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.  


 

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