| 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.) |
|
354 |
"Now, it might easily be shown that the conclusions of this metaphysics springing from science, have rebounded upon science itself, as it were, by ricochet. They penetrate the whole of our so-called empiricism. Physics and chemistry study only inert matter; biology, when it treats the living being physically and chemically, considers only the inert side of the living: hence the mechanistic explanations, in spite of their development, include only a small part of the real. To suppose a priori that the whole of the real is resolvable into elements of this kind, or at least that mechanism can give a complete translation of what happens in the world, is to pronounce for a certain metaphysic—the very metaphysic of which Spinoza and Leibniz have laid down the principles and drawn the consequences. Certainly, the psycho-physiologist who affirms the exact equivalence of the cerebral and the Psychical state, who imagines the possibility, for some superhuman intellect, of reading in the brain what is going on in consciousness, believes himself very far from the metaphysicians of the seventeenth century, and very near to experience. Yet experience pure and simple tells us nothing of the kind. It shows us the interdependence of the mental and the physical, the necessity of a certain cerebral substratum for the Psychical state—nothing more. From the fact that two things are mutually dependent, it does not follow that they are equivalent. [Quantum c¤mplements are not equivalent, nor do they conserve!]" |
(Our 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:
|
| 355 |
"Because a certain screw is necessary to a certain machine, because the machine works when the screw is there and stops when the screw is taken away, we do not say that the screw is the equivalent of the machine. For correspondence to be equivalence, it would be necessary that to any part of the machine a definite part of the screw should correspond—as in a literal translation in which each chapter renders a chapter, each sentence a sentence, each word a word. Now, the relation of the brain to consciousness seems to be entirely different. Not only does the hypothesis of an equivalence between the Psychical state and the cerebral state imply a downright absurdity, as we have tried to prove in a former essay,(1) but the facts, examined without prejudice, certainly seem to indicate that the relation of the Psychical to the physical is just that of the machine to the screw. To speak of an equivalence between the two is simply to curtail, and make almost unintelligible, the Spinozistic or Leibnizian metaphysics. It is to accept this philosophy, such as it is, on the side of Extension, but to mutilate it on the side of Thought. With Spinoza, with Leibniz, we suppose the unifying synthesis of the phenomena of matter achieved, and everything in matter explained mechanically. But, for the conscious facts, we no longer push the synthesis to the end. We stop half-way. We suppose consciousness to be coextensive with a certain part of nature and not with all of it. We are thus led, sometimes to an "epiphenomenalism" that associates consciousness with certain particular vibrations and puts it here and there in the world in a sporadic state, and sometimes to a "monism" that scatters consciousness into as many tiny grains as there are atoms; but, in either case, it is to an incomplete Spinozism or to an incomplete Leibnizianism that we come back. Between this conception of nature and Cartesianism we find, moreover, intermediate historical stages. The medical philosophers of the eighteenth century, with their cramped Cartesianisin, have had a great part in the genesis of the "epiphenomenalism" and "monism" of the present day." Note (1) - "Le Paralogisme psycho-physiologique" (Revue de métaphysique et de morale, Nov. 1904, pp. 895-908). Cf. Matiere et mémoire, Paris, 1896, chap. i. |
(Our bold.) |