| Chapter | I | II | ||||||||||||||||||||||
| Introduction | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | |||
| Chapter | III | IV | |||||||||||||||||||||||
| 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45 | 46 | 47 |
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||
says, "You are here!")|
|
(Most quotes verbatim Henri Louis Bergson, some paraphrased.) |
(Relevant to Pirsig, William James Sidis, and Quantonics Thinking Modes.) |
|
329 |
"Modern, like ancient, science proceeds according to the cinematographical method. It cannot [classically] do otherwise; all science is subject to this law. For it is of the essence of science to handle [inanimate] signs, which it substitutes for the [inanimate] objects themselves. These signs undoubtedly differ from those of language by their greater precision and their higher efficacy; they are none the less tied down to the general condition of the sign, which is to denote a fixed aspect of the reality under an arrested form. In order to think movement [i.e., thibedir], a constantly renewed effort of the mind is necessary. Signs are made to dispense us with this effort by substituting, for the moving continuity of things, an artificial reconstruction which is its equivalent in practice and has the advantage of being easily handled. But let us leave aside the means and, consider only the end. What is the essential object of science? It is to enlarge our influence [hegemony and control] over things [which include sentient humans and animals]. Science may be speculative in its form, disinterested in its immediate ends; in other words we may give it as long a credit as it wants. But, however long the day of reckoning may be put off, some time or other the payment must be made. It is always then, in short, practical utility that science has in view." |
(Our link, brackets, and bold.) Bergson restarts his footnote counts on each page. So to refer a footnote, one must state page number and footnote number. Our bold and color highlights follow a code:
Bergson tells us, and we agree, that science does not give a rat's ass about reality, only mundane hegemony. |
| 330 |
"Even when it launches into theory, it is bound to adapt its behavior to the general form of practice. However high it may rise, it must be ready to fall back into the field of action, and at once to get on its feet. This would not be possible for it, if its rhythm differed absolutely from that of action itself. Now action, we have said, proceeds by leaps. To act is to re-adapt oneself. To know, that is to say, to foresee in order to act, is then to go from situation to situation, from arrangement to rearrangement. Science may consider rearrangements that come closer and closer to each other; it may thus increase the number of moments that it isolates, but it always isolates moments. As to what happens in the interval between the moments, science is no more concerned with that than are our common intelligence, our senses and our language: it does not bear on the interval, but only on the extremities. So the cinematographical method forces itself upon our science, as it did already on that of the ancients. "Wherein, then, is the difference between the two sciences? We indicated it when we said that the ancients reduced the physical order to the vital order, that is to say, laws to genera, while the moderns try to resolve genera into laws. But we have to look at it in another aspect, which, moreover, is only a transposition, of the first. Wherein consists the difference of attitude of the two sciences toward change? We may formulate it by saying that ancient science thinks it knows its object sufficiently when it has noted of it some privileged moments, whereas modern science considers the object at any moment whatever. [And believes its object real. Doug 16Nov2000.] "The forms or ideas of Plato or of Aristotle correspond to privileged or salient moments in the history of things—those, in general, that have been fixed by language. They are supposed, like the childhood or the old age of a living being, to characterize a period of which they express the quintessence, all the rest of this period being filled by the passage, of no interest in itself, from one form to another form." |
(Our brackets, bold, and color.) From which we may affirm science's great fear of philosophy and its magnetism to artificial analytical tools like mathematics. Money mongers assure this outcome for science, for science needs money and must sell its soul to azazel's highest bidder. So, we see now in full light, there are no scientists, only many different flavored professional engineers. No thinkers, only paid builders. Only paid professional pipe fitters. Science taught is re-rote and engineered. Science wrought is evolute and pioneered. |
| 331 |
"Take, for instance, a falling body. It was thought that we got near enough to the fact when we characterized it as a whole: it was a movement downward; it was the tendency toward a centre; it was the natural movement of a body which, separated from the earth to which it belonged, was now going to find its place again. They noted, then, the final term or culminating point (telos [telos], dkmh) and set it up as the essential moment: this moment, that language has retained in order to express the whole of the fact, sufficed also for science to characterize it. In the physics of Aristotle, it is by the concepts "high" and "low," spontaneous displacement and forced displacement, own place and strange place, that the movement of a body shot into space or falling freely is defined. But Galileo thought there was no essential moment, no privileged instant. To study the falling body is to consider it at it matters not what moment in its course. The true science of gravity is that which will determine, for any moment of time whatever, the position of the body in space. For this, indeed, signs far more precise than those of language are required. "We may say, then, that our physics differs from that of the ancients chiefly in the indefinite breaking up of time. [Irving Stein has shown us rather dramatically how problematic this "...indefinite breaking up of time" is. See our review of Stein's book.] For the ancients, time comprises as many undivided periods as our natural perception and our language cut out [, using SOM's knife,] in it successive facts, each presenting a kind of individuality [Read Don Howard's works on quantum lisr.]. For that reason, each of these facts admits, in their view, of only a total [actually partial: necessarily incomplete and inconsistent] definition or description." |
(Our links, brackets, bold, and color.)
Bergson did not know of quantum coherence, let alone aspects of quantum partial coherence which affect macroscopic condensation, i.e., gravity, of fermionic quantons. In spite of that, his reasoning appears sound, so far. Our major concern would be if Bergson takes gravity as a dual of acceleration in a manner similar to Einstein's approach. Gravity is not a temporal affect! It is superluminal! Fermions and some bosons react with paratemporal isoconic motion to gravity's zero latency influence. Doug 16Nov2000. See Doug's 2007 Gravity HotMeme™. |
| 332 |
"If, in describing it, we are led to distinguish phases in it, we have several facts instead of a single one, several undivided periods instead of a single period; but time is always supposed to be divided into determinate periods, and the mode of division to be forced on the mind by apparent crises of the real, comparable to that of puberty, by the apparent release of a new form.—For a Kepler or a Galileo, on the contrary, time is not divided objectively in one way or another by the matter that fills it. It has no natural articulations. We can, we ought to, divide it as we please. All moments count. None of them has the right to set itself up as a moment that represents or dominates the others. And, consequently, we know a change only when we are able to determine what it is about at any one of its moments. "The difference is profound. In fact, in a certain aspect it is radical. But, from the point of view from which we are regarding it, it is a difference of degree rather than of kind. The human mind has passed from the first kind of knowledge to the second through gradual perfecting, simply by seeking a higher precision. There is the same relation between these two sciences as between the noting of the phases of a movement by the eye and the much more complete recording of these phases by instantaneous photography. It is the same cinematographical mechanism in both cases, but it reaches a precision in the second that it cannot have in the first. Of the gallop of a horse our eye perceives chiefly a characteristic, essential or rather schematic attitude, a form that appears to radiate over a whole period and so fill up a time of gallop. It is this attitude that sculpture has fixed on the frieze of the Parthenon. But instantaneous photography isolates any moment; it puts them all in the same rank, and thus the gallop of a horse spreads out for it into as many successive attitudes as it wishes, instead of massing itself into a single attitude, which is supposed to flash out in a privileged moment and to illuminate a whole period. "From this original difference flow all the others. A science that considers, one after the other, undivided periods of duration, sees nothing but phases succeeding phases, forms replacing forms; it is content with a qualitative description of objects, which it likens to organized beings." |
(Our underlines, bold, and color.)
In Quantonics we say this as, "Every quanton has its own, local, temporal bandwidth." |
| 333 |
"But when we seek to know what happens within one of these periods, at any moment of time, we are aiming at something entirely different. The changes which are produced from one moment to another are no longer, by the hypothesis, changes of quality; they are quantitative variations, it may be of the phenomenon itself, it may be of its elementary parts. We were right then to say that modern [classical] science is distinguishable from the ancient in that it applies to magnitudes and proposes first and foremost to measure them. The ancients did indeed try experiments, and on the other hand Kepler tried no experiment, in the proper sense of the word, in order to discover a law which is the very type of scientific knowledge as we understand it. What distinguishes modern [classical] science is not that it is experimental, but that it experiments and, more generally, works only with a view to measure. "For that reason it is right, again, to say that ancient science applied to concepts, while modern science seeks laws—constant relations between variable magnitudes. The concept of circularity was sufficient to Aristotle to define the movement of the heavenly bodies. But, even with the more accurate concept of elliptical form, Kepler did not think he had accounted for the movement of planets. He had to get a law, that is to say, a constant relation between the quantitative variations of two or several elements of the planetary movement. [Note that Kepler's 'law' too is inadequate, in general. Planetary orbits are not elliptical! They are nondeterministic periodic flux whose patterns may and do experience a wide variety of attractors. A good example to think of here is y-our heart's various possible and imminent attractors. It 'beats' with a nondeterministic periodic flux. It has at least these attractors: sleep sinus rhythm, at-rest sinus rhythm, normal work exertion sinus rhythm, peak exertion sinus rhythm, potential tachycardiac sinus rhythm, potential bradycardic sinus rhythm, fibrillation, and terminus. Chaotic paratemporal changes to and fro all these attractors are possible under a wide variety of conditions. Each rhythm offers its own local times. Viewed together, we see a heart microcosm of Bergson's many times, his heterogeneous times. Planetary orbits also have similar attractors, but their paratemporal bandwidths are so different from our human ones that we seldom see or experience them.] "Yet these are only consequences—differences that follow from the fundamental difference. It did happen to the ancients accidentally to experiment with a view to measuring, as also to discover a law expressing a constant relation between magnitudes. The principle of Archimedes is a [classically, and locally] true experimental law. It takes into account three variable magnitudes: the volume of a body, the density of the liquid in which the body is immersed, the vertical pressure that is being exerted. And it states indeed that one of these three terms is [classically] a function of the other two [plus, quantumly, many other qualitative affects which classical analysis ignores—for convenience—by convention]." |
(Our link, underlines, brackets, bold, and color.)
We are just now working on a separate web page which broaches one of two remaining 'problems' or issues with quantum science: the measurement problem, and the quantum interpretation problem. We arrived some time ago at where Bergson affirms we are—now—here—again. Bergson, perhaps without y-our recognizing it, in this marvelous book, solves both of those problems for us.
Humanity's anthropocentrism and dichotomous CTMs made us think we could find one locus of a special event, and one interpretation of quantum reality. Our r-evolved QTMs with Pirsig's, Ho's, Poincaré's, Tomonaga's, James', Savage's, Herbert's, et al., help enable us to leave legacy and passé CTMs and enter a new, better way of think-king. Doug 17Nov2000. |
| 334 | "The essential, original difference must therefore be sought elsewhere. It is the same that we noticed first. The science of the ancients is static. Either it considers in block the change that it studies, or, if it divides the change into periods, it makes of each of these periods a block in its turn: which amounts to saying that it takes no account of time. But modern science has been built up around the discoveries of Galileo and of Kepler, which immediately furnished it with a model. Now, what do the laws of Kepler say? They lay down a relation between the areas described by the heliocentric radius-vector of a planet and the time employed in describing them, a relation between the longer axis of the orbit and the time taken up by the course. And what was the principle discovered by Galileo? A law which connected the space traversed by a falling body with the time occupied by the fall. Furthermore, in what did the first of the great transformations of geometry in modern times consist, if not in introducing—in a veiled form, it is true—time and movement even in the consideration of figures? For the ancients, geometry was a purely static science. Figures were given to it at once, completely finished, like the Platonic Ideas. But the essence of the Cartesian geometry (although Descartes did not give it this form) was to regard every plane curve as described by the movement of a point on a movable straight line which is displaced, parallel to itself, along the axis of the abscissae—the displacement of the movable straight line being supposed to be uniform and the abscissa thus becoming representative of the time." |
(Our bold and underline.) |
| 335 |
"The curve is then defined if we can state the relation connecting the space traversed on the movable straight line to the time employed in traversing it, that is, if we are able to indicate the position of the movable point, on the straight line which it traverses, at any moment whatever of its course. This relation is just what we call the equation of the curve. To substitute an equation for a figure consists, therefore, in seeing the actual position of the moving points in the tracing of the curve at any moment whatever, instead of regarding this tracing all at once, gathered up in the unique moment when the curve has reached its finished state. "Such, then, was the directing idea of the reform by which both the science of nature and mathematics, which serves as its instrument, were renewed. Modern science is the daughter of astronomy; it has come down from heaven to earth along the inclined plane of Galileo, for it is through Galileo that Newton and his successors are connected with Kepler. Now, how did the astronomical problem present itself to Kepler? The question was, knowing the respective positions of the planets at a given moment, how to calculate their positions at any other moment. So the same question presented itself, henceforth, for every material system. Each material point became a rudimentary planet [hence Bohr's mistaken planetary atomic model], and the main question, the ideal problem whose solution would yield the key to all the others was, the positions of these elements at a particular moment being given, how to determine their relative positions at any moment. No doubt the problem cannot be put in these precise terms except in very simple cases, for a schematized reality; for we never know the respective positions of the real elements of matter, supposing there are real elements; and, even if we knew them at a given moment, the calculation of their positions at another moment would generally require a mathematical effort surpassing human powers. [Bergson hints at what we now know: elements are not classically 'real.' Rather they are quantum patterns of flux. We need a new "periodic table," not of elements, but of flux (quantonic) pattern of Value interrelationships! Doug 17Nov2000.]" |
(Our bold and brackets.) |
| 336 |
"But it is enough for us to know that these elements might be known, that their present positions might be noted, and that a superhuman intellect might, by submitting these data to mathematical operations, determine the positions of the elements at any other moment of time. This [classical] conviction is at the bottom of the questions we put to ourselves on the subject of nature, and of the methods we employ to solve them. That is why every law in static form seems to us as a provisional instalment or as a particular view of a dynamic law which alone would give us whole and definitive knowledge. "Let us conclude, then, that our science is not only distinguished from ancient science in this, that it seeks laws, nor even in this, that its laws set forth relations between magnitudes: we must add that the magnitude to which we wish to be able to relate all others is time, and that modern [classical] science must be defined pre-eminently by its aspiration to take time as an independent variable. But with what time has it to do? "We have said before, and we cannot repeat too often, that the science of matter proceeds like ordinary knowledge. It perfects this knowledge, increases its precision and its scope, but it works in the same direction and puts the same mechanism into play. If, therefore, ordinary knowledge, by reason of the cinematographical mechanism to which it is subjected, forbears to follow becoming in so far as becoming is moving, the science of matter renounces it equally. No doubt, it distinguishes as great a number of moments as we wish in the interval of time it considers. However small the intervals may be at which it stops, it authorizes us to divide them again if necessary. [This unlimited process is what causes so much grief in classical science and mathematics. It generates infinities. Scientists then must perform somersaults to dodge infinities. Sadly they have not yet been able to see that their underlying philosophy, metaphysics, and ontology are root causes of their dilemmas. Somehow we must assist their transitions from CTMs to QTMs.] In contrast with ancient science, which stopped at certain so-called essential moments, it is occupied indifferently with any moment whatever." |
(Our links, brackets, color, and bold.)
View laws as stoppages of reality!
View classical measurement as stoppage of reality. |
| 337 |
"But it always considers moments, always virtual stopping-places, always, in short, immobilities. Which amounts to saying that real time, regarded as a flux, or, in other words, as the very mobility of being, escapes the hold of scientific knowledge. We have already tried to establish this point in a former work. We alluded to it again in the first chapter of this book. But it is necessary to revert to it once more, in order to clear up misunderstandings. "When positive science speaks of time, what it refers to is the movement of a certain mobile T on its trajectory. This movement has been chosen by it as representative of time, and it is, by definition, uniform. Let us call T1, T2, T3, . . . etc., points which divide the trajectory of the mobile into equal parts from its origin T0. We shall say that 1, 2, 3, . . . units of time have flowed past, when the mobile is at the points T1, T2, T3, . . . of the line it traverses. Accordingly, to consider the state of the universe at the end of a certain time t, is to examine where it will be when T is at the point Ti of its course. But of the flux itself of time, still less of its effect on consciousness, there is here no question; for there enter into the calculation only the points T1, T2, T3, . . . taken on the flux, never the flux itself. We may narrow the time considered as much as we will, that is, break up at will the interval between two consecutive divisions Tn and Tn-|-1; but it is always with points, and with points only, that we are [classically] dealing. What we retain of the movement of the mobile T are positions taken on its trajectory. What we retain of all the other points of the universe are their positions on their respective trajectories. To each virtual stop of the moving body T at the points of division T1, T2, T3, . . . we make correspond a virtual stop of all the other mobiles at the points where they are passing. And when we say that a movement or any other change has occupied a time t, we mean by it that we have noted a number t of correspondences of this kind." |
(Our bold and underline.) See Doug's CeodE 2011 QVH Table. See Doug's CeodE 2012 'A Reservoir of Wave Functions' at his A Quantum Cuneiform Primer.
Consider Bergson's subtle use of -|- here in place of what
usually is +. It is an interesting way to depict a plus sign:
as a SOM wall midst a continuum, a quantized
continuum, a quantum~continuum, a quantal~continuum. |
| 338 |
"We have therefore counted simultaneities; we have not concerned ourselves with the flux that goes from one to another. The proof of this is that I can, at discretion, vary the rapidity of the flux of the universe in regard to a consciousness that is independent of it and that would perceive the variation by the quite qualitative feeling that it would have of it: whatever the variation had been, since the movement of T would participate in this variation, I should have nothing to change in my equations nor in the numbers that figure in them. "Let us go further. Suppose that the rapidity of the flux becomes infinite. Imagine, as we said in the first pages of this book, that the trajectory of the mobile T is given at once, and that the whole history, past, present and future, of the material universe is spread out instantaneously in space. The same mathematical correspondences will subsist between the moments of the history of the world unfolded like a fan, so to speak, and the divisions T1, T2, T3, . . . of the line which will be called, by definition, "the course of time." In the eyes of science nothing will have changed. [This is exactly Poincaré's point!] But if, time thus spreading itself out in space and succession becoming juxtaposition, science has nothing to change in what it tells us, we must conclude that, in what it tells us, it takes account neither of succession in what of it is specific nor of time in what there is in it that is fluent. It has no sign to express what strikes our consciousness in succession and duration. It no more applies to becoming, so far as that is moving, than the bridges thrown here and there across the stream follow the water that flows under their arches. "Yet [non-classical evolute] succession exists; I am conscious of it; it is a fact. When a physical process is going on before my eyes, my perception and my inclination have nothing to do with accelerating or retarding it." |
(Our brackets, bold, and color.)
Quantonic change is thus an intra-perceptual quanton(one_flux_pattern,another_flux_pattern) in a local temporal bandwidth. Bergson tells us we cannot sense quanton(same_flux_pattern,same_flux_pattern). Poincaré made a similar point in his Science and Method. Thus, now, we can see even more clearly futility of classicism's CTMs, especially their OGT in OGC. Stasis is a classical apparition which arises from an assumption of homogeneous time, which assumption finds its bases in Aristotelian monism. Heraclitus tried to warn them, but they would not listen. This is SOM's wall-box/vicious-circle which entraps those classicists like Julian Barbour.
Think about how Bergson's sentence in bold purple appears to contradict our statement above about a quanton in a perceptually local temporal bandwidth. We think this is no more than a simple manifestation of his own anthropocentrism, although we thought he avoided his own anthropocentrism on some prior occasions. If his local bandwidth could be augmented, would he still agree with his own statement? We think increasing a local observer's clock rate makes an observed slow and stabile clock appear relatively slower. Herein lies crux of a new quantum perceptually variable flux-based relativity, unlike Einstein's relativity based upon a fixed and reference frame independent velocity for light. In our new relativity, light's velocity would appear greater or smaller in wide ranging paratemporal bandwidth local reference frames. Instead of classical "reference frames," we use "isocones." Also, ponder how masses, lengths, times, velocities, gravities, etc. are all quantons(some_fluxes,other_fluxes). |
| 339 |
"What is important to the physicist is the number of units of duration the process fills; he does not concern himself about the units themselves and that is why the successive states of the world might be spread out all at once in space without his having to change anything in his science or to cease talking about time. But for us, conscious beings, it is the units that matter, for we do not count extremities of intervals, we feel and live the intervals themselves. Now, we are conscious of these intervals as of definite intervals. Let me come back again to the sugar in my glass of water:(1) why must I wait for it to melt? While the duration of the phenomenon is relative for the physicist, since it is reduced to a certain number of units of time and the units themselves are indifferent, this duration is an absolute for my [local] consciousness [where apparent 'absoluteness' bases itself on local perceptual temporal bandwidth], for it coincides with a certain degree of impatience which is rigorously determined [again, we see Bergson's anthropocentricity]. Whence comes this determination? What is it that obliges me to wait, and to wait for a certain length of Psychical duration which is forced upon me, over which I have no power? If succession, in so far as distinct from mere juxtaposition, has no real efficacy, if time is not a kind of force, why does the universe unfold its successive states with a velocity which, in regard to my consciousness, is a veritable absolute? Why with this particular velocity rather than any other? Why not with an infinite velocity? Why, in other words, is not everything given at once, as on the film of the cinematography The more I consider this point, the more it seems to me that, if the future is bound to succeed the present instead of being given alongside of it, it is because the future is not altogether determined at the present moment, and that if the time taken up by this succession is something other than a number [i.e., instead of a number, is interrelationships of qualitative Value-interrelationships of flux], if it has for the consciousness that is installed in it absolute value and reality, it is because there is unceasingly being created in it, not indeed in any such artificially isolated system as a glass of sugared water, but in the concrete [i.e., quantum cohesive] whole of which every such system forms part, something unforeseeable and new." Note (1) - See page 10. |
(Our brackets, bold, and color.) This number vis-à-vis units topic is close kin our One is the Oneliest. |
| 340 |
"This duration may not be the fact of matter itself, but that of the life which reascends the course of matter; the two movements are none the less mutually dependent upon each other. The duration of the universe must therefore be one with the latitude of creation which can find place in it. "When a child plays at reconstructing a picture by putting together the separate pieces in a puzzle game, the more he practices, the more and more quickly he succeeds. The reconstruction was, moreover, instantaneous, the child found it ready-made, when he opened the box on leaving the shop. The operation, therefore, does not require a definite time, and indeed, theoretically, it does not require any time. That is because the result is given. It is because the picture is already created, and because to obtain it requires only a work of recomposing and rearranging—a work that can be supposed going faster and faster, and even infinitely fast, up to the point of being instantaneous. But, to the artist who creates a picture by drawing it from the depths of his soul, time is no longer an accessory; it is not an interval that may be lengthened or shortened without the content being altered. The duration of his work is part and parcel of his work. To contract or to dilate it would be to modify both the Psychical evolution that fills it and the invention which is its goal. The time taken up by the invention, is one with the invention itself. It is the progress of a thought which is changing in the degree and measure that it is taking form. It is a vital process, something like the ripening of an idea. "The painter is before his canvas, the colors are on the palette, the model is sitting—all this we see, and also we know the painter's style: do we foresee what will appear on the canvas?" |
(Our bold.) |
| 341 | "We possess the elements of the problem; we know in an abstract way, how it will be solved, for the portrait will surely resemble the model and will surely resemble also the artist; but the concrete solution brings with it that unforeseeable nothing which is everything in a work of art. And it is this nothing that takes time. Nought as matter, it creates itself as form. The sprouting and flowering of this form are stretched out on an unshrinkable duration, which is one with their essence. So of the works of nature. Their novelty arises from an internal impetus which is progress or succession, which confers on succession a peculiar virtue or which owes to succession the whole of its virtue—which, at any rate, makes succession, or continuity of interpenetration in time, irreducible to a mere instantaneous juxtaposition in space. This is why the idea of reading in a present state of the material universe the future of living forms, and of unfolding now their history yet to come, involves a veritable absurdity. But this absurdity is difficult to bring out, because our memory is accustomed to place alongside of each other, in an ideal space, the terms it perceives in turn, because it always represents past succession in the form of juxtaposition. It is able to do so, indeed, just because the past belongs to that which is already invented, to the dead, and no longer to creation and to life. Then, as the succession to come will end by being a succession past, we persuade ourselves that the duration to come admits of the same treatment as past duration, that it is, even now, unrollable, that the future is there, rolled up, already painted on the canvas. An illusion, no doubt, but an illusion that is natural, ineradicable, and that will last as long as the human mind!" |
(Our bold and color.)
An Capraesque encapsulation of quantum cohesion. (See Fritjof Capra's 'Interpenetration' chapter in his Tao of Physics.)] Reader, we do not like to use words like 'absurd.' Why? Because SOMites used "absurd" and many of its synonyms for over 2500 years attempting annihilation of sophism. They made a strawman of sophism and then called it names. However, quantum science as a rebirth of sophism now sees those SOMites and their classicism for what they are in new quantum light. But Bergson, Bohm, James, et al., are doing just fine without name calling. Still, and honestly, we think SOMites and their CTMs deserve some well-earned ridicule. Look at what they have done to humanity with their contradictions, versus-think, oppositions, dichotomies, etc. It is an evil and static legacy. Excellent point. Now, imagine a tri-lobed or quarto-lobed humanesque mind. Imagine our expanded mental capabilities and our abilities to sense multiple actualities in many more quantum isocones. |
| 342 |
"Time is invention or it is nothing at all. But of time invention [classical] physics can take no account, restricted as it is to the cinematographical method. It is limited to counting simultaneities between the events that make up this time and the positions of the mobile T on its trajectory. It detaches these events from the whole, which at every moment puts on a new form and which communicates to them something of its novelty. It considers them in the abstract, such as they would be outside of the living whole, that is to say, in a time unrolled in space. It retains only the events or systems of events that can be thus isolated without being made to undergo too profound a deformation, because only these lend themselves to the application of its method. Our physics dates from the day when it was known how to isolate such systems. To sum up, while modern physics is distinguished from ancient physics by the fact that it considers any moment of time whatever, it rests altogether on a substitution of time-length for time-invention. "It seems then that, parallel to this physics, a second kind of knowledge ought to have grown up, which could have retained what physics allowed to escape. On the flux itself of duration science neither would nor could lay hold, bound as it was to the cinematographical method. This second kind of knowledge would have set the cinematographical method aside. It would have called upon the mind to renounce its most cherished habits. It is within becoming that it would have transported us by an effort of sympathy. We should no longer be asking where a moving body will be, what shape a system will take, through what state a change will pass at a given moment: the moments of time, which are only arrests of our attention, would no longer exist; it is the flow of time, it is the very flux of the real that we should be trying to follow. The first kind of knowledge has the advantage of enabling us to foresee the future and of making us in some measure masters of events; in return, it retains of the moving reality only eventual immobilities, that is to say, views taken of it by our mind." |
(Our brackets, bold, and color.)
Bergson tells us that classical time does (can-) not evolve. It cannot evolve because it is both homogeneous and thus analytic. For time to evolve, it would have to be heterogeneous and thus stochastic. He affirms our Quantonic call for 'many.' James told us that a better philosophy of reality is a plural one. Bergson agrees. Dump monism. Adopt pluralism. Dump CTMs. Adopt QTMs. Expel classicism from your curriculum vitae! Let's stop classicism's intellectual hegemony in Earth's 21st century! Doug 17Nov2000. |
| 343 |
"It symbolizes the real and transposes it into the human rather than expresses it. The other knowledge, if it is possible, is practically useless, it will not extend our empire over nature, it will even go against certain natural aspirations of the intellect; but, if it succeeds, it is reality itself that it will hold in a firm and final embrace. [No finite sentient intellect will ever hold Reality in its final embrace!] Not only may we thus complete the intellect and its knowledge of matter by accustoming it to install itself within the moving, but by developing also another faculty, complementary to the intellect, we may open a perspective on the other half of the real [Quantum c¤mplementarity is not a "half." It is from any static pattern's local perspective "all else" including "all possibilities."]. For, as soon as we are confronted with true duration, we see that it means creation [agree—plural, evolute creation], and that if that which is being unmade endures, it can only be because it is inseparably bound [as a quantum c¤mplement] to what is making itself. Thus will appear the necessity of a continual growth of the universe [agree—a quantum multiverse is open], I should say of a life of the real. "To intellect, in short, there will be added intuition. "The more we reflect on it, the more we shall find that this conception of metaphysics is that which modern science suggests. "For the ancients, indeed, time is theoretically negligible, because the duration of a thing only manifests the degradation of its essence: it is with this motionless essence that science has to deal. Change being only the effort of a form toward its own realization, the realization is all that it concerns us to know. No doubt the realization is never complete: it is this that ancient philosophy expresses by saying that we do not perceive form without matter. But if we consider the changing object at a certain essential moment, at its apogee, we may say that there it just touches its intelligible form. [When SQ touches and interpenetrates DQ it experiences reality's face of change.]" |
(Our brackets, italic formatting of one sentence of Bergson's text, bold and color.) Assuming that we have commenced a new millennium count from 2000 to 2999 with Quantonics and MoQ as new philosophy and science, and assuming Pirsig, James, Bergson and we are on a new and better path, then we must disagree with Bergson's "practically useless." It is Value! Those who succeed in all and many new ways in our approach to millennial year 3000 or M3K, will not only embrace real Quality but use it to do what nature expects its change agents to do: add Value! Quantum Quality is already making enormous inroads in a plethora of disciplines. Indeed, Quantum Quality is practically valuable.
Bergson affirms a new, emergent Quantonic reality. He affirms Pirsig's new philosophy and metaphysics of Value over objective truth and Value over materiality. Bergson disaffirms a SOM/CR reality of materialism over Value.
Doug had not studied gnosis and quantum gn¤sis when he originally did this review. Now, approximately seven years in retrospect, Bergson appears to Doug as a gnostic. Study gnosis. For example, Elaine Pagels in her The Johannine Gospel in Gnostic Exegesis offers us a topos of gnosis:
It is clear to Doug now that Henri Louis Bergson understood that topos... Re: Bergson's "No doubt the realization is never complete...," see partiality and partial puzzles (please read all of latter's Kuhn's Puzzle HotMeme™). It was almost impossible for Doug to grasp that seven years ago. Bergson's quantum~genius is almost beyond contemporary humans' qua. To Doug, Gn¤sis is ancients' quantum~gnosis refined by folk like Bergson into quantum~gn¤sis. Quantum~Sophia, Quantum~Wisdom! Philo~Sophia! Quantum~phil¤s¤phy! Doug - 7May2007. |
| 344 |
"This intelligible form, this ideal and, so to speak, limiting form, our science seizes upon. And possessing in this the gold-piece, it holds eminently the small money which we call becoming or change. This [classical] change is less than being. The knowledge that would take it for object, supposing such knowledge were possible, would be less than science. "But, for a science that places all the moments of time in the same rank, that admits no essential moment, no culminating point, no apogee, change is no longer a diminution of essence, duration is not a dilution of eternity. The flux of time is the reality itself, and the things which we study are the things which flow. It is true that of this flowing reality we are limited to taking instantaneous views. But, just because of this, scientific knowledge must appeal to another knowledge to complete it. While the ancient conception of scientific knowledge ended in making time a degradation, and change the diminution of a form given from all eternity—on the contrary, by following the new conception to the end, we should come to see in time a progressive growth of the absolute, and in the evolution of things a continual invention of forms ever new. "It is true that it would be to break with the metaphysics of the ancients. They saw only one way of knowing definitely. Their science consisted in a scattered and fragmentary metaphysics, their metaphysics in a concentrated and systematic science. Their science and metaphysics were, at most, two species of one and the same genus. In our hypothesis, on the contrary, [classical] science and metaphysics are two opposed although complementary ways of knowing, the first retaining only moments, that is to say, that which does not endure, the second bearing on duration itself. Now, it was natural to hesitate between so novel a conception of metaphysics and the traditional conception." |
(Our brackets and bold.) |
| 345 | "The temptation must have been strong to repeat with the new science what had been tried on the old, to suppose our scientific knowledge of nature completed at once, to unify it entirely, and to give to this unification, as the Greeks had already done, the name of metaphysics. So, beside the new way that philosophy might have prepared, the old remained open, that indeed which physics trod. And, as physics retained of time only what could as well be spread out all at once in space, the metaphysics that chose the same direction had necessarily to proceed as if time created and annihilated nothing, as if duration had no efficacy. Bound, like the physics of the moderns and the metaphysics of the ancients, to the cinematographical method, it ended with the conclusion, implicitly admitted at the start and immanent in the method itself: A given." |
(Our bold.) |
