Arthur Young on Henri Bergson

[alliant]

what if objects contain a potentiality for experience, but become actualized when our minds apprehend them. that is, an organism's mind can 'stretch out' of its body into its surroundings. Rupert Sheldrake often mentions this possibility.

[BoBeRz3]

Does anyone know what Bergson has to say about multiplicity?

thankss =]

[EPADEMC]

please go search EPADEMC on google....

Hes stuck in the matrix!

[cozmikzen]

ok, i saw this 1, i watched it again tho. i do think everything is ultimately made of photons. so, it is inescapable that photons produce all intelligence. but i dont think i can agree that all photons produce intelligence. a lump of coal and a brain are both made from carbon. can u really think there is no difference? the carbon cell with the life quality interpets data, the coal doesnt. the ability to absorb outside energy thru the membrane seems key. life seems to be magnetic to energy.

[0ThouArtThat0]

There is a huge difference between coal and organized nervous tissue. The difference is essentially the evolutionary process. The reason I think seeing matter as inherently sentient is appropriate is because it offers an explanation for how that nervous tissue could have come to have any inner sense of experience at all. Evolution itself explains more complex forms, but not why those forms are conscious (though evolutionary development leads to MORE consciousness, it does not create it).

[cozmikzen]

well i agree with the last part. but i really cant agree that all matter is sentient. there is an obvious difference in what we would consider living and non-living matter. i guess my ultimate point is, whatever this "life" quality is, it is the same exact thing that has developed into consciousness. as to how a single cell can display enough intelligence to consume & reproduce, i dont know. like i said, it seems like an almost magnetic attraction to nutrients.

[0ThouArtThat0]

yeah, the key is adequately defining "life." Any suggestions?

[cozmikzen]

thats where i am now. it cant be just consumption and reproduction because fires & crystals, and other things do this too. but , the life quality that exist in each living cell is the key. which takes us to some kind of creation,i know u are familiar with some different types of creation. i dont have that answer. but i am going to start looking into cell construction. i know alot about DNA,but i think it has to do with the cell membrane. it "knows" what it needs, and allows matter to pass thru

[Metalogicc]

life = negentropy

[ComplexEmergence]

metabolism, autopoiesis....Di Paolo, 2005 on teleology, adaptability, and autopoiesis seems close enough for me. I dont agree with panpsychism. Why not just say there are emergent strata? Roy Bhaskar sounds closer to the truth, in my own view. If your brain was made of cheese you'd go around swearing the whole universe was dairy product at the deepest level. Seems silly. Although not all things have experience, I would say all things could contain experience ie information.

[dpgpqasw2]

life is self-direction

[jogayot]

even in space you can not flip back (like the equations suggest) in place. you need to make a cycle. vector has to rotate... even decelaration and accelaration in opposite direction can be looked upon as a cycle, sinusoidal wave change... not to mention cyclic processes of thermodynamics.

[0opsqo0]

thanks *hug*

[pennilesscripple]

thanks for posting this

[MariborchanX]

The so called 'originality' comes from using different 'high quality' or 'further developed' 'information sources' or 'philosophies', combining them, developing them, etc. You can never escape the 'limits of your knowledge', upbringing or whatever you want to call that. Thinking under a paradigm that the world has 'outgrown', like someone still being an Aristotelian in our times, is probably not the most productive way to go, even tho that doesn't mean someone can't live that way. khmcropperkhm

[MariborchanX]

I would call this video anthropomorphism. 'Learning' is a distinct word attributed to human or animal behaviour. What is meant by 'learning' in the article you linked is in no way connected to how humans interact and 'learning' as in learning ideas, except that it shares the fact that there was something preceding it and that lead to the 'current' state. In that sense learning is everywhere all the time, but just by doing that, the word looses most of it function, it's only a description,

[MariborchanX]

only empirical data and in no way tells us how we should act, it's not the domain of philosophy, it's the domain of science - and the article you linked to is a scientific article. The photon 'learning' and human 'learning' are different phenomena, and mixing them just bring out mysticism, which I think you are searching for, who knows why.

[0ThouArtThat0]

I think my recourse to what you call mysticism is an attempt to bridge the troublesome gap that has been erected between human beings and the natural world. Of course this video is anthropomorphism, because we live in a cosmos that has formed we humans from its dust (or its photons). We have no choice but to anthropomorphize, and in fact I think we would be misguided in any attempt to understand the universe as a whole without integrating our own human existence within it.

[MariborchanX]

Yeah but anthropomorphizing is not the same as figuring out our relationship with the so called nature or what we should do about it. (If you want to be a sceptic, you should at first doubt the very idea of this romanticized nature that we should all return to.) I don't think we need to attribute our characteristics to understand nature, I think the opposite, that precisely that is the biggest mistake we make. That's how the primitive ideas of god originated for example. You should avoid these

[MariborchanX]

easy traps and really doubt the essential ideas that are behind this. You may be surprised how many of them stand on shaky grounds. As Žižek would probably say, the biggest act here could as well be to retreat from the world, like Descartes did, and just think in isolation, and then return and you may as well have a 'fresh' perspective on things. Sometimes being in a community like youtube, to 'collectively' develop ideas can be a bad thing, just like figuring out math while drinking juice

[MariborchanX]

with your schoolmates (that have approximately the same amount of knowledge) is not nearly as effective as retreating and studying it alone, and then thinking it over. You only return to the community to test your beliefs, to receive and give criticism, and that's in my opinion (as I have interpreted Žižek) the best way to progress when dealing with difficult philosophical topics.

[MariborchanX]

I'm only against what I call mysticism, because I think it lacks serious scepticism, it's too fast to accept all kinds of things. That doesn't mean you shouldn't think about a wide range of things, but it's good to have a good bullshit detector or how can I say it, don't be gullible too fast. Question the authority that is giving you 'knowledge' and what their motivations might be to say things like they do.Like the astrotometry guy seems a total whack job to me, probably just seeking attention.

[0ThouArtThat0]

I agree with what you are saying about maintaining a degree of skepticism. I think skepticism is what has lead me to question the adequacy of standard, mechanistic/materialist thinking. It is disappointing, though, that any claims made in regard to the nature of reality that do not fit neatly into the mechanistic picture are called "mysticism." I don't think this is fair.

[MariborchanX]

I think that something like this might have happened in this situation. You started loosing confidence in the 'standard ... thinking' and then searched for alternatives. But, living in the American culture, you don't really have access to the vastly different philosophical ideas floating in the books and started studying the things closest to you and stayed there. I wouldn't regard any thing that doesn't match the 'standard .. thinking' as mysticism, since there are a lot of different kinds out

[0ThouArtThat0]

It is not just "standard thinking" that is troubling me. It is specifically mechanistic materialism. I am well aware of the many Continental ontologies that try to express something other than this, and I celebrate them. I much prefer Continental philosophers to Anglo-Americans like Dennett.

[MariborchanX]

Just a note - I wrote 'standard ... thinking' because of the youtube comments character count, I just wanted to copy what you said and thought that it would be clear.

[MariborchanX]

there. What I label as mysticism is basically new age and the westernised versions of old eastern philosophies, since these two are a kind of a 5 step program to enlightenment in my eyes. "Just stop believing, start meditating and you will enter a whole new psychical world, you can get rid of your anxiety in months!" And I confess, Watts had a nice calming influence on me, since he allows one to get rid of the anxiety, stress, worrying, etc.

[0ThouArtThat0]

Watts is more of a spiritual entertainer than a philosopher, at least in his lectures. Some of his books are more technical.

[MariborchanX]

Mysticism, spiritualism, whatever the label, basically I'm against this quick fix, like the Objectivists read a few books on Rand and think that they know the Truth. I'm writing this stuff to you, because I see you're genuinely interested in these stuff and are not doing it just for an ego gratification.

[0ThouArtThat0]

Return to nature? I'm not suggesting that. We never left nature, it makes no sense to try and "return." We just need to reintegrate our conception of nature with its actuality.

[MariborchanX]

Ok I guess that was in a sense a strawman. Could you explain what you mean by "reintegrate our conception of nature with its actuality."?

[0ThouArtThat0]

I mean that our favored mode of thought for the past few centuries has been rationalism and intellectualism, which both see all of nature in terms of spatial relations. This is how we categorize and conceptualize everything into mechanical parts, etc. All this totally neglects the temporal aspect of nature, however. This is why Bergson's notion of "duration" is so important, as it reveals that time cannot be understood as a static slice between past and future, but rather must be seen as...

[0ThouArtThat0]

a sort of smeared out moment appropriating memory of the past into a creative leap toward the future. There is no present moment as such, only this perpetual feedback loop between habit and novelty that carries us always into new beginnings. Static concepts do not do justice to the processual actuality of the nature world. If awareness of this fact requires a kind of mystical satori, then so be it.

[MariborchanX]

I don't really have a problem with different interpretations of the concepts of time, I'm not really that interested in that, I think basically that this notion got developed in this way for enlightenment and scientific purposes, and it serves a function. It's always good to know how much time it is until the sun will go down, so you can do your work in time and not be awake in the middle of the night like me, but it's of totally practical purposes, not metaphysical.

[0ThouArtThat0]

I agree. Treating time as though it were some kind of spatial extension or number line is great for practicality's sake (ie, for technology and approximate prediction). But for ontology and philosophy, this view of time will not do!

[cosmanthony21]

We percieve the universe through a human lense.

[0ThouArtThat0]

and the lens itself is the universe.

[cardellacole1]

thanks for this mat very interesting

[2bsirius]

Arthur Young was an eccentric genius. I watched this video eons ago. It was great to see that it still inhabits some obscure corner of the internet. Thanks for finding it and posting it.