.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
If duration is an illusion, then life is an Illusion, which brings us to Hindu Maya or Deterministic illusions of mind. Not my cup of tea. For me, everything is real, exactly as we experience it. Mirages, dreams, thoughts, unconscious states, day dreaming, sleep walking, Everything. There are differences in similarities and similarities in differences. Solving the clues leads to a deeper understanding of life. Calling something an illusion just ends the search since there are no boundaries to illusions.
People I talk too tell me their day really dragged, their vacation when by to quickly, life is too short, they feel asleep and woke up and had no sense of time, dreams are like floating images. I know when I was unconscious, I felt no time though I knew that time was disrupted because my memories were disrupted. Everyone seems to be experiencing life differently. Sometimes passing too fast, sometimes too slow. That's life.
Of course there is a division, the past is substantially different from the future. Therefore there must be a division between the two.
Quoting Rich
You really haven't explained how "learning", "experiment", "creating", "the future is possibilities" translates into "duration".
Quoting Rich
I don't see any logic here. Life is now, at the present, the division between past and future. Duration is only relevant if one wants to relate past events to future events, etc.. But this is not necessary to life, it is just the human enterprise of applying rules.
The future possibilities manifests as memory just like all our thoughts. They are different in kind, but still all memory. As we take action, the new memory presses into the old and new possibilities arise - in memory.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
It is the experience of life as felt in memory. When one meditates, one brings to bear one's mind on its own memory. There it is. Life. When one comes out of meditation, one begins to create new images in memory, learn from what it observed whole meditating, and then plots a new action to create something new, maybe dinner?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
The human enterprise is creating those rules and experimenting with the results.
I don't see how future possibilities could be memories. How could something which hasn't occurred yet exist as a memory? That makes no sense.
It's possibilities. On this we stake action using will.
While there are those who claim to be able to see in the future, and I accept the possibility (of a different sort), this is not the future I am talking about. I am only talking about what are memory is of possibilities that we act on. There is no future beyond these possibilities. Everything we experience is in memory.
So how would one have a memory of something which is a possibility?
I have now gone back and listened to the lecture in the OP. Interesting talk. Also interesting to note how completely Bergson has vanished from the public sphere, at least the Anglo-sphere.
Anyway - my comments were general, they're not specific to Bergson and Einstein in particular. All I'm arguing is that Einstein was a scientific realist. He says, the time that physicists measure by clocks, is objectively real, and so, real in a way that what he refers to 'philosopher's time' is not. Whereas I am arguing that nothing is truly or only or completely objective.
The video in the OP starts with a couple of quotes from philosophy of science, by Bruno Latour and someone else. They're pretty close to what I'm getting at.
In response to 'what mind is' - obviously a deep question. What I'm saying is that modern analytical philosophy generally assumes an evolutionary perspective: that mind is 'the human mind' and that this is something that has evolved (like everything else) - hence 'a product of evolution'. That is almost the common-sense view nowadays. But that treats mind in a naturalistic way, as a phenomenon. Whereas I think in the philosophical tradition, there is a different way of considering the issue.
Here's another Einstein discussion - this one with Tagore, Hindu mystic and poet:
[quote=Einstein]I cannot prove scientifically that Truth must be conceived as a Truth that is valid independent of humanity; but I believe it firmly. I believe, for instance, that the Pythagorean theorem in geometry states something that is approximately true, independent of the existence of man. [/quote]
The profound point that I think Einstein misses, is that the Pythagorean theorem can only be grasped by a rational intelligence. So I agree with him that it's not dependent on the human mind; but it is nevertheless an intelligible principle, something that only a mind can see. 'Mind' is what grasps such ideas - which is clearly the Platonist understanding of the nature of mind, and is very close to the meaning of the Greek word 'nous'. (This also, incidentally, is close to Frege's view of the question, and also Husserl's.) Whereas the naturalistic understanding of mind, is of an evolved adaptation. So my view is that mind transcends a biological description, as it is logically prior to the discipline of biology as such, being necessary for there even to be 'a science of biology'.
Quoting Janus
Nagel says that it's a cultural issue, that what he is calling 'fear of religion' is widespread in modern culture, and that it drives a lot of the debate around evolution and religion. (It's not coincidental that Bergson's best-known book was Creative Evolution.) I think it's a frequently-expressed cultural attitude in the West, and that it is behind this post. But I might be wrong, and in any case, it's tangential.
The arrow is resting AT every instant but it is not resting BETWEEN instants.
Even the idea that the arrow is resting at every instant is strange. Rest is something that takes place BETWEEN instants.
You are just START/STOP which is the nature of the Paradox and my very first question to you. Do you believe feel like your life is coming stopping and going? This is rhetorical. I don't need an answer.
You need to define what it means for life to be starting and stopping.
Alright, so you do not want to define what it means for life to be starting and stopping which means the discussion is over and it's your choice. No problem.
A fair point. Again I would only add that mind here is social; the rules of geometry are in principle public. That is, roughly, I would use language were you use mind. So your point becomes that biology requires language. Perhaps the result is just that the transcendence appears a little less grandiose.
Do you really consider that to be a "profound point"? I don't: I would say that surely Einstein would not have been stupid enough to miss something so patently obvious! The issue that remains unresolved is what it means for something to be intelligible (what are the implications of intelligibility) and what it means for something to be a rational intelligence (or less tendentiously, rationally intelligent). It seems to me that the answers to those questions are not so obvious as your position seems to assume they are. You seem to me casting the obvious as profound, and the profound as obvious.
Even if "fear of religion" is widespread in modern culture; that still leaves the question as to why people might be afraid of religion. I can imagine that people might be afraid of it because they were indoctrinated with a fear of divine judgement and eternal punishment. I can imagine that people might be afraid of it because it involves ethical questions about their lives which they have repressed, because they don't want to acknowledge them and take responsibility for them.
It may be tangential, but it was you who introduced it into this thread as the subject of an entire post.
It's not a matter of being 'stupid', nor is what I am saying obvious. The point you make about 'understanding the nature of intelligibility' is not the least obvious! Not at all! Recall another quote by Einstein: 'The greatest mystery of the Universe is why it is intelligible.' His younger associate, Eugene Wigner, wrote that well-known essay, the Unreasonable Efficiency of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences; the word 'miracle' appears in it a dozen times. And he wasn't stupid, either.
So the reason you don't consider it 'a profound point' might be because you don't see why it's actually profound.
(I am starting another thread on Fear of Religion.)
You completely miscomprehended what I wrote. I said the point that the Pythagorean principle can only be grasped by a rational intelligence is obvious, but that the answers to the questions as to what it means to be rationally intelligent, and rationally intelligible are not.
He was wrong. In interesting ways, that have since been discounted.
Most strikingly, the origin of his criticism of relativistic time came from the first rendition of the twin paradox. WE now know that such time dilation is quite real.
So, in regard to the OP, is there something about Bergson I am missing?
My take on Bergson was that he was completely discounted because his ‘Elan vital’ was interpreted as another version of Descartes’ res cogitans - a ghost in a machine. And it’s not hard to see there’s no such thing. It’s bit of a wilful misrepresentation but it’s enough to have buried him.
[quote]Bergson, like Kant, strives hard to show that spiritual values can co-exist with the findings of science. He does this by contrasting the largely false world of common sense and science (in which he, nevertheless, takes a keen interest) with the true world of intuition. He is perfectly lucid and even superb so long as he demonstrates that both the intellect and our practical preoccupations manifestly distort the world view both of everyday experience and of mechanical science. But, when he comes to the way out, to his ‘duration’ and his "intuition," vagueness envelops all and everything. His positive views have therefore been rightly described as "tantalising," for "as soon as one reaches out to grasp his body of thought it seems to disappear within a teasing ambiguity."
Mature and accomplished spiritual knowledge can be had only within a living tradition. But how could a Polish Jew, transplanted to Paris, find such a tradition in the corridors of the CollŠge de France or in the salons of the 16th arrondissement? It is the tragedy of our time that so many of those who thirst for spiritual wisdom are forced to think it out for themselves--always in vain. There is no such thing as a pure spirituality in the abstract. There are only separate lineages handed down traditionally from the past. If any proof were needed, Bergson, a first-class intellect, would provide it. His views on religion are a mixture of vague adumbrations and jumbled reminiscences which catch some of the general principles of spirituality but miss its concrete manifestations.
Tradition furnished at least two worlds composed of objects of pure disinterested contemplation--the Buddhist world of dharmas and the Platonic ideas in their pagan, Christian, or Jewish form. Here Bergson would have had an opportunity to "go beyond intellectual analysis and to recapture by an act of intuitive sympathy the being and the existence in their original quality."(20) But for various reasons he could not accept either of these traditions. Like Schopenhauer, he regarded art as one of the avenues to the truth,(21) but, otherwise, his "intuition," this "ecstatic identification with the object,"(22) this "spiritual sympathy by which one places oneself within an object in order to coincide with what is unique in it, and consequently inexpressible, "(23) is never explained as a disciplined faculty.
Because of this disseverance from a concrete spiritual practice, Bergson has now no disciples, and his work belongs to the past. As Rai'ssa Maritain put it so well, "Bergson travelled uncertainly towards God, still far off, but the light of whom had already reached him." Unable, like Moses, to reach the promised land, he, nevertheless, cleared the way for the Catholic revival of the twentieth century, which enabled many French intellectuals to regain contact with at least one living spiritual tradition. At the same time, he realized that the inanition of the spiritual impulse slowly deprives life of its savor among the more finely organized minds of Europe, and he wrote in 1932, "Mankind lies groaning, half-crushed beneath the weight of its own progress. Men do not sufficiently realize that their future is in their own hands. Theirs is the task of determining first whether they want to go on living or not(!)....[quote]
We know gravities affect clocks. Not at all surprising. We know nothing about human experience and the affect of gravity on it, other than what we feel on Earth. In space, we know humans react in different ways, but none have report time slowing down.
You keep mixing up clocks with humans, which is comparable to mixing up computers with humans. In any case, my prediction would be if humans are accelerated near the speed of light they would die. I wonder if Einstein would debate me on this?
"it should be recognized that, taken as a whole, the work is powerful: it is impossible to examine it without experiencing, almost in each page, the impression that it makes us perceive a number of questions in a different light, that it places constantly before us windows through which we perceive, in a flash, unsuspected horizons.
"Personally, from our early youth, we have been stuck by Bergson's very original ideas concerning time, Dustin, and movement. More recently, turning again these celebrated pages and reflecting on the progress achieved by science since the already distant time when we first read them, we have been struck by the analogy between certain new concepts of contemporary physics and certain brilliant intuitions of the philosophy of duration. And we have been still surprised by the fact that most of these intuitions are found already expressed in Time and Free Will, Bergson's first work and also perhaps the most remarkable at least from our point of view: this essay, it's author's doctors thesis, dates from 1889 and consequently antedates by forty years the ideas of Neils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg on the physical interpretation of wave mechanics".
To characterize Bergson as some spiritual leader seeking disciples for some religious Renaissance is beyond dumbfounding. An absolute disgrace to his works and contributions to knowledge of the human experience. What he was, and forever will be, one of the greatest philosophers in history, and until one actually reads and understands his works, which would take lots of time, it would be best not to depend upon some third parties for some letter of recommendation. Do it yourself.
I think what Conze meant was that he left no academic successors (although it’s true that Conze was often a cynic.)
https://www.scribd.com/document/255911421/Experience-vs-Concept-The-Role-of-Bergson-in-Twentieth-Century-French-Philosophy
http://blog.uvm.edu/aivakhiv/2009/04/12/deleuze-whitehead-bergson/
Any teleological approach to evolution ought be discarded as a mater of course. The point of evolution is its lack of purpose.
This is what buried Bergson. The academic warfare on life and meaning wholely and gleefully supported by commercial industry which prefers the term computer robots as a substitute term for humans. Where have we witnessed this before?
Hired guns for dehumanization like Russell. We are nothing more pre-determined bots whose only use is as fodder. Pathetic, disgusting, disgraceful.
Bergson biggest sin was defending and promoting the creative force that lies within us all and connects us all. His name for this was the Élan vital. It is this force that makes life magnificent.
But this was a thread about time.
Quoting Rich
SO are you saying that Élan vital is outside of time?
Our lives. This is what we do every day in our life. Create, learn, experiment, and evolve. That is why people come to forums and why they go to museums, or doodle, or very everything else we do, even dreams. It is all of life. The impetus of life and evolution is us - our Minds.
That's the biggest just-so story in the whole history of science, in my view. It is one area where I much prefer Bergson. It's simply because nothing like 'purpose' - and what is that but the Aristotelean 'telos' - can't be accomodated in the procrustean bed of materialism. The origin of all scientism.
I would have thought the Earth is evidence.
I think the issue is that methodological naturalism has to eschew any of those kinds of questions. They’re just not in scope for a naturalist explanation, as they really require a value-judgement of the kind that is beyond the scope of the discipline. But now that biological evolution has become a de facto secular religion, then that is now read as a ‘science shows that life really has no purpose’ or is ‘the outcome of the accidental collocation of atoms’ (Bertrand Russell’s phrase).
But that really is a category error (to put it charitably). Naturalism really has nothing to say about purpose in any sense other than material and efficient causes. Whether life or the universe has or doesn’t have any kind of inherent teleology is not really a scientific question at all, but a metaphysical one. But nowadays of course science is commonly used to rebut metaphysical claims - just as it was in the debate between Einstein and Bergson. Which is like using a sledgehammer to play a fiddle (to mangle a metaphor).
Have a look at the Wikipedia entry on the term teleonomy. The drift is, that having rejected the taboo word ‘teleology’ from the lexicon, scientists were obliged to replace it with a neologism, teleology, because it turned out to be quite impossible to present any kind of coherent biology without a word for ‘inherent purpose’.
Apokrisis, our resident expert on theory of biology, will acknowledge that the notion of formal and final causes have had to be re-introduced to philosophy of biology for similar reasons.
Besides, where else in science, would the idea that ‘something happened for no reason’, be regarded as ‘an hypothesis’?
There’s a philosopher of biology I really like, by the name of Steve Talbott, whose essays have been published in the New Atlantis, and who discusses these questions. Well worth a read.
That time slows down as speed increases has been empirically shown to be true. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_dilation#/issues. It is not necessary that the speed be near the speed of light for the effect to occur.
A human would not sense his own time slowing, but a human could observe another person's time slowing relative to his own. Suggesting that one could sense time slowing conflates an event with time itself. We don't sense time. We sense that our drink takes too long to be served. If you slowed time, you wouldn't feel like your drink got there faster because your frustration was also slowed down.
Bergson was entirely right, for instance, that more than sheer randomness was needed to account for phenomena like converent evolution - a major theme of Creative Evolution - but he, along with the science of his time, simply did not have the proper tools to explain it. The Elan vital does more to name the problem than to account for it, but that there was a problem, Bergson was entirely right about. Bergson would have been delighted, I think, with the discovery of evolvability, in which evolution enhances its own ability to generate adaptive traits, a kind of 'directed randomness' or accelerated search function which is entirely explicable on scientific grounds alone. So too would he have loved the advent of epigenetics and the deepening work on genetic assimilation, the principles of which are presciently intuited in so much of Creative Evolution.
Similarly with Einstein, Bergson definitively fucked up in the debate in terms of his own positive account of simultaneity, but he was also entirely right that Einstein's own account did indeed leave out time in any substantive sense.
Do you not see that there is purpose in each act of every living thing? If every living thing acts with purpose, and evolution is a result of those acts, how can you conclude that there is a lack of purpose in evolution?
No, what has been shown is that periodicity of movement is affected by matter. Science, by virtue of its incredible bias toward dead matter, just chooses to label clocks as "time". Clocks are not time. Clocks are instruments which, within limits, attempt to measure simultaneous events. Simultaneity is not relative, measurement is relative because of the limits of instrumentation.
Quoting Hanover
Of course v they do. They do it all the time and they vocalize these feelings
Quoting Hanover
Never heard this happen anywhere by anyone. This is comparable to flying dogs. I'll be v this under the c heading off fabricated evidence?
So science denies that people can feel time slow, despite the enormous evidence to the contrary, but feel it is perfectly sensible that one human can observe another person's time slowing. This c is exactly how c twisted science had become. It's become the modern version of the traveling troubadours just making up stories for money and amusement. Absolutely amazing.
.
Oh, the revisionist comes out of the woodwork, and stakes the higher ground by cleansing the narrative for his own pathetic reasons. You want to stay in good graces? I thought you might have some insights. What you offer is nice, nice so you can remain respectable among your buddies.
What can joke. Never have I read such revision of Bergson as this. Why don't you just offer your own stuff if you don't like Bergson? Bergson had more courage in his pinky than you offer in your entirety. Weak.
I specifically stated that time and events were distinct, so I'm not sure who you're arguing with.Quoting Rich
They feel like events are occuring slowly. Humans can't sense time itself. Stop conflating time with events. If I feel like something lasts longer than it did, I didn't feel time slow down because it didn't.Quoting Rich
I cited the reference you didn't read.Quoting Rich
This isn't theoretical. It's empirical. Read the cited material.
You have nothing more to offer than your revisionism for your own pathetic reasons. Here is P.AY. Gunter's non-revisionist account of the Élan vital, as told by Bergson, not you:
The élan vital or "vital impetus" is described by Bergson as being engaged in a continual struggle with physical matter. The result of this struggle is twofold: While life is forced to take on many of the characteristics of its material environment, matter is nonetheless shaped into ever more complex and active organisms.
In page 89 of Creative Evolution, noteworthy title for his major work on the nature of Life and consciousness, Bergson defines the Élan vital as the original impetus of life. There is no problem other than with revisionists. I suspect you do not understand one thing that Bergson since you not understand even the most elementary concept of his works.
No one has ever observed another person's life slowing. The sense of time is an internal feeling of time passing. Read Thomas Mann or Virginia Woolf. Clocks are measurement instruments to try to determine simultaneity.
Read the cited material. That's precisely what they've done. That no one has experienced another's experience is a given. Having a first person experience of a second person is incoherent.
So a sparrow that collects food for its family has more successful offspring. But that does not mean the sparrow has an intent to have more successful offspring.
This is curiously parallel to recent discussion of belief in which I have been involved. We use the language of belief to describe the actions of a dog, but does that mean the dog has a belief? We use the language of intent to describe the actions of the sparrow, but does the sparrow have intent?
Edit:
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
What do you make of this, @Wayfarer?
Is this an acceptable argument?
I don't think so.
Nothing in the article about "a human could observe another person's time slowing relative to his own."
As you said, it is incoherent.
I wondered as much.
Silly pandering which is exactly what your cowardly buddy is doing. You figure he knows all about Bergson because he insulted me? Did he get into your good graces by pandering to you? You figure maybe that is why he made his heroic comments about me?
Let me say this, his one fleeting comment about Bergson's philosophy was monumentally silly. He opened up the book and read another.
I hope you won't mind my drawing attention to this inadvertent pun. I've just been reading Victoria Welby, a neglected philosopher of the turn of the 19th/20th century, who had a notion of 'mother sense' which is a kind of version of 'intuition'. A mater of course seems to fit perfectly.
The very nature of motherhood - which is at the core of evolution though neglected - always seems a primal problem for philosophies of purposelessness, to me. It's hard to understand the act of giving birth unless...well, motherhood embodies purpose. It just is purpose.
Or maybe it's just that...
There seems to me a pretty large assumption in what we are prepared to say that animals do 'out of instinct' - as if this is something obvious. Here's a snippet from one of the aforementioned Talbott essays, originally published in 1927, concerning the activities of the small British bird, the chaffinch:
Talbott comments:
I can't help but be reminded of a comment that I once read about a remark in The Origin of Species itself:
“It may be metaphorically said that Natural Selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, the slightest variations; rejecting those that are bad, and adding up all that are good; silently and insensibly working whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being.” (1876 ed., 68-69)
Darwin has acknowledged that he is using metaphor, but this begs the question: metaphor, for what? Because here, 'Natural Selection' is likewise imbued with the attributes of agency - it scrutinizes, rejects, adds up, and subtly works. A critic remarked that “Darwin starts by insisting that nature is not a goddess but a metaphor. As soon as he begins to talk about nature, however, she is transformed into a divinity with consciousness and will.”
I know this whole subject is massively fraught and contested, but I think there's something deeply amiss with the general, mechanistic way of depicting 'life'. I mean, I will frequently notice narrators on nature documentaries being starry-eyed about what evolution 'does'. But according to evolutionary theory, evolution is not actually 'an agent', and there is a deep question as to whether there really are any 'purposive agents' at all. Yet it seems to me that all living things are indeed animated, and in a deep sense, purposive. But we seem to be persuaded that this itself is a grand illusion.
disagree, you and I, and yet utterly agree, at the same time. That's philosophy :) Thanks for carrying on such debates!
On this, I agree; but I would like you to answer the further question: does this imply the presence of an agent?
I think not. I think that our language developed an approach to action based around our own agency, and finds itself unable to easily present the undirected agency of evolution.
@McDoodle - not really clear on what it is we are not agreeing on.
Try this quotation for size: ‘I’ll tell you if I’m an atheist, if you tell me what it is I’m supposed not to believe in’ ~ Chomsky.
I just can't see how being mind-dependent in the sense you are pointing to, the sense that the Pythagorean Theorem must be formulated and understood in order to be known, could be anything but unarguably obvious.
Let me see if I understand your claim. We observe that living things act with purpose, but this does not provide us with what we need to conclude that living things act with purpose. Commonly called "the problem of induction".
And on the poverty of vitalism: "There lies the stumbling-block of the vitalistic theories. We shall not reproach them, as is ordinarily done, with replying to the question by the question itself: the "vital principle" may indeed not explain much, but it is at least a sort of label affixed to our ignorance, so as to remind us of this occasionally while mechanism invites us to ignore that ignorance" (CE, p. 48).
And again on how "It would be futile to try to assign to life an end, in the human sense of the word. To speak of an end is to think of a preexisting model which has only to be realized. It is to suppose, therefore, that all is given, and that the future can be read in the present. It is to believe that life, in its movement and in its entirety, goes to work like our intellect, which is only a motionless and fragmentary view of life, and which naturally takes its stand outside of time". (CE, p. 58).
On why Plato sucks: "Plato was the first to set up the theory that to know the real consists in finding its Idea, that is to say, in forcing it into a pre-existing frame already at our disposal as if we implicitly possessed universal knowledge. But this belief is natural to the human intellect, always engaged as it is in determining under what former heading it shall catalogue any new object; and it may be said that, in a certain sense, we are all born Platonists. Nowhere is the inadequacy of this method so obvious as in theories of life." (CE, pps. 55-56).
The whole book is just so good.
I didn't say recognition of time slowing was incoherent. I said experiencing another's phenomenal state was.
There needn't be intentionality (which seems to be how "agency" is being used here) where there is teleological behavior. A plant grows upward toward the sun for the pupose of survival, but entirely without intent. The evolutionary pull of survival, posited as no different than any other law of nature, offers the causative, non-teleological explanation for its behavior just as gravity explains why the rock falls to earth when dropped.
And the theory for this phenomenon? Why does dead matter long to survive? For what purpose? With what intent? Why does dead matter create forums to discuss non-existent intent? Why does dead matter enjoy Big Macs and sugar and conversing with other dead matter about themselves? What is the theory? It just happens - and keeps happening forever? It's that the theory? A Miracle?
“Fortunately, some are born with spiritual immune systems that sooner or later give rejection to the illusory worldview grafted upon them from birth through social conditioning.[/b] They begin sensing that something is amiss, and start looking for answers. Inner knowledge and anomalous outer experiences show them a side of reality others are oblivious to, and so begins their journey of awakening. Each step of the journey is made by following the heart instead of following the crowd and by choosing knowledge over the veils of ignorance
“But, then, I cannot escape the objection that there is no state of mind, however simple, which does not change every moment, since there is no consciousness without memory, and no continuation of a state without the addition, to the present feeling, of the memory of past moments. It is this which constitutes duration. Inner duration is the continuous life of a memory which prolongs the past into the present, the present either containing within it in a distinct form the ceaselessly growing image of the past, or, more profoundly, showing by its continual change of quality the heavier and still heavier load we drag behind us as we grow older. Without this survival of the past into the present there would be no duration, but only instantaneity.”
To think intuitively is to think in duration. Intelligence starts ordinarily from the immobile, and reconstructs movement as best it can with immobilities in juxtaposition. Intuition starts from movement, posits it, or rather perceives it as reality itself, and sees in immobility only an abstract moment, a snapshot taken by our mind, of a mobility. Intelligence ordinarily concerns itself with things, meaning by that, with the static, and makes of change an accident which is supposedly superadded. For intuition the essential is change: as for the thing, as intelligence understands it, it is a cutting which has been made out of the becoming and set up by our mind as a substitute for the whole. Thought ordinarily pictures to itself the new as a new arrangement of pre-existing elements; nothing is ever lost of it, nothing is ever created. Intuition, bound up to a duration which is growth, perceives in it an uninterrupted continuity of unforeseeable novelty; it sees,it knows that the mind draws from itself more than it has, that spirituality consists in just that, and that reality, impregnated with spirit, is creation.”
“Creation signifies, above all, emotion, and that not in literature or art alone. We all know the concentration and effort implied in scientific discovery.
Banno first said "The point of evolution is its lack of purpose". Now the subject has switched to "intent", and "agency", rather than "purpose". I suppose the question is whether "purpose" implies "intent".
You suggest that it does not, that a plant's growth has purpose, but no intent. I find that difficult to accept, as I see no other meaning to "purpose", except as an object to be attained. The object to be attained is what the thing intends. We could however, assume that "intent" refers to a special type of purpose, a type of purpose specific to conscious agents, so that "intent" implies "purpose", but "purpose" does not imply "intent".
But then we still have to account for all the rest of the "purpose" which we observe in the biological realm, "purpose" which is not properly intentional. How is it that plants act as if survival is an object to be attained? Why do they grow? So we cannot remove "purpose" from evolution, as Banno suggested. And the problem, with teleology, as Aristotle demonstrated, is that when we ask "that for the sake of which" (why?) in this way, we can always ask that again of the answer. Either we get an infinite regress or we hit the ultimate end. One might argue that "survival" is the ultimate end, but the reality of death, reproduction, evolution, and the endeavours of the conscious mind, make it highly unlikely that survival is the ultimate end of the biological organism.
[quote=Bergson]But, then, I cannot escape the objection that there is no state of mind, however simple, which does not change every moment, since there is no consciousness without memory, and no continuation of a state without the addition, to the present feeling, of the memory of past moments. It is this which constitutes duration. Inner duration is the continuous life of a memory which prolongs the past into the present, the present either containing within it in a distinct form the ceaselessly growing image of the past, or, more profoundly, showing by its continual change of quality the heavier and still heavier load we drag behind us as we grow older. Without this survival of the past into the present there would be no duration, but only instantaneity.[/quote]
It is interesting that Bergson does not give us an approach to the existence of the future here. He relates present to past, and speaks as if things come into existence, at the present, in the act of creation. But we all know that it is nonsense to speak about something coming from nothing. The eternalist determinist, would have all the things which come into existence at the present, (are created), already existing somehow in the future, prior to being observed at the present, as time passes. But the free willist allows that things which are created as time passes, actually "come into existence" from possibility, in some very real way.
So if we take the free willist ontology, then when things are created at the present, as time passes, they come into existence from the real existence of possibility. "Possibility" here substitutes for "nothing", because it is irrational to believe that something could come from nothing. The ontology is radically different from the eternalist determinist ontology which assumes that what will be, already is, in some substantial way, because "possibility" negates the reality of this substantial future, assuming rather a "nothing" in relation to substantial existence. This is difficult for people to grasp, that substantial existence comes from nothing (mere possibility), at the moment of the present.
This leaves us with the question of where do the creations really come from. If the past consists of what is determined, in the sense of having real substantial existence, and the future consists of possibilities for creativity at the present, then the decisions as to what exactly is created at the present, from the possibilities which are proper to the future, must come from somewhere else. What exactly is a "decision"?
There is no terse response to your questions (I prefer terse and to the point), so I am struggling to understand the precise concept that you are attempting to grasp. This quote from Bergson is not meant to be satisfy your question but possibly to steer it in a Bergsonian direction.
"Spirit borrows from matter the perceptions on which it feeds and restores them to matter in the form of movements which it has stamped with its own freedom."
Admittedly, poetic but actually very much to the point.
A decision, can be considered a choice to move in a specific manner of action. Bergson was fundamentally suggesting that duration is the unfolding of action by the Élan vital/consciousness/mind.
It's purpose is survival, which is the purpose of all living things, and is the basis for evolution theories. As with plants, it's clear they grow up toward the sun in order to survive, but no plant decided or intended to grow upward. It's simply that if they had not, they would not have survived and those of similar genetic code would not have seen a next generation.
I think the same is true of birds and of higher biological organisms. It's clear that a causal explanation is not entirely complete when describing bird behavior, as in, just telling me the physical and chemical causes of wing flapping will not explain to me why the bird is going south for the winter. I do need to know why the bird is going south in order to understand bird behavior, but that answer boils down to survival of the species. It goes south to eat, to reproduce, and to raise its young, without which it won't survive.
When it comes to people, though, it's not entirely clear why we do the things we do, and it's not clear we as a species are advancing our survivability, but maybe we are doing the best we can in our environment. Afterall, human populations are at the highest ever.
I'll repeat what I said. It is highly doubtful that survival is the purpose of living things:
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Now move to evolution, and see what it has given to living organisms. Plants grow, which is much more than surviving. Animal have the capacity to move themselves, which gives them something more than growth. Animals also sense, and have a power of creativity. Human beings have intellection, which gives them an even higher power of creativity, and understanding.
So it seems highly unlikely that the purpose of all these higher levels of activity, which living organisms engage in, is survival, which the most basic, primitive organisms already have.
"Bergson inclined to convert to Catholicism, writing in his will on 7 February 1937: My thinking has always brought me nearer to Catholicism, in which I saw the perfect complement to Judaism.[30] Though wishing to convert to Catholicism, as stated in his will, he did not convert in view of the travails inflicted on the Jewish people by the rise of Nazism and anti-Semitism in Europe in the 1930s; he did not want to appear to want to leave the persecuted. On 3 January 1941 Bergson died in occupied Paris from bronchitis.[31] A Roman Catholic priest said prayers at his funeral per his request. Bergson is buried in the Cimetière de Garches, Hauts-de-Seine".
Bergson chose, and it had nothing to do with survival, instead had everything to do with his Spirit.
Then perhaps you are making a good point.
Rather, we observe that living things act with purpose, but this does not provide us with what we need to conclude that evolution acts with purpose.
https://youtu.be/bKjgNznlkcI
Comment by:
Matthew Marsden
(Auth “A Brief History of Timelessness) ?
To unify any two theories (e.g. Relativity and Quantum), one should be very clear that each and all of the phenomena suggested by both theories Is reasonably confirmed.
Otherwise, if one or other theory is believed to prove something that it in fact does not, and this not noticed, then one may be endlessly trying to fit two pieces of a puzzle together, thinking the problem is very hard, because one is not realising that one piece may actually be bogus.
In this talk, Professor Dowker refers to, and incorporates into her explanation, Relativity, and space-“time”. Suggesting that she accepts that “time” is a phenomena that exists, and is merged with space, and that this is proven to a reasonable extent by Relativity. And thus is trying to work out how to merge space-time with the quantum arena.
However, if we actually check for ourselves, and look at the seminal paper on Relativity, ( translated ) “The electrodynamics of moving bodies”, we find that concerning the theory of time it actually says...
[b]A.Einstein, (Section § 1. Definition of Simultaneity) quote...
“If we wish to describe the motion of a material point, we give the values of its co-ordinates as functions of the time. Now we must bear carefully in mind that a mathematical description of this kind has no physical meaning unless we are quite clear as to what we understand by “time[/b].” “
And...
“If, for instance, I say, “That train arrives here at 7 o'clock,” I mean something like this: “The pointing of the small hand of my watch to 7 and the arrival of the train are simultaneous events.” “
Here, to avoid accepting, and attempting to explain and incorporate phenomena which may in fact not be proven be Relativity, I think it is important that professor Dowker considers the following.
Where apparently describing a thing called “time”, “The electrodynamics of moving bodies”, says we describe “the motion of a material point” , “as functions of the “time” “.
However the paper clearly only actually describes the comparing the motion of a material point ( a train) , with the motion of another material point “a motorised pointer on a numbered dial”.
In other words, from the outset Special Relativity does not actually show the existence of a past, a future or a thing called time, that must exist and pass for things to be able to exist and move, but instead Relativity only assumes that a thing called time exists, and that a rotating hand in some way proves or indicates this.
(i.e. just saying "time is that which clocks measure, is nonsense, no matter who says it, unless one can scientifically prove, rather than just assume, there is a "past" and or "future", and an extra thing called time that must exist, extra to the energy in a spring or battery that IS clearly measured by such a motor).
SR does show us that for easily understood reasons that
“all moving oscillators are oscillating more slowly than expected”,
And this fact is of course essentially incorporated in GPS satellite oscillators etc.
[b]But logically, and scientifically, just observing the rotating tip of a motorised hand and “calling” that motion “time”, is in no way at all scientific proof, as per the scientific method, that there IS a past, or a future, or a thing called time that exists and passes between a past and future.
And, more importantly, just observing that a moving oscillator is oscillating more slowly than expected, is not scientific proof as per the scientific method, that one’s “guess” that a thing or place called the “past”, and or the “ future” and a thing called “time” must exist. Logically, it is only confirmation bias that would make us assume this.[/b]
In other words, while it is agreed with the professor, that a rapidly moving twin will be “changing more slowly” that a stationary twin, without specific proof it cannot actually be logically and scientifically accepted that this is because of, or proves the existence of a thing called “time”, or that the moving twin is changing more slowly becasue a thing called time is dilated in its passage between a "past and "future", and is thus affecting the twin.
(imo, the importance and consequences of seeing how SR may in fact in no way prove the existence of a 4th dimension, and realizing tha many professionals assume, without actually checking, that it does , cannot be over estimated. I.e it may lead to the conclusion that matter just exists, moves changes and interacts "now", or "timelessly" so to speak, effectively disolving and solving the so called "problem of time", and all eliminating all discussion of temporal paradoxes etc)
And, despite the fact that many people cite Relativity as apparently proving that extra to space, matter and motion, a thing called time exists, unless they can actually show where Relativity from the outset proves, rather than just assumes, the existence of a thing called “time”, and where the paper proves there may be a thing or place called “past” and or “future”, rather than just assuming these “things” are obvious, and for some reason exempt from needing proof as per the scientific method, the concept of “time”, and the existence of 4 dimensional space-“time”, should not be considered scientific fact.
Therefore , if the professor is trying to unify quantum mechanics, with the concept of space”time”, but the time component she has just accepted as proven, but cannot actually cite the proof of, then this “time” component may be a falsehood that does not exist, and need not be included in the unification.
i.e imo, probably wrongly assuming a thing called “time” does exist, and must be incorporated as in space time, will make professors Dowkers problem seem harder to solve than it may actually be.
Wonderful! I’ll frame that for the Trophy Room. X-)
On a more serious note - it’s not far removed from the main point of Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos.
Evolution is not an acting thing, so to suggest that it acts with purpose would be a category mistake in the first place. Evolution is not an agent in any way, rather it is a description that we have, of a process carried out by life on earth. Life is the agent.
The thing which "evolution" refers to, is the result of the actions of living beings. So if living actions are purposeful, then we cannot divorce evolution from purpose unless we propose that some living actions, the ones that result in evolution, are not purposeful. This would be ridiculous though, because it would mean that reproductive acts are not purposeful acts, when they clearly are. Therefore we cannot separate evolution from purpose.
Does the presence of a purpose imply the presence of an agent?
Great post.
I think that would depend on how you define "agent". I believe that anything which is active, an active cause, is an agent.
In the case of a human being, we say that the person acts with intent (has a purpose in mind), and is an agent. In the case of other living beings, I would say that each one of them is an agent as well, as they each act with purpose. However, the agency associated with "purpose" need not be within the object which acts with a purpose. For instance, each component in my computer has a purpose, so it is not necessary for a thing to be animate in order for it to act for a purpose. But in this case, the object was created with intention, such that the parts are directed toward their purpose by the intent of the creator. The agent who acts to give each of the parts its purpose, is the one who builds the object. I do not see how anything could act with purpose without some sort of agency.
Always. Without an agent there is no activity.
What do you mean? What is the soul?
Yeah, it's necessary to assume something like that as the "agent", but no one really understands it. That's just the facts of life.
Those who prefer priests to guide their lives lovingly embrace the externalization of the agent, the priest being the mortal conduit to the truth. Those who are comfortable in their own skin and fully embrace their own creative force will no doubt prefer their very own Mind.
Quoting Banno
Have you any reason to think it more than a bad translation?
Yes, God is mysterious. Appreciate your making my point.
God is not a satisfactory explanation for anything; because god explains everything.
Evolution? God did it. Creation? God did it. The cat has been sick? God did it.
Evolution did it. Omnipotence is always associated with the externalized impetus.
Priests being the conduits to the mystery of God, who do you suppose are the conduits to the mystery of Evolution?
I love the symmetry of the human condition. Somethings just never change.
Every theory has a name for the impetus. Those who prefer a more religious-like force will externalize it and set up a priesthood structure whose job is to provide the Truths. To understand this provides deep insight into the human condition because it repeats throughout history.
Indeed.
Didn't you like the rest post?
BTW, I used induction for this observation.
Did you? Where?
The similarities are spooky.
Where did you use induction?
No, it's not a matter of translation, it's a matter of understanding. That we understand ourselves to act with purpose, and we compare the purposeful activities of other beings, to our own purposeful acts, is not a "bad translation". The study of biology and evolutionary theory tells us that we are fundamentally, not much different from other animals. So, the purposeful acts within ourselves, are probably very similar, fundamentally, to the purposeful acts in other animals.
If our purposeful acts can be attributed to "agency", then why wouldn't we attribute the purposeful acts of other animals to "agency". What would support such a boundary between humans and others?
future is only an illusion, however persistent.” Albert Einstein
Whenever I come across any explanation that uses illusion to explain a concept, a know immediately that the explanation is lost. Everything we experience in life is exactly as we experience it. What creates illusions are the explanations. The explanation must be evaluated and change.
In Einstein's case, his explanation of time creates the illusion. Eliminate the equivalency between clock time (oscillations in space) and the real time of life (duration of action or concretely change in memory) then the illusion disappears. Of course, when someone builds an entire career around illusions (e.g. David Copperfield), then it's tough to admit to the sleight if hand.
Similarly, when one proclaims that mind and thinking is an illusion because wave-particles (by some magic) create the illusion, all one needs to do is make the mind real and the illusion is gone.
Everything in life is exactly how it is being experienced. There are no illusions.
I don't have a problem with ascribing intent to animals.
I do not think we can ascribe intent to evolution.
Of course. I think we went through this, "evolution" refers to a description of the result, the effect of the actions of living things. Evolution is not an acting agent itself, it is the result of the activity of agents. So we cannot ascribe intention directly to evolution, just like we cannot ascribe intention to directly to my computer, which is the result of the intentional acts of agents.. We ascribe intent to the agents which are responsible for evolution, the individual living organism which act with intent.
Let's say that there is a compilation of activities carried out by living beings, and the result of all these activities, the effect, is what we call evolution. If you agree that these activities are purposeful, then why wouldn't you agree that the result, evolution, is also purposeful? My computer is purposeful despite the fact that we wouldn't assign intent to it. It is something which came about from intent.
Because that's an invalid inference.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yeah. Somehow you think this not a contradiction.
I agree. There is a strong tendency to call primary experience an illusion relative to some true but hidden reality. Yet this hidden reality can only manifest itself as an idea within experience and the experience of its consequences.
As far as I can tell, 'illusion' is relative to purpose. To hallucinate an oasis in the desert is to an experience an illusion with respect to quenching thirst. But the hallucination may be success for another purpose. Maybe I go to the desert to have visions.
(In the first post I responded to, I like how the comment you quoted revealed the metaphysical baggage (what we think we know about time) that we tend to bring to a quantitative and geometrical theory. I suspect that some of Einstein's power came from seeing the situation with fresh eyes. I've read a bio or two, and he was a strong personality, even a bit of a 'rock star' (confident nonconformist) as a young man.
Evolution has occurred as the result of the actions and interactions of many living beings, along with their interactions with the environment. It is how we describe what has occurred. It is a description. What on earth would make you think that evolution is an acting agent?
Take another description for example, "my dog bit the mailman". Would you say that this description is an acting agent? Of course not, the things described my dog, and the mailman, are the acting agents. Likewise, in this description "evolution", the living beings, and the environment are the acting agents.
As far as Einstein himself is concerned, I feel he may be a rockstar but more in the vein of Milli Vanilli than Bruce Springsteen. In his own letters to his first wife Milena Malic, he talks of their partnership with respect to the development of Relativity as he was involved in an affair at at time. Milena was a gifted mathematician who never had a chance to nourish her talents as she worked to build Einstein's career. Einstein never gave her involvement credit for the work on Relativity, and it is unknown to what extent Milena's mathematical work contributed to Relativity. She did receive the entire Nobel Prize award money. Hush money?
To the extent my opinion means anything, I have always been whole unimpressed by Einstein's philosophical musings and as far as science is concerned, his refusal to accept the probabilistic nature of quantum theory throughout his career is dumfounding. He may have been more about ego and glory than a real investigation of nature.
I haven't read much of his prose, so, when I think of Einstein as a philosopher, I think of the philosophy implicit in his science. He thought about time and space in a new way. His thought experiments were triumphs of imagination that led to technical revolutions.
I agree that he was a bad boy. It's possible though that achievement and a kind of selfishness go together. When Einstein is selfish, for instance, he's selfish for 'science.' His personal achievement is also an achievement of the species. Similarly a novelist or composer might be a nightmare in personal relationships and yet a kind of saint in his or her development of potentially shared symbolically stored awareness. To be sure, lots of self-proclaimed geniuses (actually mediocre or worse) are probably out there being a-holes in the name of their universal mission. But if the future cannot be calculated in the present (which is to say that a genuine future exists), then it's not easy to sort out the geniuses from the mediocre a-holes.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/the-forgotten-life-of-einsteins-first-wife/
In 1925, Albert wrote in his will that the Nobel Prize money was his sons’ inheritance. Mileva strongly objected, stating the money was hers and considered revealing her contributions to his work. Radmila Milentijevi? quote from a letter Albert sent her on 24 October 1925 (AEA 75-364). ”You made me laugh when you started threatening me with your recollections. Have you ever considered, even just for a second, that nobody would ever pay attention to your says if the man you talked about had not accomplished something important. When someone is completely insignificant, there is nothing else to say to this person but to remain modest and silent. This is what I advise you to do.”
I read the link. New to me. What I get is that Einstein had help, though, and not that he wasn't himself important to the genesis of the idea. Still, he was apparently a jerk to let the credit fall only on him.
As for everything in life being ‘exactly how it is being experienced’ - again, one wonders how any one calling themselves a Bergsonian could utter such crap. Matter and Memory famously extolls its reader to place themselves at the well known “turn of experience”, where we must disconnect experience from perception in order to install ourselves in duration, which requires us “to give up certain habits of thinking, and even of perceiving, [which is] is far from easy.” This just is the method of intuition, one which requires a critical and discerning effort at not taking experience for what it is, insofar as experience is bound up with precisely the many illusions that Bergson aims to draw our attention to.
Merleau-Ponty once famously wrote of the ‘two Bergsons’: "The truth is that there are two Bergsonisms. There is that audacious one, when Bergson’s philosophy fought and… fought well. And there is that other one after the victory, persuaded in advance about what Bergson took a long time to find, and already provided with concepts while Bergson himself created his own. When Bergsonian insights are identified with the vague cause of spiritualism or some other entity, they lose their bite; they are generalized and minimized. What is left is only a retrospective or external Bergsonism. . . . Established Bergsonism distorts Bergson. Bergson disturbed; it reassures. Bergson was a conquest; Bergsonism defends and justifies Bergson. Bergson was in contact with things; Bergsonism is a collection of accepted opinions.”
As someone who continually identifies Bergson with precisely the "vague causes of spiritualism”, it’s no secret which Bergson Rich subscribes to.
Who ever said I was a Bersonian. All I said is that your mummification of Bergson was a joke and it was and it is.
The rest of your post pretty much illustrates my point. I always say that people should do their own homework. Hopefully this thread encourages people to read not only Bergson, but also Bohm, Rupert Sheldrake, and watch Stephen Robbins' video on his interpretation of Bergson's theory of perception.
Beyond this, I hope people go out and experience life and all its dimensions so that they don't have to rely on laughable diatribes such as yours for information. Your understanding of Bergson is the worst I've ever read and I have read tons.
Bergson, had a very clear point of view. The title of his major work, "Creative Evolution" declares this point of view. However, he was a visionary who was able to intuit the nature of nature as no other, actually suggesting aspects of quantum physics and holography, several decades in advance.
Great philosophers can imagine what it must be by observing patterns of what is. One must be able to see through his eyes to understand all that he wrote. I try must best. But the grand theme is clear, over only had to read the titles of his major works. Stephen Robbins does a spectacular job of narrating Bergson's theory of perception in a photographic (holographic) universe.