I am glad i came across your video for me trying to understand Bergson on my own seems impossible. I will watch more of Bergson the way you present him. I first came across him by way of Stephen Robbins on youtube. Robbins was very kind to reply to my e mails on his videos. I will be 74 years old next month but still have a curious mind. I have studied Buddha's teachings for the majority of my life as truck driver and ending my work career as a Railroad Conductor 14 years ago. Thank you so much for sharing your understanding and the gift of expressing it out loud.
I've got a ton of Bergson books and the BEST, thus far, is an old one by Alexander Gunn. It is easier to follow than most. I recommend starting there but RU-vid is also excellent.
THANK YOU for this clarification, I'm reading Bergonism and I was stuck on the damn cone part. What the hell does he mean by 'rotating' as supplement to 'contraction'? How am I supposed to understand this 'rotating'?
This is a really difficult question which Deleuze discussed without, imo, making it much clearer. I think that it has a lot to do with the different ways that a nebula of memories can influence our consciousness, not just by becoming memory images. Rotational changes the multitude by reorienting and organizing them… elsewhere he calls is a turn if the kaleidoscope. The contraction change has more to do with compressing complex elements into smaller simpler symbolic or habitual units.
Thanks for your explanations! So, did I understand correctly that consciousness is a plane of memory, that tries to connect to the present? Why does Bergson say that memory is the bridge between matter and spirit? And what exactly is the panpsycism, Bergson means? What is the spirit? And The elan vital is time, right? In which way is the plane holografic? Is the hologram memories then? Seems like the more I try to understand Bergson, the less I do understand 😅
Yea consciousness is a plane of memory, contracting the past into a concentration of memories, configuring them in a way that makes them fit together so that they make sense of the present and, normally, to afford it with a path toward something useful
Pure Memory can not reside (or 'be spaced') in the brain coz that would spatialize the temporal. Any residence, be it in the brain or in some other etheric realm, would mean it is spatializable. Bergson is claiming pure memory exists temporally and temporally only (unlike habit-memory, or memory-images present to fill up the gaps in perceptions). This grounding on absolute temporality supports his thesis that the past and future still exist, albeit virtually, that means he is not looking at the passage of time as a timeline but as a duration, since a timeline is again spatialized time (so is calendar time for example). Thus, pure memory, by being what is, can not be spaced inside the brain or in a computer (as those uploading consciousness nerds and the brain-in-a-vat nerd like to think). Same goes for the spirit-body problem that Bergson tackles, as it would be incorrect to think of the spirit being spaced inside the shell of a body, since he frames the spirit to be more akin to pure memory. In the same vein, he is not a fan of representationalism. The very word, 'represent' has the sense of re presenting, that it is happening THERE in the world and my consciousness is presenting it HERE again in its little made up world inside my brain for my body to act on it, making it a spatialized claim apropos representation as the bringing the there to a here. In fact, the logic of representation, even representation of ideas not conscious to me -- such as in theoretically knowing of the existence of something (e.g., when am conscious of the existence of atoms even though I can never sense it like I can with an apple in front of my eyes) -- still has this the world there now brought here in the symbolic domain of math and science to presented here so we can manipulate symbols and so on. Re-presentation == move the presence of there in the world to here in my world == a transportation in space between worlds.
Also, would have been nice for viewers, if you wanted to mention that The Image is not of the world, rather the world is a world (read: multiplicity) of images. Its not that the real world is out THERE and we HERE are perceiving it via images (as the materialists would claim), for that would suffer from a logic of representation (there to here movement), nor that we HERE are fabricating the world out there (as the idealists would claim). Once you drop representation, it allows you to drop having to chose between either camps of idealism and materialism, and as a bonus you get the concept of time that is not tampered by sprinkles of spatialization. Although he does say something weird in Pg159 of 'Matter and Memory' (the Dover Philosophical Classics edition), "For the images can never be anything but things, and thought is a movement" -- Is he trying to say that images are not in flux, but it is thought that puts the flux in things-as-images?
As far as I understand, we see the images because of our mode of perception, so that we can act on them. If we only saw processes, we could not really act.
I'm not sure you can say that for Bergson "the future still exists, albeit virtually ". For him reality is continuous generation of novelty. While you can say the past continues to exist in memory, my understanding is that for Bergson the future is completely open and yet to come, so to speak. That is also why it is also unpredictable. What can be predicted are only the regularities that can be extracted from the whole of reality (those regularities on which science focuses), regularities that relate only to repeatable, quantifiable, measurable subsets of reality, but not to reality as a whole (and not to living systems, which share the same unpredictability of the whole).
The piano doesn’t play the whole way thru. Also, it’s putting the ideas that I’m talking about to work in real time; can you focus your attention to not be distracted by the noise ?
I found the music alternatingly illustrative and annoying, but it's RU-vid, not university. You can get a pdf and use the read aloud feature, or you can accept the creator's choices. The music made me think about the way vibrations and rhythms are an interface between time and space, which seems to be relevant here.
