In computational terms, I see Bergsonism as a philosophy that fully embraces
the unpredictability of interaction and the accumulated histories of
side-effects.
Bergson has often been dismissed as a 'vitalist' positing an alternative
substance driving life, but this is quite wrong. He was openly critical of
vitalism and emphatic that we must give an *immanent* account of how things
come to be, without recourse to anything mysterious, external or transcendent.
I think he was in fact trying to give a name for the powerful, unpredictable
effects of dynamic organizations, what we might now put in terms such as
emergence, complexity, self-organization, complex adaptive systems, and so on.
In his language, he was attempting to account for the unity of matter and life
through a continuous interplay ('becoming') between the 'actual' (contingent
histories) and the 'virtual' (degrees of freedom and tendencies, akin to the
phase spaces of systems for example). In that sense, it is quite relevant
indeed to interactive computation/eternal computing.
He was one of the mostly highly respected philosphers of his day, and very well
educated in mathematics, physics and biology (including evolution and
development). He was aware of the physical theory of entropy, and life's
apparent reversal of the trend. Wiener acknowledged Bergson's insight regarding
the irreversibility of lived time in 'Cybernetics', and his writing exerted a
strong influence on Prigogine in his youth:
'Since my adolescence, I have read many philosophical texts. I still
remember the spell L’e´volution cre´atrice cast on me. More specifically, I felt
that some essential message was embedded, still to be made explicit, in
Bergson’s remark: ‘‘The more deeply we study the nature of time, the better we
understand that duration means invention, creation of forms, continuous
elaboration of the absolutely new.’’ ' (Prigogine, 1977)
... could have written much more... I guess I can't recommend his 'Creative
Evolution' highly enough... especially the last chapter.
On Jun 29, 2011, at 2:03 PM, Wesley Smith wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 29, 2011 at 12:38 PM, Alan Kay <[email protected]> wrote:
>> Thanks for the references to The Chemoton Theory -- I hadn't seen this
>> before.
>>
>> But I didn't understand your reference to Bergson -- wasn't he an adherent
>> of the Elan Vital as a necessary part of "what is life?" and that also drove
>> evolution in particular directions.
>
>
> you're welcome. The interesting part of about Chemoton Theory is that
> the first papers were written contemporaneously with Eigen's RNA world
> theory and Maturana and Varela's autopoiesis ideas.
>
> The Bergson reference was cryptic. Sorry about that! He did write
> about Élan Vital, but in my understanding it doesn't represent a
> transcendental category but is rather a name for a self-referential
> process by which objects/virtualities/... differentiate. The clearest
> exposition I've found on this is the last chapter of Deleuze's
> Bergsonism.
This book is also really great.
>
> The aspect of Bersgon that I was thinking about though was the concept
> of duration, particularly that of the cerebral interval (the time
> between a received movement and an executed movement), which generates
> perception. Yet perception is both matter (made of up of neurons,
> cells, chemical networks, sensors, ...) and the perception of matter.
> It's a self-loop of something perceiving itself. We see the same kind
> of self-loop pattern in von Foerster's Cybernetics of Epistemology and
> Notes on an Epistemology of Living Things where computation is
> understood as com + putare or thinking together.
He also said: "an organism is the continual posing of a problem, and the
offering of a solution to that problem", with the interval between being due to
that part of the organism's living behavior which cannot overcome the obstacles
created in the past (for Bergson, time is not a linear space to be filled;
rather what is real is a continuous accumulation of actual history: past and
present co-exist in layers of more or less extended duration.)
>
> Where Bersgon was talking about human perception, I think his ideas
> can be taken all the way down to the basic (theoretical) units of life
> that Ganti describes in Chemoton Theory where instead of a cerebral
> interval, there's a metabolic interval. The metabolic interval is the
> time of adjustment and reaction to environmental conditions (the cell
> shrinks, grows, chemicals flows with varying degrees and directions)
> that is a direct result of the structure of an auto-catalytic loop.
> By virtue of this self-loop, novel conditions develop through
> differentiating patterns of chemical flow that hook on to the
> metabolism, over time developing into more and more complex structures
> with new hierarchical levels.
>
> I should point out that I'm not saying this is how life happened, but
> rather that I believe it's a compelling way to approach
> conceptualizing about how computational systems could be cast in a
> biological perspective. I tend to think of computation as mathematics
> + duration and biology as chemistry + duration. Computational systems
> does not have to mimic in a literal way what biology does, which is
> what I see most systems doing.
>
> wes
>
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