Stardust and Memories

Bergson and Einstein: Time and Consciousness

The great debate between Bergson and Einstein centered on the question: What is the relationship between duration and consciousness? The soul is transcendental to time--our sense of self remains and persists even as the measurement of its duration is ticked off in hours and minutes. But more to the point, our sense of self is stable--we remain the same self, even while the situation around us changes. The entire material cosmos is in constant flux, constantly changing, readapting and evolving. And yet, even while my own body changes before me--I transit the stages of birth, growth, reproduction, infirmity and old age--I myself remain. The self remains, transcending even the change of death, according to the ancient wisdom tradition of Bhagavad-gita. My personal consciousness persists; it continues on even after death--in defiance of clocks.

Consciousness is a hard problem since it defies the laws of nature. It cannot be created or destroyed. Nor can it be studied through ratiocination. But when even time eludes analysis, how can we expect to understand the nature of the human soul through mundane measurements? Since we refuse to consider the larger dimensions of time, we must reduce time to “stuff,” a mere aspect of space.

We dispose of the time problem by viewing time as a substance that can be sliced and diced and measured in segments: “take 2 aspirin 3 times a day”, or “the train arrives at 5:00.” “Time is money.” Time is merely a convenient way of cutting action into segments, like a film strip. Like the rising agent in bread, time is a convenient element to add to the “mix” of space to give it an extra dimension.

We study space to determine its “nature” and function. Time is merely a measurement of objects in motion. How long does it take an object to get from here to there? If a pitcher throws a baseball at ninety miles an hour, how long does it take the ball to reach the plate?But by considering time as just another element in the mix, by applying to time the same conclusions that we reached with regard to space and matter, we miss its metaphysical element. What about “lived” time? The duration of consciousness is not merely another aspect of matter; it is felt as memory. Memory is the proof of the duration of consciousness. If there were no memory we would have no true understanding of consciousness. But memory is simply another metaphysical construct with no significance, according to the physicalists. It is a “psychological” problem, not a scientific one. The attempt to see time as just another element of matter fails when we are forced to consider the function of memory. Memory demonstrates the duration of consciousness. For this reason, both memory and duration must not be taken into consideration by physicalists. As Einstein put it “The time of the philosophers does not exist.”

But is “Time” merely an aspect of matter? How matter moves through time is the subject of physics, but physics refuses to define time. Space is defined as elemental matter moving through 3 dimensions. We think we know something about the movement of elemental matter. But since particles function also as waves at the subatomic level “matter” may be seen in terms of solid particles or waves of energy. Matter after Einstein and Niels Bohr is more elusive than we once believed. And if the “uncertainty principle” applies to matter at the subatomic level, what of time? What is time? We’re not at liberty to say.

Duration cannot be defined. We can measure duration in units, borrowing a system of measurement from the language of space and matter. We measure matter in terms of volume and weight, height and length in kilos and liters or pounds and ounces. We apply the same terms to time and measure time in hours and minutes. But what is it we are measuring? You can touch matter; its measurement is purely physical. There is nothing metaphysical about a liter of water. But what is an hour of time?

Henri Bergson debated Einstein on just this point. The doubts he raised were enough to deny Einstein the Nobel Prize for his General Theory of Relativity at the time. The Nobel Prize in Physics 1921 was awarded to Albert Einstein "for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect". He was denied the Prize for his General Theory because the French philosopher questioned his understanding of time. Bergson had no argument with Einstein’s calculations. A polymath and a brilliant mathematician, he had gone over the formulas. But while Bergson admired Einstein’s handling of Relativity in general, he disagreed with the hidden ideology. He felt that while Einstein was taken credit for new insights into the measurements of time, he had broken no new ground in understanding time as a philosophical principle. By concentrating his efforts on the measurement of duration, Einstein had cleverly avoided the question: what is time? In fact, he uttered the famous statement, “The time of the philosophers does not exist.” Einstein not only avoided the question, but blandly stated that philosophers have no business considering the metaphysical aspects of reality that are unfathomable by engineers and technologists.

While Bergson won the debate that Paris that afternoon at the Societé Francais de Fhilosophie, Einstein had his revenge. Bergson´s days were coming to an end. The debate marked a turning point for his philosophy. After Einstein´s General Theory, his Special Theory of Relativity was lionized by intellectuals. Bergson´s reputation fell. Einstein´s friends and promoters smeared Bergson with terms like “unscientific, mystic, crackpot, sentimental,” and so on. Bergson, who accepted Einstein’s scientific views had philosophical misgivings about shunting the definition of time into oblivion. As a philosopher he disagreed with the idea that physicists would invade his field and discard the work of generations of philosophers. Bergson felt that Einstein’s mysticism was intellectually dishonest.

Nevertheless, while winning the battle in Paris in 1922, Bergson lost the war. History would recall Einstein as the man who bent time and showed us how time travel was possible. He was a genius who rode on a beam of light and showed how time dilation was a scientific principle. Bergson, on the other hand, was a mystical crank from the 19th century. His senile brain couldn’t possibly understand Einstein’s subtle mathematics.

But Bergson felt that while most theories of space and time are counterparts of one another, Einstein had avoided the problem of duration. By focusing on things and their movements, his physics avoided any discussion of transition and the duration of consciousness to the detriment of philosophy.

In his work Matter and Memory, Bergson insisted that “Lived time” is what we experience. “Measured time” is what is useful for experimental science and time management, but has nothing to do with the human condition. What could be more real than “lived time”? And yet, Einstein and his followers had banished “lived time” from science. Bergson was determined that it would not be banished from philosophy.

Human language everywhere has sophisticated systems for handling time. Einstein’s Gedankenexperiments or thought experiments would be impossible without them. Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, German, Russian, English, all have in common the ability to view time from a number of different angles. There are real, possible, improbable, and impossible conditionals for discussing “lived” time.

An example of an impossible conditional: “If she had known he was poor, she wouldn’t have married him.” This statement supposes that we go into the past and change someone’s knowledge. The marriage then doesn’t take place because of the knowledge. It is called an “impossible conditional” since we cannot go back in time and change events. And yet “could have, would have, should have” are so quotidian that sports fans have an expression, “coulda, woulda shoulda” for Monday morning quarterbacks lamenting their team’s loss. “If only they had the ball for three more minutes--coulda woulda shoulda.” Of course this is a metaphysical concept, but these metaphysical concepts are baked into human language.

This sophistication of time concepts is native to all Indo-European languages--which makes their learning so difficult. Anyone who has spent hours going through a grammar book knows what I mean. Verb tenses are often the most difficult thing to study in any language. But language encodes very subtle ideas about time--past, present, future and all kinds of impossible conditional concepts of duration.

It may be argued that the subtlety of time consideration as it is developed through human language--our ability to process metaphysical ideas in past, present, future and imaginary time--is what distinguishes human society from animal society. Language indeed is another “hard problem” for science since it cannot be explained.

A recent scientific article on the subject inspired a new book by Tom Wolfe, “The Kingdom of Speech.”

The article points out that after centuries of study, we are no nearer to understanding the nature of language than we were before. The conclusions of the study are worth quoting:

Understanding the evolution of language requires evidence regarding origins and processes that led to change. In the last 40 years, there has been an explosion of research on this problem as well as a sense that considerable progress has been made. We argue instead that the richness of ideas is accompanied by a poverty of evidence, with essentially no explanation of how and why our linguistic computations and representations evolved. We show that, to date, (1) studies of nonhuman animals provide virtually no relevant parallels to human linguistic communication, and none to the underlying biological capacity; (2) the fossil and archaeological evidence does not inform our understanding of the computations and representations of our earliest ancestors, leaving details of origins and selective pressure unresolved; (3) our understanding of the genetics of language is so impoverished that there is little hope of connecting genes to linguistic processes any time soon; (4) all modeling attempts have made unfounded assumptions, and have provided no empirical tests, thus leaving any insights into language's origins unverifiable. Based on the current state of evidence, we submit that the most fundamental questions about the origins and evolution of our linguistic capacity remain as mysterious as ever, with considerable uncertainty about the discovery of either relevant or conclusive evidence that can adjudicate among the many open hypotheses. We conclude by presenting some suggestions about possible paths forward.

http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00401/full

Author Tom Wolfe was so astonished by the article that he penned a book on the subject, “The Kingdom of Speech.” He begins, “It seems that eight heavyweight Evolutionistsb—linguists, biologists, anthropologists, and computer scientists—had published an article announcing they were giving up, throwing in the towel, folding, crapping out when it came to the question of where speech—language—comes from and how it works.

“The most fundamental questions about the origins and evolution of our linguistic capacity remain as mysterious as ever,” they concluded. Not only that, they sounded ready to abandon all hope of ever finding the answer.”

But if language is another “hard problem” for science, the sophisticated handling of time within language is another. Duration through memory is processed in an ordered form in language. Human speech is capable of expressing innumerable imaginary scenarios like the ones found in Einstein’s thought experiments. The capacity of language to discovery the metaphysical underpinnings of duration and time is itself an ontological argument for the

existence of a deeper spiritual dimension animating our existence.

Materialistic science seeks to study duration by stopping time. This is impossible. But we may try to stop time in freeze frames, analyzing moments or units of duration as “living time” itself passes us by. We can take “snapshots” of reality. But the snapshots we have frozen have nothing to do with time’s flow. The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus pointed out that it is not possible to step into the same waters twice. The river of time is always moving. Wherever you sample it, it has already changed as soon as you analyze your sample.

Technology comforts us. Ever since humans crawled out of caves, technology has given us fire, aid and comfort. But technology is based on measurement. And so we love measurement. It gives us control. It provides a light in the obscurity of constant change. But, as the French philosopher Henri Bergson argues in Creative Evolution, there is a distinction between moments measured as seconds and minutes and life itself.

Subjective Evolution is the constant creative evolutio nof the living entity by which sentient reality inhabits, consumes, and transforms the inert elements of matter through the constraints of space and over the course of time. A higher, conscious subjective evolution is the process by which consciousness itself becomes more and more self-aware and transcends space and time--going forever beyond this four-dimensional world of forms, extension and temporal duration.

To say that what is beyond measurement is unworthy of study is ignorance. By ignoring the immeasurable we comfort ourselves, seeking enjoyment in the world of the measurable, the world of exploitation. But by ignoring the existence of the immeasurable we cannot wish it out of existence. Hard metaphysical problems like duration, consciousness, and language will continue to haunt us for they strike at the core of human existence and meaning. Technologists assure us we have no need for meaning; our heart tells us otherwise.

Bergson felt that science is like a film-goer who stops the projection and analyses the frames of a moving picture, evaluating each image separately. His analysis ignores the director’s intentions. Such analysis ignores the story and the characters. Sometimes an amusing game in see comic strips:”Spot the 10 differences in the 2 drawings.” By close study, we find that in one drawing the chair only has 3 legs and the picture on the wall is crooked. We feel triumphant when we spot the differences and move on to the crossword puzzle. Scientific analysis of the frames in a film-strip is something like this kind of approach. But if a freeze-frame approach to time measurement works at some mundane level, a stop action analysis is not at all the way to understand “lived time.” Science is almost autistic in its ignorance of significance and meaning.

Consider a recent experiment done with autistic patients. Scientists studied the eye-movements of autistic subjects watching a movie. Given a film with highly charged emotions, patients focused on differences in continuity from one scene to the next. They noticed whether the picture on the wall was crooked or whether the light switch was on or off. They focused on everything but the emotionally charged conflicts between the characters. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/11/health/experiment-offers-look-through-eyes-of-autism.html

The study showed that in highly dramatic scenes subjects paid more attention to the color of the chairs and the position of the light switch than to the actors. They had the same approach to the film that scientists have when studying the freeze-frames of time duration. By focusing on the frames of a film, we overlook its content. By exclusively focusing on the measurement of duration, we make an understanding of time impossible. Why should we restrict our study of time, the essence of experience, in such a way?

By looking at space and time as a linear progression, we may learn many things. But why should the linear point of view be our only perspective? Bergson felt that this was a distortion. By viewing reality exclusively through the lens of scientific measurement, we overlook its content. By avoiding the problems of the human experiences as seen in language, consciousness, and the persistence of memory, we overlook the most important aspect of reality: life itself.

Our fascination with seeing only measurable or “Objective” reality reveals blindness to lived or “subjective” reality. This weakness in vision forces us to divine the film of reality into its fragments--we analyse successive “images” while failing to see the whole. By cutting frames into filmstrips we lose the ability to interpret the story of the film.

The need for analysis is paramount for technology, but the language and symbolism of “science” as an ideology has now dominated philosophy so thoroughly that we look to physicists for spiritual truth. Physicists are by definition materialists: they are experts in the study of matter. But why concede to them the right to opine about the spiritual condition, if they deny its existence as a premise for studying matter? And yet, their platitudes become the koans of the 21st century: “We are nothing but billion year old stardust.”

Are we nothing but dust?

In part, our surrender to the materialist point of view is a consequence of a poverty-stricken view of consciousness.

The debate between Einstein’s measured time and Bergson’s lived time has had deep influences on modern thinking. If duration exists only as minutes and seconds and not as “lived” time, then consciousness has no part to play in reality. But such a stark vision of physicalism leads only to emptiness and nihilism.