this saying anything more or distinct from "we each experience different events"? If so, what? — Banno

Tell me.

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. — Rich

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.

It's your thread.

What we feel is the division between past and future. — Metaphysician Undercover

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.

We have memories of the past, and we anticipate the future. We do not feel duration. — 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.

The "rules", and this talk of "duration", produce a big illusion, making us think that duration is something real. — 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.

You want me to tell you want you are experiencing?

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.

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. — Rich

Of course there is a division, the past is substantially different from the future. Therefore there must be a division between the two.

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. — Rich

You really haven't explained how "learning", "experiment", "creating", "the future is possibilities" translates into "duration".

If duration is an illusion, then life is an Illusion, — 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.

Of course there is a division, the past is substantially different from the future. — Metaphysician Undercover

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.

You really haven't explained how "learning", "experiment", "creating", "the future is possibilities" translates into "duration". — 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?

But this is not necessary to life, it is just the human enterprise of applying rules. — Metaphysician Undercover

The human enterprise is creating those rules and experimenting with the results.

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. — Rich

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.

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. — Metaphysician Undercover

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?

Memory of the possibilities. The mind perceives a history and possibilities blended together, such as picking up a utensil. It conceives of the possible virtual action in memory and then chooses which possibility to act upon, in memory. It's all blended together.

But there is still a sense in which the mind itself furnishes the background within which all such judgements are made.

— 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. — Banno

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:

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. — Einstein

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'.

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? — 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.

↪Magnus Anderson How something can be at rest all the time and moving? Hmm. I'll try it out later today and see if I can teleport myself somehow. — Rich

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.

The arrow is resting AT every instant but it is not resting BETWEEN instants. — Magnus Anderson

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 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. — Rich

You need to define what it means for life to be starting and stopping.

The problem is not definition, it is conceptualization. I cannot teach you how to conceptualize a problem. Unfortunately, there is no training for such a skill I'm any educational courses other that art. So you either have to train yourself through hard work or be at the mercy of others to tell you the answers for the rest of your life. I can only suggest that you try to conceptualize the problem in your mind. Forget about logic and anything else you have been taught. Conceptualize in the mind is the single most important skill one can have in anything they in life.

↪Magnus Anderson I cannot teach you how to conceptualize a problem. Unfortunately, there is no training for such a skill I'm any educational courses other that art. So you either have to train yourself through hard work or be at the mercy of others to tell you the answers for the rest of your life. I can only suggest that you try to conceptualize the problem in your mind. — Rich

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.

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. — Wayfarer

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.

You've conceptualised it wrong. Try using instantaneous velocity.

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. — Wayfarer

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.

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. — Wayfarer

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.

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.
— Wayfarer

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! — Janus

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.

I watched the video last night and remain unconvinced that Bergson's anonymity is undeserved.

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?

OK, I will try again. My argument is that, when it comes to something like the Pythagorean Theorem, which Einstein comments on - even though it’s not dependent on the human mind, it is ‘mind-dependent’ in another sense, i.e. only can be understood by a rational intelligence. And that, I think harks back to the traditional Platonic understanding of the mind, which is very different from the understanding of mind as an ‘evolved adaption’. This is because the intellect as it were creates the meaning-world within which science is effective. And that is not the kind of thing Einstein really understood very well, despite his great genius in respect of science. It’s not saying that Einstein is stupid or misses something obvious, but I don’t think he was philosophically very savvy. And I think that also comes through in his debates with Bohr and Heisenberg on interpretation of QM.

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.

Some comments on Bergson by Edward Conze, Buddhologist, in his essay Spurious Parallels between Buddhist and European Philosophy:

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(!)....

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. — Banno

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?

And here is what Louis De Broglie, one of the founders of quantum mechanics, who certainly was well aware of Relativity, had to say,

"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.

To characterize Bergson as some spiritual leader seeking disciples for some religious Renaissance is beyond dumbfounding. — Rich

I think what Conze meant was that he left no academic successors (although it’s true that Conze was often a cynic.)

Bergson had enormous influence on Whitehead, Deleuze, and modem French philosophy.


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/