It has become a dominant view in the philosophy of time that Einstein’s Theory of Relativity showed that the passage of time is an illusion, and that in fact the past, present, and future all coexist.
I was under the impression that Relativity united Space and Time as 'Space-Time' . There are 'world-lines' and 'light cones' but no privileged frame of reference from which the 'true' sequence of events or 'rate' of time's passage can be measured. It is not the case that the past and the future coexist with our future which is why I can't visit yesterday or pop into the middle of next week to find out who won the Great British Bake off.
What Einstein said was 'People like us who believe in physics know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion." We may make an illusory distinction about a thing- e.g. I distinguish between when my computer is being nice and sweet and when it is being a fucking pain in the ass- without committing to the view that the thing is illusory. I really do have a computer. It probably misbehaves- or appears to do so- because I have done something stupid or failed to do something sensible.
But the philosopher Henri Bergson, a contemporary of Einstein’s, was a strong critic of the theory’s portrayal of time.
There is no portrayal. There are equations and there are predictions. That is all.
Bergson emphasised the cultural and technological context in which Einstein formulated relativity
which everybody was aware off and thus didn't need emphasising
and argued that a theory of time that relies on clocks but doesn’t understand their history and significance, is incomplete, writes Jimena Canales.
Theories aren't meant to be complete. They are either useful or useless.
As you explore in your book The Physicist and The Philosopher, there was a contemporary of Einstein’s, the philosopher Henri Bergson, who didn’t buy the relativistic picture of time. What was Bergson’s main objection?
Bergson said '... there is nothing to change in the mathematical expression of the theory of relativity.
Clearly, this wasn't true. The special theory had been changed to get the general theory but a more general theory was already beckoning. Kaluza had sent his paper to Einstein and got it published in 1921. Klein would chime in by 1926. This is the thread from which superstrings evolved.
But physics would render a service to philosophy by giving up certain ways of speaking
it had. It had become Machian and mathsy. Tarski and others would clarify this for the innumerate.
which lead the philosopher into error,
Philosophy is only being done in connection with an open problem. There is no error. There are just useful and useless avenues to closing the problem- provided it genuinely is a problem and not a 'semantic' as opposed to 'intensional' (in Godel's sense) paradox.
and which risk fooling the physicist himself regarding the metaphysical implications of his views. For example, we are told above that “if two identical, synchronised clocks are at the same spot in the system of reference, if we shift one very rapidly and then bring it back again next to the other at the end of time t (the time of the system), it will lag behind the other […].” In reality, we should say that the moving clock exhibits this slowing at the precise instant at which it touches, still moving, the motionless system and is about to re-enter it. But immediately upon re-entering, it points to the same time as the other.'
Maybe Bergson thought that acceleration with respect to one frame of reference meant time slowed down but that deceleration with respect to it would have the opposite effect. This wasn't true. Acceleration just means rate of change of velocity which is speed in a particular direction. Thus if an object moves at the same speed in a circular path, its acceleration is changing. Precisely because a frame of reference has no magic properties nor is 'privileged', an object subject to acceleration will have 'aged' less or shown a lower lapse of time than one which remained at rest.
Thus, contra Bergson, two clocks will show different times when the travelling clock returns and becomes motionless. This is because it experienced acceleration, its speed and velocity changed, whereas the other did not. Deceleration relative to us is still acceleration relative to the thing slowing down towards us. The same thing would be true if instead of twins, billions of identical siblings were being sent off on journeys at different rates of acceleration only to be reunited at some point. Bergson had to reject this view because it was worse than Newton's. Seeing a bunch of genetically identical humans who very obviously are of different biological ages would show that whatever Bergsonian 'duration' might mean, it couldn't possibly mean the one thing of interest to us which is the lived quality of the time in a particular frame of reference. Clearly, at age 60, time moves for both of a pair of conjoined twins in a way that it didn't when they were 16. Indeed, I myself move at a much slower speed now then I did even 20 years ago. Still, had some ET scientist cloned me when I was ten and sent off a hundred million of such clones on round trip journeys at different rates of acceleration, it would be the case that I could personally see how different me's would experience duration watching the same Netflix series. Also I would be able to see that, whatever my age, I would bore myself- which, I suppose, is why I blog.
The relation between Einstein and Bergson is a complicated one with many wrinkles.
Not really. One was a scientist. The other was some sort of belles lettrist who thought some great malaise had been created by everybody misunderstanding some long dead philosopher whose contemporaries ignored him because he was clearly mad and babbling nonsense.
It was personal, political, and philosophical.
But only in the same way that their relations to everybody else was.
When I began writing my book, the accepted historical narrative claimed that Bergson had misunderstood Einstein’s theory of relativity and that he had made a crucial mistake in his book Duration and Simultaneity in his interpretation of what became known as the “twin paradox” in the theory of relativity.
I made the same mistake because I thought 'acceleration retards Time but deceleration will speed it back up again'. But, I am as stupid as shit. My plan was to become a History graduate but, it turned out, I was too lazy and stupid and, any way, you need to know foreign languages- like Hindooo- to be a historian of Indi-yaa.
Bergson indeed repeatedly ascribed a “fictional” and “phantasmagoric” status to one the traveling twins/clocks.
Because he thought that one clock or twin could never be sent on a return trip journey where acceleration would be high enough to have an observable outcome. He was wrong. But, if memory serves, the crucial experiment wasn't performed till some three decades after his death. But then Einstein-Rosen too was experimentally disproved decades after their death.
If one reads Bergson’s book in terms of physics, then one can certainly claim that he made a mistake in it.
One can do more. One can conclude that the man had shit for brains.
Canales writes ' Bergson found Einstein’s definition of time in terms of clocks completely aberrant.
Einstein does not define time. He merely populates different frames of reference with either mechanical clocks or human beings who could be considered biological clocks in the sense that anybody looking at me would know I am closer to 60 than 16.
The philosopher did not understand why one would opt to describe the timing of a significant event, such as the arrival of a train, in terms of how that event matched against a watch.
Because watches, like church bells or the muezzin's call or the position of Sun in the sky give people information useful to them to coordinate their activity. We might say 'take the five A.M train' or 'take the Dawn train' or 'take the train after the muezzin's call for the fajr prayer'. This is because we occupy the same frame of reference and are not being accelerated at different speeds. We are at rest relative to each other.
He did not understand why Einstein tried to establish this particular procedure as a privileged way to determine simultaneity.
Einstein says there is no privileged frame of reference. Simultaneity is not guaranteed to hold for all observers but order of precedence for causally connected events is. Concurrency matters. Simultaneity does not.
Bergson searched for a more basic definition of simultaneity, one that would not stop at the watch but that would explain why clocks were used in the first place.
They may be synchronized for a particular purpose but approximate, not absolute, simultaneity is good enough to solve most coordination problems. The trouble is that there is no 'natural' (i.e. non arbitrary) solution to concurrency problems. It may be that a 'fundamental enough' constructor theory gives us a 'many-fingered' time or a whole host of durations as part and parcel of the relevant 'super-information' stream.
Incidentally, why things are used has nothing to do with their 'definitions'. Anyway, Time and Space are Tarskian primitives. You get circularity or an infinite regress if you try to define them.
But there was much more to Bergson’s critique of relativity than this reading allows for. Bergson repeatedly claimed that he had no objections to any of the facts of Einstein’s theory and that his contributions were of a philosophical nature.
Bergson was wrong about the facts regarding clocks and twins in Special Relativity. Also, philosophy needn't be as stupid as shit. The truth is, if Bergson was a philosopher, so was Tagore and Gandhi and Keyserling and Spengler and the Grand Wizard of the fucking KKK.
(Einstein himself wrote numerous letters promoting the view that the philosopher was mistaken.)
It was right for Einstein to point this out just as it would have been right for Darwin to point out that your uncle could not have reverted to the condition of a chimpanzee. It really isn't true that the Zoo authorities have kidnapped an elderly relative of yours.
Bergson’s objections were therefore more than simply objections about the Einsteinian notion of time. They were about the role of science vis-à-vis other forms of knowledge.
Like the knowledge that London Zoo has illegally kidnapped your elderly uncle and are exhibiting him to earn money.
Bergson’s main objection against Einstein’s work was that it was smuggling in a certain metaphysics into science,
which is like using heroin or cocaine to smuggle arseholes into Thailand
without acknowledging its presence.
cocaine should acknowledge the arseholes which enabled it to enter a jail cell in Bangcock.
This metaphysics was nothing extraordinary—just the contrary—it was basically run-off-the-mill materialistic.
In which case it was physics- not metaphysics.
Bergson ended his controversial and complex book with a simple sentence, “Einstein is the continuator of Descartes.”
Coz Descartes was a creative mathematician as were Newton and Liebniz and the expositors of Mach and Einstein and so forth.
Bergson’s objections were therefore more than simply objections about the Einsteinian notion of time.
They were less than objections to anything as grand as 'notions'. They were merely a metaphorical shitting of the trousers while twerking or seeking to impersonate Josephine Baker.
They were about the role of science vis-à-vis other forms of knowledge.
Like Magic and Alchemy and Voodoo
Bergson felt he had a “duty” to defend these other forms of knowledge from being snuffed out by some of the claims made in the name of science. “The idea that science and philosophy are different disciplines meant to complement each other,” he wrote, “arouses the desire and also imposes on us the duty to proceed to a confrontation.”
The result of that confrontation was that Science beat the shit out of philosophy.
Philosophy has a long tradition, going at least as far as Plato, that argues that the way the world appears to us isn’t the way the world really is.
So does Paranoia.
Why should we take Bergson’s complaint that Einstein’s time makes a fool of our pre-scientific view of time seriously? Why isn’t it the case that Einstein somehow revealed the true nature of time, underneath this illusory, everyday view of time?
Of course, one of the most successful aspects of science has been to describe the world in a sense that is true without relying on appearances.
Science does rely on appearances for empirical verification. There are crucial experiments and observations of the sort which confirmed Einstein was right about some things but not others.
For example, Descartes very successfully describes the moon illusion (why it appears larger closer to the horizon) in his book on optics.
This is the 'apparent distance' theory. Descartes did not dispel an fucking illusion and even modern psychology has trouble with it. The problem is 'looks bigger' is just a manner of speaking. If we think of the moon as an object like a tree or a house, it is obvious that we believe it remains the same size though it appears bigger when it is closer to us.
As science progressed, it continued to correct for more and more illusions that were not limited to the realm of the visual. Thus Laplace corrected illusions of a mathematical nature, such as the commonly held belief that if a coin had landed heads many times in a row it will have a greater probability to land tails.
There was no such belief. Instead, there was the notion that a 'lucky streak' was bound to end.
Einstein was part if this tradition, taking it to a new level. The philosopher Ernst Cassirer celebrated Einstein for taking science “a step further by freeing it still more from the presuppositions of the naïvely sensuous ‘substantialistic’ view of the world.”
This was done by an experiment confirming Einstein's theory.
Does Bergson in your view have anything to say about the tendency of the scientific image to undermine our everyday concepts?
Like the earth being flat or the computer becoming naughty from time to time? These aren't concepts. They are just a manner of speaking.
And how does his critique of Einstein relate to this idea of science as uncovering an ultimate reality, beyond the illusions of everyday experience?
That too is merely a manner of speaking. It isn't true that Scientists- generally played by pulchritudinous women in white coats who wear big, but sexy, glasses- start disrobing me so as to uncover my ultimate reality and suck it to their heart's content any time they get the chance.
Yes, Bergson laments that science typically undermines one very important everyday concept: change and movement.
Bergson had noticed that many hobos were reading Einstein and were loudly complaining that their everyday concepts were being undermined. There was this one elderly prostitute in Montmartre who had been having bowel movements in reverse ever since she learnt about Minkowskian light cones.
“Our entire belief in objects,” he wrote in Creative Evolution (1907), “indeed rests upon the idea that time does not bite into them.”
Nor does Space suck them off. However, we do not greatly care if Possibility scratches them from time to time.
In Creative Evolution his targets were certain interpretations of Darwinian evolutionary theory, such as Thomas Huxley and defenders of determinism such as Laplace: “For time here is stripped of all efficacy, and, from the moment that it does nothing, it is nothing.”
Also Space should be allowed to have a Mistress rather than remain chastely wedded to Time. Possibility, however, should be discouraged from entering into a Lesbian relationship with the Hypokeimenon.
In that early work we already see some of the ideas that he uses to criticize Einstein’s work.
There was no 'criticism'. The man publicly shat himself.
Bergson was a phenomenologist of sorts,
the sort who publicly shits himself
and like Husserl he emphasised the context within which science takes place
Einstein's daddy was in the Electricity business. The context in which science was being done was Industrial Capitalism with a technologically advanced military sector.
- Husserl called it the life-world.
Why not the pleroma of the mutual sodomy of but shit-for-brains dickhead turds?
Is part of Bergson’s argument that if the end results of scientific inquiry seem to undermine our concepts and experience that we have in the life-world
e.g our belief that a gremlin occasionally enters our computer and makes it behave in a very annoying manner
– the place where the activity of science take place – then science isn’t revealing the whole truth about reality?
Scientists aren't incessantly pointing their finger at philosophers and saying 'the reality is youse guys got shit-for-brains.'
Husserl, Bergson, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty sketch out very different "phenomenological" philosophical programs.
They were shit.
When Bergson is read as a phenomenologist it is usually because of his early work “Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience” (1889), yet even that work is very different from Husserl’s “The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness.”
Because no two shitheads produce identical turds.
By the time Bergson composed “Les Deux sources de la morale et de la religion” (1932) it was clear that he had moved completely away from a “phenomenological” focus on experience and that he was interested in exploring how it intersected with social, political and even moral questions.
Experience is the intersection with some fucking question or the other. Generally, the question is 'does this shit have to be so fucking boring?'
The “really real,” which Bergson defined as “that which is perceived or can be,”
but what is perceived can't be. The rope can't magically turn into a snake. The Moon isn't really a big pizza pie.
was interesting to him, but he always understood it as playing a minor role in a much more complex process through which reality comes to be determined.
He didn't even play a 'minor role' in anything useful. Sorel thought he could be the 'French Marx'. The dude was a total waste of space.
Did Bergson's phenomenology play any role in his critique of Einstein's theory of time?
No. The cunt was simply stupid.
Or do you see his critique of Einstein as being independent of his philosophy of phenomenology?
It was because the cunt was as stupid as shit. The bottom line here is that Bergson misunderstood Kant. He didn't get that so long as there was some arbitrary symmetry breaking mechanism- e.g. who owns what or who has a bum they can themselves most conveniently wipe- no, fucking 'category', can have purchase or supply an 'imperative'. Bergson was merely stupid and verbose and vacuous. Unlike Sartre- or, more to the point, Proust- he didn't produce any fiction worth re-reading. Why not admit this?
Bergson has been frequently interpreted as
not not worth interpreting coz, though he was as stupid as shit, still maybe you could get a fucking cretin to do a dissertation on Proust & Bergson on the basis of an impartial ignorance of both.
aiming to recuperate the feeling of time’s passage which Einstein considered illusory. Einstein, in an entry of his travel diary commenting on Bergson’s Duration and Simultaneity read him as a philosopher who “objectivized” psychological aspects of time.
Einstein was being kind. He himself had ended up on the wrong side of the Science v Stupidity debate as the Fifth Solvay Conference made clear. The fact is, we can always get other peeps to 'objectivize' our intuition that Jews really want us to kill them and to grab their cool, shiny, stuff.
Heidegger also portrayed him this way when he explained that the term “time” in Being and Time “means neither the calculated time of the ‘clock,’ nor ‘lived time’ in the sense of Bergson and others.”
nor anything anybody else meant by Time but the unity of the three ecstases of past, present and future which, however, may be a pepperoni pizza or a suppressed fart from last week. The problem here is that Heidegger's Time could just as easily be Ahab's White Whale or some poor lunatic's King Charles' head
Those interpretations are much too simplistic. Bergson was interested in investigating the area where the subjective and the objective meet
which is like searching for the place West and East meet.
and the area where life and matter connect.
why not the place where your arm connects to your shoulder?
He did not want to stand on either dichotomy. His most significant contribution was to analyse how those concepts were “riveted” to each other and why.
That's a 'significant' contribution? What then is farting?
Bergson seems to argue
Why the fuck should he 'seem' to argue something when we can check what he actually did argue? Are we entitled to say that this lady seems to argue that she has a chipmunk up her colon even though such is not the case?
that even Einstein’s concept of time, as what’s measured by a clock, is based on some more fundamental, more real, non-mathematical view of time,
that's fine. Obviously, there may be some more general theory whose interpretation is not itself mathematical.
time as we perceive it, which might defy exact mathematical expression.
which again is fine. Maths is useful because approximations are good enough most of the time.
What sense of time does Bergson have in mind here?
Wasting it by pretending to be really profound.
It is a mistake to ask Bergson for a single unchanging definition of time,
It would also be a mistake to ask him how to get to the fucking Eiffel Tower coz the fucker is dead.
because time changes throughout time: “time is what happens, and also what makes everything happen”. (“Le temps est ce qui se fait, et même ce qui fait que tout se fait.”)
We may say the same about Truth, Justice and the American Way though in truth it is shit which happens and which makes everything happen.
Consider, for example, how different pre-modern notions of time are from ours.
They weren't different at all. That's why we use calendars going back thousands of years and. in English, name the days of our week after long forgotten Teutonic Gods.
When I write about the history of time in contemporary times, I always have in the back of my mind the image of Saturn devouring his son.
There isn't yet a history of time in contemporary times because we don't know which ideas are sound and which were always obviously flawed.
In it, the passage, keeping and telling of time occurs be reference to love, violence, anthropophagy and reproduction.
Not to mention shitting while fisting yourself furiously.
Throughout time, it is clear that we are dealing with radically different beasts.
Like giraffes fisting themselves furiously while copiously shitting.
Bergson did not draw such stark distinctions,
He drew a veil over the furious fisting and copious shitting.
but in Duration and Simultaneity he asked us not to forget how time was a precondition for effective action.
We don't know that. There may have been an act of creation or there may be one in the future. Perhaps some action was required for Time to get going.
Einstein’s definition of time has none of these radical elements
there is no definition. Time is a Tarskian primitive.
and might even be responsible for leading us to forget about them.
She means reading Einstein's paper might have caused Bose to forget that he wanted the Brits out of India.
In his work, time is closely tied to what clocks measure.
We spend money on clocks because they claim to tell the time. Einstein merely used the example of twins and clocks to show that what matters is whether a frame of reference accelerates with respect to another frame of reference.
To Bergson’s dismay, it did not include clock makers, clock users and those events external to the clock that make time meaningful.
The twins could be clock makers and clock users. They might spend their time writing odes to every hour of the day.
Without these other aspects of Time, Bergson argued that clocks would only be “bits of machinery
which is all they are
with which we would amuse ourselves by comparing them with one another;
we use clocks to coordinate our actions- e.g. ensuring we get to skool before assembly.
they would not be employed in classifying events;
we do classify events using clocks. McDonalds won't serve their 'Big Breakfast' after 11 A.M.
in short, they would exist for their own sake and not serve us.
Just as spades would exist for their own sake and not for the purpose of digging holes.
They would lose their raison d’être for the theoretician of relativity as for everybody else, for he too calls them in only to designate the time of an event.”
No. Einstein was using clocks and twins to show that acceleration or deceleration of one frame of reference affected how much time had elapsed and this would be different from a frame of reference which had remained at constant velocity.
Bergson warns followers of relativity theory not to confuse “the real from the symbolic”
A mathematical theory is expressed in symbols which are interpreted as relating to physical reality.
and to avoid identifying “a mathematical representation with transcendental reality”.
But we know that even the most cutting edge representation will be 'sublated'- i.e. be shown to be inconsistent or incomplete in some manner. Indeed, this appears to be happening with respect to Einstein's theory of gravity.
Does Bergson’s arguments against Einstein extent beyond just a critique of relativity theory to a broader critique of scientism – the view that science reveals the ultimate nature of reality?
You are right: Bergson did inspire later thinkers who denounced “scientism,” such as Jacques Maritain and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. But his position was different from theirs in that he did not criticize science in general or denounce its place in modern society. Even a cursory look at his books shows how they contain numerous scientific facts and are based on the scientific knowledge of his era. What separates his work from those who denounced “scientism” is that he did not want to take it down but to build on it to get to a fuller understanding of knowledge in relation to reality.
Sadly he wasn't smart enough to do so.
“If you define reality by a mathematical convention,
which Einstein hadn't done.
you end up with a conventional reality,”
as opposed to one which dropped out of College to become a hippy
he explained, but he fully accepted and valued (drawing from Henri Poincaré) the importance of these tools and conventions.
Poincare was smart and did useful work.
In one of your talks you mention that the correct way to understand Einstein’s revolution is not as a theoretical, but as a technological revolution. Can you explain what you mean by that?
It is both—but the technological revolution that provided the conditions of possibility for Einstein’s theory of relativity to emerge has been completely ignored.
So had the fact that Einstein needed to go to the toilet from time to time.
When Einstein talked about “signals” he meant signals in the sense of those that were actually being sent across space by new wireless technologies.
or by heliographs or semaphore or the beating of drums or the tolling of church bells thousands of years ago.
When he talked about “the speed of light” he meant the speed of light as it was measured by engineers who sent electromagnetic waves across long distances on the surface of the Earth.
What else could he have meant?
When Einstein talked about “light sources”, he included new powerful means of illumination developed at the time. All the lowly objects that populate Einstein’s scientific papers and his popular writings, such as rulers, clocks, trains, bullets, flashes, stations were part of a new technological universe that arose at the turn of the century.
This lady thinks clocks and bullets and trains 'arose' circa 1900!
The theory of relativity provided a general framework to understand these new communication, transportation and media networks. I
No. Newtonian physics was just fine for bullets and clocks and trains.
n my essay “The Media of Relativity” I describe the changing technological environment that led Einstein to build a new comprehensive theory of the universe and led many others to adopt it.
But this lady thinks 'bullets' were invented circa 1900! I suppose one may say the Michelson-Morley experiment of 1887 motivated Einstein's thought experiment or, as he himself said, made it of interest to others. No aether meant no Absolute Space and Time. However Ole Romer had shown that the speed of light was finite back in 1676. Still, so long as there was an aether, this didn't matter too much.
A very interesting question is why and how Einstein’s work was able to shed its mundane origins and parade itself as theoretical, cosmological and universal.
An astronomical expedition had shown that Einstein was right. The guy wasn't parading around. He was a well respected Physics professor.
That undertaking was a complicated accomplishment that took decades and involved many collaborators.
The Jews collaborated with the Illuminati and the Homosexuals and the shape shifting lizards from Planet X. Did you know the Post Office is actually just cover for a paedophile ring headed by Oprah?
Part of the process included shaping Einstein’s persona into that of an otherworldly genius.
Whereas he was just a bald janitor from Cleveland who put on a wig and a fake German accent.
Do you think contemporary philosophers should, like Bergson, question the picture of reality that theoretical physics is offering us, and focus on the conceptual and perceptual preconditions of science?
There are no such preconditions. Contemporary philosophers should concentrate on teaching their graduate students how to tie their own laces though they may themselves lack any such skill.
A central motivation of my work is to point out that in addition to knowledge, we need knowledge about knowledge
Yes. We need to find out which research programs are useful and thus worth funding. But we don't need this nutter to point anything out to us. What she does is useless. Did you know that respiration is vital to prevent suffocation? You did? Oh. In that case let us not spend money on people who say 'Respiration is important. Einstein failed to point this out probably because he was a fucking homosexual prevert wot wore a wig and faked his German accent.
—the latter can help us obtain a better understanding that includes the sciences, arts and humanities.
Sadly, ordinary people like me can't tell which types of scientific research programs are worth funding. Apparently CERN is going to spend over 27 billion dollars. Is this a good thing? Probably but I'm too stupid to say why.
We have first order knowledge of things,
or first order stupidity about things
a second order one about things, but we can also begin to develop a third order knowledge that includes knowledge about itself.
We can also fart as a way of analysing farts and then shart as a third order way of shitting our pants. But nobody should subsidize this type of research.
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