Reading Henri Bergson, Creative Mind, Introduction
I'm reading "The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics" by Henri Bergson. It's so interesting...
Introduction
Real Time eludes mathematical treatment. It flows, but our intellect operates on discretely chopped up moments, and the flow from moment to moment is ignored as being too complex or too subjective.
Duration, to Bergson, is a flow which cannot be chopped up. It is at the center of our experience of the world but is ignored by "scientific inquiry."
His idea was to begin to find out what Duration is. To focus on it and not look away. Modern inquiry treats time as something like space. He says that language probably reinforced this error.
The intellect "refuses to consider transition," replacing actual transition with simply an increase in the number of discrete measurements. As he says, "the fixed placed side by side with the fixed will never constitute anything that has duration." No matter how many measurements you take, the real sense of duration is lost in the intervals between your measurements.
Considering all this, Bergson had great hope that seemingly complex problems were not complex, it is only the error in our fundamental view of time which make them seem so.
For example, we are preventing from experiencing the new and novel because of our habit of insisting on causes in the past for effects we see in the present. The causes we identify vary with the observers, but the fact that the observers are convinced they have found causes locks them into viewing the present as calculable baby-steps from the past. Freedom is then circumscribed into a set of finite choices. It practically invites theories of randomness, because why should one such trivial choice be better than any other? So our multiverse ideas come from this confining view.
I identify 3 causes, you identify 5, and one of them is contradictory with one of mine. So goes the dreary dance of human metaphysics or philosophy. They are all approximation, and the freshness of any real inquiry is soon lost in contention of one school with a dozen rivals.
The new simply appears, and contains all the pasts inside it. There is no digestion of those pasts. Even to enumerate the many pasts in the present creates new present moments which extend the infinite pasts in infinite directions. Such is the exhilarating nature of Duration. You get lost in it, and it is bigger than any dessication written down.
(the italics indicate I was riffing on my own and no longer outlining)
Regarding this belief in causes, which dessicates our experience of reality, he writes:
The consequences of this illusion are innumerable. Our estimate of men and events is wholly impregnated with a belief in the retrospective value of true judgment, in a retrograde movement which truth, once posited, would automatically make in time. By the sole fact of being accomplished, reality casts its shadow behind it into the indefinitely distant past: it thus seems to have been pre-existent to its own realization, in the form of a possible.
If it were true that an event had causes, enumerated and identified, then we could divine the future state of a universe by calculation from a present state. If this were possible, then we need never let the universe unfold at all.
You discover a truth! But it turns out that discovery was easily predicted because you found a cause for it in a prior moment. And the cause of that cause was similarly identified, and so on.
He uses as an example, the Romanticism of the 19th Century. You could find its precursors in the 18th century, and continue finding causes of causes in this way. But the only reason you gaze at the past looking for romantic ideas, is because of the impression 19th Century Romanticism made on you. Your "causes" are illusory, or at least a waste of your time. Because it cannot be really true that Romanticism came about in this dreary step-wise way along the ladder of your discovered causes. Reality is more complex than that. As Bergson says about this illusion:
Retroactively it created its own prefiguration in the past and explanation of itself by its predecessors.