In a previous post I focussed on concurrency as a scandal for simultaneity in the context of the Bergson/Einstein debate.
In this blog post I will comment on an article in Aeon by Evan Thompson re. who actually won the Einstein/Bergson debate.
I should clarify, at the time, ordinary people- like the Nobel committee- thought Bergson won. They mentioned him as the reason Einstein's Special theory could not be recognised in the Nobel citation. However, as the years passed, people realised that Bergson was useless. Einstein was useful. Philosophy was nonsense. Physics could decide the balance of power.
This is not to say, Prof. Evan Thompson et al aren't making a valuable point in their new book- 'The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience (2024). A good example is the failure of modern science to show that Jews are actually a type of Iyengar and thus their soi disant 'Science' or 'Mathematics' should be interpreted EXCLUSIVELY as proof that all Iyers must receive retroactive affirmative action on the basis that they are not just educationally backward but MENTALLY FUCKING RETARDED. Mind it kindly.
The plain fact is- philosophy is 'metaphysics'- i.e. what is beyond physics. It is welcome to be magic or mania or, if done by smart peeps, to confine itself to 'open questions' in physics. However, once a crucial experiment is performed which closes a particular open question, philosophy must move on or be relegated to 'self-help' or some species of 'Grievance Studies'- e.g. how come all them Jews and Iyengars and other such folk are so smart while I struggle to tie my shoe-laces? Obviously, the answer has to do with Neo-Liberalism. Fuck you Neo-Liberalism! Fuck you very much!
Prof. Thomson writes-
Bergson began by declaring his admiration for Einstein’s work -
which he didn't understand. To be fair, lots of peeps didn't get that time actually slows down when a frame of reference's velocity increases greatly.
Bergson wanted to 'un-mix' space and time so as to get rid of a mechanistic type of causality thus getting rid of determinism and opening the door to freedom. But, one could do this just as easily by believing in God or Theosophical Mahatmas on the astral plane or by doing Magic or some type of Yoga such that Mind would prevail over Matter.
he had no objection to most of the physicist’s ideas. Rather, Bergson took issue with the philosophical significance of Einstein’s temporal concepts,
Philosophers, like fools, were welcome to deny the significance of anything the could not understand or which did not address their pressing concern with securing affirmative action for Iyers.
and he pressed the physicist on the importance of the lived experience of time,
It had no importance whatsoever. Our 'lived experience of time' misleads us when it comes to the natural sciences. I recall believing that Time goes slower during Summer because the Sun is closer to the earth and thus its weight bears down causing Time to be less nimble. I should explain, in India, we look forward to the Winter and dislike Summer.
Europeans exiled to Ind's coral strand may have felt that because India was closer to the Equator, time dragged in that country while it moved quickly in the North.
I suppose the reason the Anglo-Indians liked Kipling because he was 'the poet of work'. He was saying 'there's plenty of work to do in India. Put your shoulder to the wheel and, you just see, time will fly by and, before you know it, you will be back in England in the bosom of your family. ' The alternative was to drink and go to the devil.
and the ways that this experience had been overlooked in relativity theory.
Just as my farts have been overlooked. Is it coz I iz bleck?
Though Einstein was forced to speak in French, a language of which he had a poor command, he took only a minute to respond. He summarised his understanding of what Bergson had said and then shrugged away the philosopher’s ideas as irrelevant to physics.
Metaphysics, being- by definition- beyond Physics, is irrelevant to it just as the fact that I once studied Math is irrelevant to my understanding of the Mochizuki proof of the abc theorem because that type of math is beyond me. Also, when I say I studied Math, what I mean is I was taught a bit of Arithmetic in primary skool. It didn't take.
Einstein believed that science was the authority on objective time, and philosophy had no prerogative to weigh in. To end his rebuttal, he declared: ‘[T]here is no time of the philosopher; there is only a psychological time different from the time of the physicist.’
What he meant was that Kant was wrong. Time wasn't a 'form of pure intuition'. Indeed, there could be many types of intuition which would generate different 'psychological times'. Thus, a follower of Brouwer might say there is a fundamental intuition of 'two-ity' and this gives rise to our psychological sense of time. This can actually be quite useful. One might say 'two-ity' gives rise to the notion that there is a state of the world and there is a verification of it which is different. 'Time will tell' but it tells after the event. Maybe it can also tell for infinitary processes before they can be completed. Maybe not.
But despite what many have come to believe about the debate that began that night, Einstein was wrong. There is a third kind of a time: a time of the philosopher.
or many different Times of many different types of crazy people.
Still, it must be said, the older view may have been that for the true Philosopher, there was no Space or Time or Causality.
When Duration and Simultaneity
which claimed that there is no objective way to measure time. This was silly, because, for any useful purpose, it can be objectively measured well enough. True, there is an arbitrary aspect to this. Sadly, 'naturality' is far to seek because, what is useful is always arbitrary in some respect.
Why do I find it so difficult to buy three legged trousers? Philosophically, it is totes arbitrary to privilege two legged customers. Still, it is useful or profitable for clothes companies to do so.
was published later that year, Bergson’s debate with Einstein became more public and widespread, drawing in many other physicists and philosophers. But as it spread, cracks began to appear in the philosopher’s claims.
Einstein's theory really was weirder than people assumed. But then QMT was weirding out Einstein. Bohr kept taking down his pants at the Solvay Conference. Oddly, this made Einstein a more sympathetic figure.
The argument showed that Bergson had misunderstood an important technical aspect of Einstein’s theory of special relativity, particularly concerning time dilation (the difference in elapsed time, as measured by two clocks, due to their relative velocities).
If my twin is accelerated to near the speed of light and sent round the universe, when he returns, he will have hardly have aged whereas I will be decrepit.
Due to this failing, many came to believe not only that Einstein won the debate, but that the philosophy of duration had no relevance to the world of physics.
It could do. The 'duration' of my twin's interstellar voyage would be counted in months. My 'duration' would be counted in decades. When he returns, he is still young. I am very very old.
Bergson began to appear out of touch with the cutting edge of science. As the philosopher Thomas L Hanna wrote in 1962:
'Einstein’s theories gradually received increasingly dramatic verification, while Bergson’s theories wilted on the vine.
They made no testable predictions. Still, maybe they inspired or contributed to great works of art- e.g. Proust's 'À la recherche du temps Peru' which, oddly, contains little useful information on that great Latin American country.
The best explanation for Bergson’s impressive failure … [is that] he was not sufficiently conversant with the outlook and problems of mathematics and physics.'
Bergson admitted that he couldn't follow Tensor calculus. I think he assumed that deceleration would cause ageing just as acceleration retarded it. It's a silly mistake, but a lot of ordinary people made it when they first heard of the twin paradox.
Even the Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine and the philosopher Isabelle Stengers,
'Humanists' who needed to find a suitably dense mumbo-jumbo to substitute for a type of theology so useless that the Catholic Church had proclaimed that Faith can't be founded on it. It must be founded on a Mystery.
Nothing wrong with that. The Scooby Do gang were useful enough. Religion is just a bunch of peeps- including really stoopid and cowardly canines like my(best)self- bound together by a mystery whose solution is bound to be deeply silly.
who were sympathetic to Bergson’s philosophy
they had imbibed it with their Mother's milk because they were fucking Francophone Belgian- as was Ernest Hello.
in their groundbreaking book Order Out of Chaos (published first in French in 1978),
but which was otiose for us Anglophone Economists coz of Ramsey Theory.
wrote that he had ‘obviously misunderstood Einstein’s theory of relativity’.
Many did- most famously Einstein. He'd been influenced by a book by Karl Pearson but didn't get that if 'Relativity' is 'turtles all the way down', though there may be a God- that of Godel- there can't be any dice worth the name. Anyway, for all we know, there may only be one 'slingshot' proposition or single 'efficient' cause. It's just that this doesn't disallow a Parmenidean universe in which anything which can be thought of, or even thoughtlessly conjured up or referred to, all such things must actually be.
Metaphysics did change into a sort of speculative 'Nature Philosophy' as Western European Science and Technology took off, but the real article burgeoned purely on the basis of 'cash value' pragmatism. For this reason, it attracted the brightest and the best. The Humanities turned adversely selective. I may be as stupid as shit but my poetry is actually better- or would be, if I could be arsed- than anybody with an MFA or PhD in 'Creative Writing' or some such shite.
What drove this reversal of fortune was the exponential growth of STEM subject 'open problems' which Philosophy could not prevision or keep up with. What was 'beyond' Physics, was beyond guys who stupidly studied shit at Uni rather than getting onto a useful scientific research program.
Consider what happened to Husserlian Phenomenology. By the late Thirties he was willing to declare, in so many words, that his research program was impossible. But, we now think, we may be stuck with phenomenology even in fields like Quantum Gravity for many years. In Econ, with the notion of Granger Causality, it is phenomenology which is licit and which might found some irrefragable truth or law, and substantive 'utilitarianism' which is on the back foot.
As for Bergson and duration- maybe it applies to different types of elementary particles. But they have no 'lived experience' because they are neither alive not have any means of recording or reflecting on 'experience'.
But close examination of Bergson’s work does not bear out these lopsided judgments.
This is equally true of a close examination of Hitler's work. It is a fact that 'Jewish Science' has not been able to prove that Jews are crypto-Iyengars and are complicit of spreading rumors that I put garlic in the sambar.
He was out of touch neither with science nor mathematics.
He gave them up at the age of 18 to devote himself to the humanities.
In fact, he was adept at mathematics – he had won a prestigious mathematics prize,
for High School students
and his first published work was in a mathematics journal.
because publication in that journal was part of the prize.
And though he was wrong about one technical aspect of relativity theory, he was right about something more fundamental: time is not just what clocks measure.
Time is measured differently for different purposes. Clocks are useful when it comes to coordinating certain useful activities or investigating crimes or establishing causal chains.
It must be understood in other ways that draw directly on our experience of duration.
Psychologically speaking- sure. You need to understand that your wife doesn't think 30 seconds is adequate 'duration' even if you know otherwise.
To understand the French philosopher’s view of time, we need to
understand why Darwin and therefore Pearson were so disruptive
return to the 1880s, when he was working on his doctoral thesis. This work would be published as his first book in 1889 – known in English as Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness – when he was 30. The book’s key contribution is the idea that time is not space.
Everybody already knew this. That's why you can't rent out tomorrow.
We usually imagine time as analogous with space.
No we don't. We imagine that space exists at different times. You can't rent out tomorrow but you can rent out your spare bedroom from tomorrow.
We imagine it, for example, laid out on a line (like a timeline of events) or a circle (like a sundial ring or a clock face).
We have a time-line but it moves in the same direction as other time-lines. There's nothing we can do about this though, psychologically speaking, we may deploy techniques to 'stay in the moment' when doing something pleasant while 'speeding up time' when doing something boring or unpleasant.
And when we think of time as the seconds on a clock, we spatialise it as an ordered series of discrete, homogeneous and identical units.
No we don't. We may try to be more mindful of the passing moment and thus make it more 'spacious'- but that is merely a poetic manner of speaking. We are incapable of 'ordering times' into 'discrete' units though it may be some scientific advance will permit the 'quantization' of time. As for 'homogeneity', we have no means of imposing this on anything whatsoever. On the other hand, we are welcome to say that particular things are alike- i.e. heterogenous- whereas others are very different from each other- i.e. heterogenous.
This is clock time. But in our daily lives we don’t experience time as a succession of identical units.
Unless that is what we choose to do. The plain fact is, 'in our daily lives' we do things we find useful or pleasant or else things which are a matter of habit or social mimetics. This seldom involves 'philosophizing' or trying to shit higher than one's arsehole.
An hour in the dentist’s chair is very different from an hour over a glass of wine with friends.
The dentist's chair is in a different place from the wine-bar where you meet your friends.
This is lived time.
Or lived space.
Lived time is flow and constant change.
Lived space is where you fart or struggle not to fart. There is a constant change in the amount of intestinal gas you need to release or prevent yourself from releasing. If there is a Bergsonian theory of Time, there is also one of farting.
It is ‘becoming’ rather than ‘being’.
Just like a fart. What can be said of passing wind- which is as much a part of real life as the passage of time- can also be said of Bergsonian duration.
When we treat farts as a series of uniform, unchanging units, like points on a line or seconds on a clock, we lose the sense of change and growth that defines real farting; we lose the irreversible flow of becoming, which I call stinking up the place.
The plain fact is, we would rather lose 'the irreversible flow of becoming' rather than our car keys.
Think of a melody.
or a sequence of farts
Each note has its own distinct individuality while blending with the other notes and silences that come before and after. As we listen, past notes linger in the present ones, and (especially if we’ve heard the song before) future notes may already seem to sound in the ones we’re hearing now. Music is not just a series of discrete notes. We experience it as something inherently durational.
Bergson may have attended performances by Le Petomane, the fartist, who could fart out nice melodies. This was experienced as 'inherently durational'- just like taking a shit.
Bergson insisted that duration proper cannot be measured.
But it can also not be not measured if that's what one wants to do. I frequently measure the amount of jizz I have deposited on the moon while jerking off. Nobody can stop me doing so. I suppose Bergson means ''duration can't be accurately measured'. But 'good enough' accuracy depends on the purpose in question.
To measure something – such as volume, length, pressure, weight, speed or temperature – we need to stipulate the unit of measurement in terms of a standard.
Only if that is what we are paid to do. Otherwise, we are welcome to use any type of measure we like.
For example, the standard metre was once stipulated to be the length of a particular 100-centimetre-long platinum bar kept in Paris. It is now defined by an atomic clock measuring the length of a path of light travelling in a vacuum over an extremely short time interval.
So what? We are welcome to use Imperial or other metrics of our own invention.
In both cases, the standard metre is a measurement of length that itself has a length. The standard unit exemplifies the property it measures.
Nope. In both cases, there is an object- either a platinum rod or a vacuum- which provides the ground for a measurement.
In Time and Free Will, Bergson argued that this procedure would not work for duration.
Anyone can measure duration for themselves in any manner they like. They may not do this consistently or accurately or to any useful purpose, but nobody can stop them doing so.
For duration to be measured by a clock, the clock itself must have duration.
which is like saying 'for my farts to be measured by a person exposed to those farts, that person must herself be a fart.'
Incidentally, the clocks in Einstein's gedanken had no 'duration'. They were wholly imaginary. We may call them Meinongian objects 'which don't belong in Being' or Becoming or Beyonce Concerts.
It must exemplify the property it is supposed to measure.
In which case, since Humans can measure time, but not duration, our species exemplifies the Time of the Physicists not some shite invented by Psilosophers.
To examine the measurements involved in clock time, Bergson considers an oscillating pendulum, moving back and forth.
It doesn't measure shit. This is because it is inanimate. True, a conscious being can use any sort of inanimate object- e.g. a melting ice-cube or burning candle- to measure the passage of time.
At each moment, the pendulum occupies a different position in space,
No. The pendulum remains at rest. The weighted 'bob' may oscillate.
like the points on a line or the moving hands on a clockface. In the case of a clock, the current state – the current time – is what we call ‘now’.
No. We call 'now' the moment we call now. That is a tautology. True, we may associate this moment with whatever time is displayed by a clock. But we may also associate it with smelling a fart or hearing a dog bark.
Each successive ‘now’ of the clock contains nothing of the past
Nonsense! It includes almost everything contained in the clock. But, if I am around, it is also likely that 'now' of the clock contains some of the smell of the fart I emitted a minute ago.
because each moment, each unit, is separate and distinct
No it isn't. It is a different matter that for some particular purpose we may assume 'ergodicity' and neglect 'hysteresis'- i.e. path dependence. Still, we understand that if the clock suddenly stops because of some internal fault due to past negligence, it isn't the case that Time has actually stopped.
But this is not how we experience time.
We use theories which greatly simply the state of the world to make useful predictions or to tinker with mechanisms to improve outcomes. This does not mean those simple theories capture everything in reality or experience or whatever.
Instead, we hold these separate moments together in our memory.
But we also hold completely false memories or 'confabulations' in our memory- if we can be bothered.
We unify them. A physical clock measures a succession of moments,
It is incapable of measuring or thinking or seeing anything. It is inanimate. Also, in a gedanken, it is wholly imaginary.'
but only experiencing duration allows us to recognise these seemingly separate moments as a succession.
Only animate beings can 'recognize' stuff. But why bother recognizing separate moments as a succession? Why not recognize something useful- like our farts are growing noisier and more pungent. We need to get to a toilet before we shit ourselves.
Clocks don’t measure time; we do. This is why Bergson believed that clock time presupposes lived time.
Being alive is what provides this presupposition. But it is irrelevant. As far as we know, the Cosmos is empty of life. Yet astronomers predict all sorts of cosmic events. It is clear that something like 'clock-time' is wholly independent of 'lived time'. Maybe, it is 'God's time'. Maybe Time is an illusion or the Universe we live in is a hologram. It was the poverty of Metaphysics which caused it to become not the horizon of Physics, but its basement where those with 'special educational needs' could be relegated to do 'Scientific Method' or 'Sociology of Science'- i.e. complaining about how lots of Scientists are White and have dicks. That's totes triggering to me coz I iz bleck. Also dicks are raping Environment Ma'am which is causing Globe to get very warm under the collar.
Bergson appreciated that we need the exactitude of clock time for natural science.
He also appreciated people keeping appointments with him. Moreover, he was affluent and appreciated the luxuries which industrialization (which was based on clock-time) had brought within his means.
For example, to measure the path that an object in motion follows in space over a specific time interval, we need to be able measure time precisely.
No. It is enough to know where it started and where it stopped. That gives you the measure of distance. You only need to know the time taken so as to calculate speed.
What he objected to was the surreptitious substitution of clock time for duration in our metaphysics of time.
But, by then, when athletes ran races, there were guys with stop-watches or 'chronographs' who measured the time taken and thus calculated their speed. But this was also being done for ships and horses and trains etc. On the other hand, nobody- including Bergson- was measuring some shit he pulled out of his arse which he was surreptitiously trying to substitute for the accepted, highly utile, contemporary notion of Time.
His crucial point in Time and Free Will was that measurement presupposes duration,
Measuring time just involves having something which changes in a predictable manner- e.g. the hands of a watch or the level of sand in an hourglass. This does not 'presuppose duration'.
but duration ultimately eludes measurement.
Nope. Any cretin can claim to measure any shite whatsoever. Indeed, it is even more true to say that 'duration eludes every attempt to not measure it' because guys who claim to experience it admit they stopped doing so in order to get to work on time or to keep an appointment or, more simply, to fall ill and die. That was the big problem with dudes who claimed to have transcended Time and Space. They tended to die of diabetes or heart disease at a somewhat younger age than their siblings who actually worked for a living.
Einstein had a different understanding of time. In his paper ‘On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies’ (1905),
Which is what he got the Nobel for.
he claimed to have defined time entirely in objective terms.
for locally Euclidean frames of reference, it was what it always had been. The problem was with accelerating frames of reference. Einstein was willing to pursue his 'Principle of Relativity' and the consequence of light's speed having an upper limit wherever it led.
Using ‘certain imaginary physical experiments’ as objective procedures or tests, he gave definitions for the concepts of ‘time’, ‘synchronous’, and ‘simultaneous’.
For a specific scientific purpose. He succeeded in it well enough.
He writes:
We have to take into account that all our judgments in which time plays a part
he was speaking as a physicist. Still, it must be said he actually engaged with 'philosophy' because back then there was more metaphysics than physics for the same reason that, as Pascal said, there were more monks than Reason.
are always judgments of simultaneous events. If, for instance, I say: ‘That train arrives here at 7 o’clock,’ I mean something like this: ‘The pointing of the small hand of my watch to 7 and the arrival of the train are simultaneous events.’
Nothing wrong in that? The two events are close enough for practical purposes.
Definitions based on such ‘imaginary physical experiments’
They were independent of them.
would go on to support Einstein’s ideas about relativity.
No. First there was the idea, then there was the exposition which included definitions. That's how mathematics works even if applied to Econ or Physics or whatever. But we can always change the definitions to get rid of 'metaphysical assumptions' to streamline the thing.
For Einstein, the ‘time’ of an event is ‘that which is given simultaneously with the event by a stationary clock located at the place of the event, this clock being synchronous, and indeed synchronous for all time determinations, with a specified stationary clock’. This definition uses simultaneity between a local event and a local clock to define the time of the event. But what counts as so-called local simultaneity depends on the direct experience of someone perceiving both the event and the clock together in one subjective ‘now’.
Not really. This wasn't like Heisenberg's uncertainty principle where there has to be an actual observer. It was enough for Einstein's purposes that there could be a potential observer. Macroscopic objects- e.g. a tree falling in a forest where there is nobody to observe it- obey Newtonian mechanics. It is only at the level of the very very small, where there might be quantum entanglement, that observers matter. But that is because they are part and parcel of an experiment. We might say, if a lumberjack is cutting a tree in a forest, what is observed will be different from what happens if a tree falls over because of some natural cause.
As Bergson argued in the 1922 debate, local simultaneity is always something that is perceived by conscious beings.
No. It may be inferred. Thus a particular astronomical event- e.g. a star going supernova- may be inferred to have occurred billions of years before, to our best knowledge, there was any 'conscious being' in the Universe.
Clocks don’t read themselves.
But, if we observe that a clock is keeping time well enough then we may use it to establish, for example, when to leave the house to get to an appointment on time. It may happen that we arrive simultaneously with the person we are meant to meet because that person too uses a watch or clock for the same purpose.
Moreover, local simultaneity is relative to the perceiver: what is locally simultaneous for an intelligent microbe with a microbe-sized clock, to use Bergson’s example, differs from what is locally simultaneous for a human perceiver with a watch.
Nope. The microbe is still macroscopic- i.e. no quantum weirdness arises. Indeed, some microbes exhibit behavior which can be used to time events just as well as clocks.
This means that Einstein’s definitions are not completely objective – they rely on the perceiver’s subjective experience of time for their meaningfulness, not just on objective procedures or tests.
A thing is objective if, for any given purpose, everybody agrees about what happened, how it happened, how long it happened for, etc. Subjectively, they may differ about how it made them feel. One person may be excited but another bored by the proceeding. A third may be preoccupied with some other matter and thus may not notice various details.
Only a conscious observer can establish simultaneity between an event and a clock.
Anyone can establish anything they like. Equally, there is nothing stopping anyone from saying 'Clocks read the Zeitgeist as the imbrication of the Social Text with White Dicks which are totes evil. Did you know Einstein had a White Dick? This proves that 'Space-Time' was invented by Capitalists to extract 'surplus value' from trillions of starving Netan-Yahoos employed by Joe Biden in sweat shops in Gaza. That's what Hamas is protesting about- right?'
To read a clock, you already have to know what time is,
only in the sense that to read the above sentence you already have to be complicit in Joe Biden's relentless sodomization of trillions of Netan-Yahoos because
and that’s something no clock can tell you.
because it has been beaten and sodomized by Neo-Liberalism and thus has lost the will to talk to you about anything.
Bergson accepted that, for physicists to measure exact moments (ie, to precisely identify the time of an event), they need to simplify the continuous experience of time and abstract away from the concept of duration.
No. They just need a consistent and accurate enough method. There is no such thing as 'the exact moment'. Currently, we have the 'attosecond' and the picosecond' and the zeptosecond. But even that last is many orders of magnitude bigger than the Planck interval.
He did not object to these kinds of abstractions. What he did object to was surreptitiously substituting the instant (an infinitesimal temporal interval whose passage is instantaneous) for duration in the metaphysics of time.
Einstein was doing physics, not metaphysics. The question is whether there is any duration 'beyond# Physics or whether it is merely 'psychology' or 'poetry' or just plain nonsense.
He was objecting to the way Einstein had forgotten that the concept of the instant is meaningful only as an abstract simplification of our concrete experience of duration.
Not in mathematical physics which is merely a way of representing a Structural Causal Model of physical phenomena. In any case, there is no 'concrete experience of duration' or, indeed, any 'concrte experience' of 'experience'. Such notions are surreptitiously smuggled into the rectum of those trillions of Netan-Yahoos which Neo-Liberalism is occultly orchestrating as the catachresis of the phenomenology of the ipseity of intentionality as scotomized by the Bergsonian de(con)struction of White Dicks which are totes evil.
Bergson wanted Einstein to see that the intuitive or experiential concept of simultaneity,
which doesn't exist. Nobody has ever experienced any such thing. It is likely that there is some very small delay between seeing something and actually seeing it.
which is based on our lived experience of duration, lay buried in the definition supporting the theory of relativity.
Dergson agreed with Bergson that Einstein had done some surreptitious shit, but Dergson believed that this had nothing to do with some bogus notion of 'duration'. Rather it was Dergson's own notion of 'isness' which Einstein had neglected to highlight. The fact is, our lived experience as a thing which is is what gives rise to 'isness'. Sadly, due to Neo-Liberalism is very evil, it also gives rise to business.
He was calling attention to an amnesia of experience in mathematical physics.
Not to mention its totally forgetting not just Dergson's 'isness' but also Gergson's 'notness'. Indeed, there are many many books to be written about how Einstein and Heisenberg and Steven Hawkings and all them other clever Scientists have surreptitiously done naughty shit with the result that all sorts of shitheads have not been recognized as real smart.
These objections had little impact on Einstein, either in 1922 or the years after. For the physicist, the final test was simply whether his theory worked. Understanding the lived experience of time would not have helped him in his theory, which is why he deemed duration irrelevant – and there is nothing wrong with that. His real mistake was not to omit duration from special relativity theory. Rather, it was his view that physical time, defined through the measurements of clocks, was more fundamental than lived time.
Yet, since Biology- so far as we know- is supervenient on Physics- i.e. first there is a material universe and then, much later, there is conscious life- it follows that lived time aint fundamental at all. Indeed, by the 1930's smart young peeps in France wouldn't have been caught dead experiencing anything as old fashioned as Bergsonian duration.
At this point you might object: isn’t duration just something happening inside our heads?
Not my head. I don't believe in duration anymore than I believe in 'mindfulness' or 'satori' or
Isn’t our experience of time passing a cognitive illusion arising from measurable activity in our brains?
Not to us. Otherwise it wouldn't be an illusion.
For example, whether two lights are judged as simultaneous or sequential, or as a single moving light, depends not just on the amount of time between them but also on how
drunk you are
they relate to the brain activity of the perceiver. So why can’t we say that our experience of duration is just a result of our brains smoothing over fine, granular details so that time seems to flow?
We can say that- unless we are too drunk. But then, we can say anything at all. It just mayn't be very useful is all.
This takes us to Einstein’s final rebuttal from the evening in 1922: ‘[T]here is no time of the philosopher; there is only a psychological time different from the time of the physicist.’
We may well that for 'true' philosophy- which is 'beyond' Physics- there is no Space or Time. There's just God or Being or something of that sort.
What he meant by ‘psychological time’ was that our internal experience of time could be aligned with external clock time,
which was clearly true of guys who carried pocket-watches and who kept appointments and turned up at the right time for lectures.
and that this could allow experts to meaningfully describe our perceptions.
'Describing perceptions' is psychology.
This idea of a psychological time, however, does not come to grips with the more fundamental philosophical issue Bergson raised: duration is not the same as psychological time.
It is shite he pulled out of his arsehole.
When neuroscientists research time perception, they apply clock time to the neural correlates, behavioural indications and verbal reports of lived time. This allows them to learn valuable information about how human brains parse time. It also allows them to produce third-person descriptions that relate consciousness to the brain as a physical system. But these third-person descriptions do not suffice to explain the first-person experience of duration. There remains an unexplained gap between brains and consciousness.
Because we don't know how to produce either brains or consciousness. There are plenty of 'unexplained gaps' of all sorts. Some are worth filling. It would be cool to know how to create artificial brains or endow an AI with consciousness. But it is not worth filling in an explanatory gap between nonsense and nonsense. This is not because it is difficult. On the contrary, it is the easiest thing in the world to fill nonsensical gaps with nonsense.
Duration helps us make sense of this gap.
If so, it would explain why our brains aren't conscious when we are asleep. But it has no such power.
To produce their descriptions, neuroscientists rely on their own first-person experience of time.
No. They rely on observations and protocols. It doesn't matter if their first-person experience is that what they are doing is boring or exciting or unlikely to qualify for grant-renewal.
They do this whenever they read clocks and measure time intervals in the laboratory;
They are welcome to delegate such menial tasks.
whenever they apply clock time to observable biological and behavioural processes;
or when they consult their watch to get to appointments on time. 'Duration', being useless, is not something anybody bothers with.
and whenever they infer back to aspects of duration that they can extract and stabilise as objects of thought and attention. In fact, all their work takes place inside lived time.
Or inside Dergson's 'isness'.
Yet, they can never step outside of this experience and exhaustively explain it.
Nor can anybody step outside Neo-Liberalism so as to explain why Biden is sodomizing trillions of Netan-Yahoos. There is an explanatory gap here which can only be explained by the isness of the duration of the ipseity of the alterity of the dialectics of the White Dicks which are totes raping the Environment
Duration is conveniently ignored.
Even more conveniently, Biden's anal rape of trillions of Netan-Yahoos is ignored or surreptitiously replaced by a narrative about how Neo-Liberalism has submitted to Gay Conversion therapy and accepted Christ as its Personal Lord God and Savior.
For these reasons, it’s wrong to think that Bergson’s idea of duration can be assimilated into the idea of psychological time in the sense that Einstein meant.
They are too useless.
Measuring clock time, whether in physics or psychology, is always downstream from the lived experience of duration.
not to mention lived experience of isness or the false consciousness engendered by Capitalism and Patriarchy such that nobody notices Joe Biden incessantly sodomizing trillions of Netan-Yahoos.
Einstein did not understand this point.
Worse yet, he did not understand that Neo-Liberalism surreptitiously sodomizes trillions of Netan-Yahoos.
Bergson thought that a careful philosophical analysis of relativity theory would show that the intelligibility of measurable clock time was inextricable from lived time – this was the task he set for himself in Duration and Simultaneity.
In the Quantum realm, Schrodinger's cat or 'Wigner's friend' might have salience. But that had to do with observation, not duration or simultaneity. Even Wheeler type 'many-fingered time' (a formalism where a different time variable is associated with each point in space, or with each physical degree of freedom) is about each dude having his own watch-time not 'duration'.
Unfortunately, his message got lost in the debate because of a mistake made in his treatment of special relativity. This mistake is the reason why so many believed that Einstein ‘won’ their debate.
Bergson stopped republishing his book.
It is part of the reason why Bergson’s theories ‘wilted on the vine’ throughout the 20th century.
What can be done with them? Might 'Djikstra concurrency' be involved? On the other hand, what if Consciousness is a 'quantum phenomena' with an 'entanglement' outside this Holographic Universe? Indeed, for all we know, our own consciousness might be limited by this body or appearance of a world-line. The problem here is that it is very very mathsy dudes, not philosophers, who are developing these ideas. Guys who went in for the Humanities can't begin to fathom. The plain fact is, the Universe may well be weirder than we can imagine.
The crux of Bergson’s misunderstanding lay in his struggle to reconcile his own philosophical views with the empirical realities of Einstein’s theory. In Time and Free Will, Bergson had argued that there is one universal time of duration in which all consciousness participates.
Which was fine if there is an aether pervading everything. Also there might be an astral plane and telepathy and ghosts and cool stuff like that.
Confronted by Einstein’s ideas, he sought to reconcile his belief in a singular and universal duration with the plural times of special relativity theory.
That 'plurality' arises when different frames of reference are accelerated relative to each other.
The way he did this was to argue that the plurality of times should be regarded as strictly mathematical rather than physically real.
In other words, it was an artefact of the theory which would not be empirically confirmed. Einstein himself, and plenty of others, hoped something similar would be the case for non-locality in QMT.
Bergson focused on the phenomenon of time dilation. Time dilation is the difference in elapsed time as measured by two clocks due to their relative velocities. The faster clock is the one at rest and the slower one is in motion. But there is no absolute state of rest in relativity theory. Any observer can regard themselves as being at rest while regarding others (ie, other reference frames) as being in motion. That is why time dilation always affects the clock of the ‘other’ observer regarded as being in motion relative to the one taken as being at rest.
Special relativity explains why events which are simultaneously can appear in a different sequences to different observers travelling at different velocities relative to that frame of reference.
Bergson reasoned that, since there is no absolute frame of reference
there is one where there is certain events are simultaneous.
in special relativity theory (and the reference frames do not undergo acceleration), the observers’ situations are symmetrical and interchangeable, and therefore the plurality of times should be regarded as just mathematical, and not physically real.
What would be physically real is the different velocities of different frames of reference- e.g. planets, spaceships etc.
And if the many times were regarded as strictly mathematical, then they could be made consistent with the one real time of duration. This is where Bergson went astray.
He appeared to be defending common sense. I think there would have been much sympathy for him at the time.
He focused on the so-called twin paradox in which one twin remains on Earth while his brother travels to outer space in a rocket ship at near the speed of light and then returns to Earth at the same speed. According to special relativity theory, when they compare their clocks (which were identically constructed and synchronised at the start of the journey), more time has elapsed for the twin who stayed on Earth, and he appears to have aged more than his brother. Bergson rejected this idea. He argued that, as long as the twins’ situations were strictly identical and there was no acceleration, the returning clock would show no slowing on its arrival back on Earth. In his view, the clock times were not physically real. They were just mathematical abstractions. But Bergson was proven wrong. Time dilation, predicted by special relativity, was experimentally confirmed as a physical phenomenon in 1971.
This is the crux of the matter. Bergson, like Kant, had endorsed a particular physical theory which was falsified. Because they did it for reasons fundamental to their philosophy, their respective philosophies took a hard knock. Still, some aspect of their philosophy might not be beyond repair for a smart enough physicist- if only with respect to open problems.
Bergson had argued for two things, one incorrect and the other correct. It was a mistake to claim that time dilation is not physically real, but he was right in claiming that no one experiences the time dilation of their own reference frame.
No. Everybody in the same reference frame experiences exactly the same time dilation.
Time dilation exists only relative to another reference frame and can be seen only from the outside.
It is experienced inside.
This means that time dilation is not a measure of anyone’s time from within their own reference frame.
No. It is a measure of everyone's time unless their frame of reference is travelling at the speed of light. If you've been around since the Big Bang and are still the same age that is the speed at which your frame of reference is travelling. Thus, if you notice that universes are born and die while your fingernails and hair scarcely grow, you know you have infinite time dilation.
A reference frame is an abstraction, not a concrete domain of experience,
Nope. Earth is a reference frame as is a space-ship. Both are wholly concrete.
and it can be specified only relative to another reference frame.
Nope. The same would be true if there was only one object in the Universe. The good news is, if you are travelling at the speed of light, you get somewhere more interesting in the blink of an eye.
And so, Bergson was right to argue that each twin experiences only his own time.
But, that's no a very interesting or informative argument. Everybody only farts their own farts. Big whoop.
This point, however, like many others, was ignored or overlooked by Einstein.
A person who can jump from one asteroid or space ship to another which was moving at a different velocity would soon be able to work out that they had experienced different rates of time dilation
Bergson insisted that the travelling twin would not feel time slowing down.
If he knew anything about astrophysics, he would know this was happening.
To notice time dilation, he would have to stand outside his reference frame and compare clock readings with the twin who remained on Earth.
He could just look at the stars and notice they were getting closer really really fast. Also, cosmic processes- e.g. the formation of galaxies or solar systems- had speeded up. Thus, he must be experiencing time dilation. He could then deduce Einstein's theory without the need for gedanken. Observation would itself be the 'crucial experiment' for which Einstein had to wait till 1919.
Without this comparison, the dilation would not be noticed because he would not have felt time slowing down. Some might argue that Bergson overlooked the dependence of experience on brain activity, which also slows down in the travelling twin, meaning that the traveller’s stream of consciousness would elapse more slowly relative to that of his brother.
That is irrelevant. One twin sees astrophysical processes occurring very quickly and thus know his time had speeded up because of the very high velocity at which he was travelling. The other might have to wait till a suitable 'crucial experiment' or observation could be made.
Nevertheless, this slowing would not be noticed by the traveller.
Unless he looks out of the window.
The slower rate of passage exists, or is what it is, only relative to the other reference frame on Earth. So it makes no sense to say that the travelling twin experiences a different time from that of his twin.
The speed of time is relative to various observable 'cosmic' clocks- e.g. galaxy formation or the life-cycle of different types of stars.
They both experience duration, though their individual experiences of duration are particular to them. In Bergson’s words, a twin who experiences a different time is a ‘phantom’, a ‘mental view’ or an ‘image’, appearing to the perspective of the twin on Earth.
But 'phantoms', to our best knowledge, are not 'compossible' with our physical reality. Einstein's twins are. Bergson was wrong. Of course, if it turns out that all our consciousnesses participate in some super-conscious and this universe is an illusion, then Bergson and Madam Blavatsky and various Wizards and Warlocks are proved right.
Bergson thought that if a measurement of time lost its connection to duration, it wasn’t really a measurement of time.
To be consistent, he could have embraced some mystical school of thought which denies the reality of the Universe.
And this is what he believed had happened to the different times of special relativity. For Bergson, there was no duration in Einstein’s conception of time dilation. Time dilation shows up only as a difference between clock readings, or a difference between the worldlines (the unique paths of objects through spacetime) computed by a physicist. But no one experiences a different rate of passage.
No. We do in fact feel things like 'days are getting shorter- Winter is coming' or 'the trees are rushing past me faster and faster, the train I am on must be travelling fast'. Equally, if we notice that plants are growing quickly or that rain isn't falling to the ground we will know that Time has either speeded up or slowed down. 'Duration' was some stupid shit and stupid shithead pulled out of his arse. People back then were looking for a pseudo-Scientific substitute for God and Spirituality.
Such difference can’t be experienced directly because as soon as you mentally transpose yourself to the reference frame where time dilation is happening, time dilation disappears and reappears in your original reference frame. Here, Bergson was correct.
No. He was wrong. From the examples I have given, it is obvious that if we experienced a large enough change in time dilation for any reason we would know that our time has speeded up or slowed down. Other frames of reference don't matter.
In the century since 1922, the conceptual distance between the German physicist
He was Swiss. He made rather a point of this.
and the French philosopher seems to have shrunk. It turns out that there is a way to reconcile Bergson’s ideas with special relativity theory – though none of the parties to the debate seems to have noticed it. As the philosopher Steven Savitt has suggested, duration can be understood as the passage of local or ‘proper time’ – the time measured by a clock following along with an object’s worldline within a reference frame (eg, following a twin leaving Earth at the speed of light). In other words, proper time can be understood as measurable clock time based on the duration proper to an observer within a reference frame.
Which is just the ordinary meaning of duration as time elapsed according to the clock. It was not Bergson's idea to any greater extent that it was the idea of his postman or waiter.
But this reconciliation implies that duration is many, not one, which is something Bergson wanted to avoid because he believed duration was singular and universal. According to this reconciliation, the passage of time is always given from some experienced perspective in the Universe and never from outside it.
In which case, there is no passage of time if there is no 'experienced perspective'. Currently we don't think intelligent life could have evolved in the first few billion years of the Universe's existence- in which case it could not have existed for those billions of years. Indeed, Time would only start once there were people who started building clocks and calendars. Why not just say 'God created the World on the 23rd of October 4004 BC?
Duration is many because there is no upper bound on the number of possible perspectives and associated worldlines.
Is this Wheeler's 'many-fingered Time'?
Every person, every insect, every rock – every thing – has its own worldline. And each of these worldlines reflects a unique passage through time and possible experience of duration. Better still, each worldline represents the distillation of a unique durational flow, since a worldline is a mathematical abstraction, whereas passage (the experience of time passing) is concrete. The Universe is teeming with times and potential durational rhythms. This means that there is no temporal bird’s-eye view of the Universe that flies above and beholds all these times as one.
But if there is no Life, there is no passage of Time. I suppose one could say 'all things have souls. Rocks have very slow souls'. The problem is that rocks could only exist long after the Big Bang.
Through these teeming times and durational rhythms, we can see how the so-called block-universe theory, which has been thought to follow from relativity theory, goes astray.
The block can contain world-lines of any type.
According to this theory, the passage of time is an illusion because the past, present and future all constitute a single block in four-dimensional spacetime.
Nothing wrong in believing in God or Magic or anything else. But we expect scientists to do useful stuff which might result in better tech.
But it is impossible to conceive of the contemporaneous reality of all the events in such a block universe without adopting a bird’s-eye (or God’s-eye) perspective external to the Universe and the passage of nature.
It is perfectly possible to conceive of anything at all as anything at all. It just may not be particularly useful.
Reconciling Bergson and Einstein shows us that there cannot be such a temporal bird’s-eye view of the Universe.
Sadly, it would also show that the Universe was created quite recently but, for some mysterious reason, it looks billions of year old. This is like the theory that God created Adam and Eve some six thousand years ago but, for some reason, buried the bones of dinosaurs so as to suggest that complex life-forms evolved over hundreds of millions of years.
There is no way of seeing outside and above the disparate paths through spacetime and the different rhythms of duration.
This same stupid way of seeing could also see outside and above anything at all.
And yet, despite these proliferating times, there is a sense
which is nonsense
in which duration is also singular and universal, as Bergson thought. Measured time always presupposes the same ineliminable concrete fact of duration or temporal passage.
It does not presuppose anything at all. It is merely an operation carried out for some utilitarian purpose.
Measurable times and durational rhythms may differ,
by stipulation of a stupid or useless sort
but the experience of time passing is ultimately immeasurable
only by stipulation. I can use my dick to measure anything at all- including levels of boredom or the size of the Federal deficit. The fact that a system of measurement is shit does not mean it isn't a system of measurement.
and resists explanation in terms of anything else.
No it doesn't. Try it for yourself. Explain it in terms of the size of your own dick. You will meet no resistance whatsoever. It is when you try to measure things with some big bloke's dick that you meet not just resistance but significant levels of violence.
As the mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead argued around the same time as Bergson, we can single out the characteristic of nature’s passage and describe its relation to other characteristics of nature but we cannot explain it by deriving it from something else – such as the temporal units of a clock.
D'uh! To explain a thing, you need a Structural Causal Model of that thing. The time-evolution of one thing isn't explained by the time-evolution of another think unless they are causally linked.
When we measure seconds, hours or other temporal intervals, we measure elapsed time, which depends on the experience of duration.
No. When we measure the time between the Big Bang and the creation of the earth (which had to weight till there were enough heavy elements in our galaxy) we don't depend our experience of duration. This is because nobody has lived for billions of years.
But, as we know, duration cannot be fully understood by measuring these intervals.
We know no such thing.
Since clock time presupposes the experience of duration, to claim that duration and the ‘now’ are an illusion, as Einstein did, cuts out the ground on which science must stand.
And yet Science stands while this nutter is crawling around on all fours eating his own poop.
Investigating that ground and gaining cognitive insight into it are the remit of philosophy, which transcends science.
But is itself transcended by coprophagy.
There is a time of the physicist and a time of the psychologist. But there is also a time of the philosopher, which lies beneath both, and which Einstein failed to grasp.
He also refused to eat his own shit. He truly wasn't a philosopher.
The debate that began on the evening of 6 April 1922 and expanded through the 20th century represents a missed opportunity for moving our scientific worldview
this nutter doesn't have a scientific worldview. He teaches shit to shitheads.
beyond its blind spot – its inability to see that lived experience is the permanent, necessary wellspring of science, including abstract theories in mathematical physics.
Nobody has lived experience of the billions of years our Universe has existed. Currently, we think being alive and conscious is important to do good science. But we may be wrong. A.I's might do better even if they never become self-conscious.
In retrospect, we can see that the debate was an unfortunate misunderstanding.
On Bergson's part- sure.
Bergson’s and Einstein’s ideas are more aligned than either realised during their lifetimes.
They may be very greatly aligned in the mind of a shithead.
By combining their insights, we gain an understanding of something fundamental. All things, us included, embody different durations as they move through the Universe.
Only in the sense that all things embody different Joe Bidens as they move through the Multiverse sodomizing trillions of Netan-Yahoos. My point is, anybody can talk nonsense.
There is no one time.
Otherwise it would not be possible for all things to embody different Joe Bidens sodomizing trillions of Netan-Yahoos.
Through his attempts to show Einstein a hidden world of duration passing beneath special relativity,
not to mention a hidden world of Joe Bidens buggering Netan-Yahoos.
Bergson continues to remind us
in the same sense that he reminds Joe Bidens to bugger Netan-Yahoos
of something forgotten in our scientific worldview:
Biden is a randy bugger and all things are that randy bugger which is why trillions of Netan-Yahoos are being sodomized all over the universe.
experience is the ineliminable source of physics.
Yet, physicists have discovered things- e.g. Black Holes- of which no life-form could have lived experience. Empirical evidence is something quite different from lived experience. It may be gathered by unmanned space-probes or Artificial Intelligences. Bergson is less relevant than ever. As for Einstein, though his theory may be superseded, like Newton, he will remain an intellectual giant. He did take an interest in philosophy as a young man and, sixty years ago, there were one or two 'philosophers' who were capable of holding their own in dialogue with STEM subject mavens. Indeed, Rockefeller University recruited some seemingly smart philosophers in the early Seventies. But they wouldn't talk to each other, let alone to any of the Scientists so they were let go. Since then, Philosophy's decline has been steep.
Bergson retains some minor importance for poets like me for purely historical reasons. But he really wasn't a particularly smart guy.
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