Bergson Stirring a Cup of Coffee by Stephen E. Robbins

 

Stephen E. Robbins' interpretation of Bergson uses the concept of the holograph to delineate how the brain modulates the vastness of Memory.  Bergson himself writes of the brain as being like a valve.  Everything that you have ever experienced is out there laid down in temporal order compressed into the single plane of duration.  Nothing is missing but not everything is to the point so the brain as an organ of action extracts that which is germane.   The vastness of the totality of experience could not be stored in the brain.  Events are stored in their fullness in memory and it is only on analysis that we can separate out all the physics.  An example that Robbins gives is the stirring of a cup of coffee as an experimental event that is such that if something untoward or unexpected were to happen we would immediately spot it.  So we therefore have it all in memory otherwise it would pass unnoticed.   Robbins throws all his esoteric, to me, knowledge of physics at this event.  Adiabatics, vectors, rate of turn etc, etc.  But apply to the man himself:

Robbins

The Memory Hole

How can we forget anything that we have paid attention to? Is that making an event in consciousness that has occurred dependent on personal omission? In the view of Bergson everything remains 'out there' requiring only retrieval by a focussing of the brain. Using a holographic analogy Dr. Stephen Robbins writes of a reconstructive wave which requires a similar wavelength to the original conscious event. The idea of the brain scanning the contents of the brain itself is rejected. The loss of memory due to brain damage is not due to the destruction of storage there because in time the reconstructive aspect of brain function can pass to another area of the brain. Stroke patients can recover language and memory returns.

In his simpler formulation of the brain's function Bergson likens it to a reducing valve. We screen out the dross and retain only the highlights so even the events we think we are attending to are chopped up. Forgetting is a good thing, the totality of the flow of events would overwhelm us. Living in an extended intuition of duration requires a special environment like a monastery or an ashram or a well appointed cave.

The basis of Bergson's Holographic intuition

The whole difficulty of the problem that occupies us comes from the fact that we imagine perception to be a kind of photographic view of things, taken from a fixed point by that special apparatus which is called an organ of perception - a photograph which would then be developed in the brain-matter by some unknown chemical and psychical process of elaboration. But is it not obvious that the photograph, if photograph there be, is already taken, already developed in the very heart of things and at all the points of space? No metaphysics, no physics even, can escape this conclusion. Build up the universe with atoms each of them is subject to the action, variable in quantity and quality according to the distance, exerted on it by all material atoms. Bring in Faraday's centres of force: the lines of force emitted in every direction from every centre bring, to bear upon each the influences of the whole material world. Call up the Leibnizian monads: each is (pg 32) the mirror of the universe. All philosophers, then, agree on this point. Only if when we consider any other given place in the universe we can regard the action of all matter as passing through it without resistance and without loss, and the photograph of the whole as translucent: here there is wanting behind the plate the black screen on which the image could be shown. Our ‘zones of indetermination' play in some sort the part of the screen. They add nothing to what is there; they effect merely this: that the real action passes through, the virtual action remains.

(from Matter and Memory pub.1896)

Dr. Stephen Earle Robbins and Bergson's Holography

Dr. Stephen Earle Robbins has produced an excellent series of youtube lectures on Bergson’s theories ie. notes and bullet points with voice over.
holography
They are adjunctive to his series of papers
papers on Bergson
on the holographic reconstructive wave theory of awareness which eliminates the need to solve the ‘storage’ problem in the brain and the conundrums generated by the classic metaphysic of an external world. By developing the difficult and counter-intuitive concepts more slowly than would be possible in a written paper and adding the enhanced instructive effect of voice plus diagrams and headings one understands more easily rather profound concepts.

Having been struggling with Bergson for years the work of Dr. Robbins is the first I’ve come across that has an understanding of this uncannily neglected philosopher.