Saturday 18 February 2023

Bergson's Qualia

So creeping alone the vast noetic continent of Matter and Mind accompanied by that man in the bowler hat whose piercing dark eyes have looked in things and felt the enigmatic gaze of silent objects.  Are they emanating their own qualia. Joel Dolbeault thinks so:



From the point of view of contemporary panpsychism, one can ask the following question: for Bergson, does matter have perceptions in the phenomenal sense of the term? The answer is positive because, for Bergson, qualia (i.e., phenomenal qualities) have an objective reality. By contracting the elementary material vibrations, the human perception does not make the qualia, appear, it only intensifies them (Bergson 1991, 182-183, 202-204). (Bergsoniana: https://journals.openedition.org/bergsoniana/884 )


Can this be right going by the normal acceptation of qualia as how things feel to us?  It seems an impoverishment of the personal and moreover contrary to cher maitre’s sense of memory as a personal hue that objects reflect even though we might think of our perceptions as entirely objective.  We live our own worlds and that is another name for soul.  What pops out or what is salient tells us what we are: for him who wears shoes the world is covered in leather.  


 

Friday 10 February 2023

Bergson Madness

 This way lies madness I say to myself.  After poring over Matter and Memory for years you have finally begun to see some light dawn .Themes emerge from the fog and shapes at last settle into an intelligible form.  The next point of departure is to feel that nobody really understands Bergson but your own self.  Nevertheless there are false steps or a characteristic misprision that arises when there is interference from an overweening conceptual schema so established that it ignores Bergson’s order of business. As I wrote previously the aporiai generated by the internal/external; idealist/materialist were considered insuperable by him.  The alternative then is to move away from a subject/object schema to a plenum of consciousness in which the two are merged.  It is the interaction that is being conscious in a state of pure perception.  As the Vipassana Buddhist meditation instead of saying ‘I hear a song’ say ‘singing is singing’.  Of course this is a limit experience, memory that is linked to a point of view and a history particularises the personal.  Memory and perception work together but the fundamental ontology is of an immediacy that lays down experiences as they happen and is a permanent record.  Forgetting is then a device that cuts out of this plenum what is needed to act efficiently.    Its on a what we need to remember basis.  


What then of interpretations that stay within the rubric of internal/external, qualia and the like conundrums generated by the standard epistemology?  Whatever of my rough hewn farrago they are certainly straying from the master’s order of business.  


I rise from my couch and resume a vacant and pensive mood.  


Saturday 4 February 2023

Bergson as a Dualist

 

In the introduction to ‘Matter and Memory’ Bergson states that his philosophy is dualist but having read his rejection of both Materialism and Idealism we are inclined to say ‘yes Henri, it’s dualism but not as we know it.  He starts from the common apprehension of a primal division between subject and object.  It’s perfectly natural and inevitable but the aporiai that it spawns sends him in a new direction.  Let’s take it that there is an interaction between a sensitive actor, the subject, and the world of sensible inputs. It is this interaction which is experienced as a plenum but not from the vantage point of a subject.  The natural tendency to place this experience in the subject is what the Advaitins call adhyasa or superimposition.  In Bergson’s panpsychist analysis memory pervades this interaction and lays it up never to be forgotten.  Now the perception which is a function of the superimposed subject has its images in a direct way in contrast to memory which is non-temporal but can insert its input.  This I think is the source of the notion of reality as the ‘aggregate of images’.  There is a pooling together from both sources.

I have previously mentioned  my intuition of the metaphor of mirror and images as being a source for his philosophy.  Metaphors instead of being merely an illustration of a point to be clarified can themselves be a higher realisation which hovers on the edge of the inexpressible.

More anon on that.