Bergson and complexity
By now you may have realized that there is something which philosophy has
to offer particularly when dealing with complexity and you wonder what it
may be? Examine again the two CA system called Proliferon. Raise the output
rates. click on ‘infection’ and watch its behavior.
It is driven by rule #600, and despite its simplicity, you don’t really
understand its behavior, or its intentions. Clearly the system is driven
by simple mathematics, yet you lack any mathematical tools which might
help you to predict its trajectory. Not even differential equations or
multivariate statistics will help. You have to search for new tools, but
how and where? So you turn to philosophy for new ideas which hopefully might
be translated into some kind of new mathematics.
Bergson (1859 - 1941) is usually dismissed by the exact
sciences as a somewhat irrational philosopher. He regarded the world dualistically,
divided into two disparate realms, life and matter. While
life evolves and climbs upward, matter falls downward and its entropy rises.
The exact sciences succeeded to harness matter and energy for our benefit,
yet lack the capability to explain what drives life. Bergson called it life
force (élan vital) which differs inherently from Newtonian forces.
No wonder that physicists ridiculed him as a Vitalist. It turns out that
this élan vital is also a property of complex systems
like the Aristotelian soul
or the WOB.
Bergson was the first to recognize the shortcoming of Darwinian evolution.
Life does not adapt passively to changes of the environment, rather it
utilizes them creatively. Evolution is a creative process.
Bergson’s time which he calls duration (la durée)
is particularly relevant to complexity. We conceive now and past
as two mutually exclusive events. Each time unit is discrete and isolated.
It follows its predecessor in the same way as the number two follows one.
Time is a mathematical succession of static states. On
the other hand duration is an amalgamation of the present with the
past. This difficult concept may be illustrated by the a
simple CA system. Its present state cannot be isolated from its past
since its structure was shaped by previous states which continue to act
in the present. In other words the past flows into the present
and cannot be distinguished from the present. The proliferon is a one dimensional
structure (worm) which changes continuously. Although the program enables
the observer to store past states and display them sequentially the proliferon
cannot store and display its past states. We are confronted here with two
kinds of time: Observer time which orders past states chronologically and
proliferon duration which is not. Duration is called here
biological time.
The proliferon illustrates also two ways to interpret phenomena. Zeno and
the Eleatic school maintained that there are things and no change,
while Heraclitus and Bergson maintained
that there ware changes but no things. In the present
experiment the observer controls a thing and may freeze it at will, while
the proliferon experiences only change. The fact that the proliferon proceeds
through discrete states is irrelevant to the above distinction. Simply imagine
this worm as a flux.
WOB is a set of interacting processes each with its individual time
(duration). Process time is more relative than Einstein’s time.
Relativity theory provides a traveler with a formula with which he sets
his clock when observing different systems. No such formula exists for
a traveler (trajectory) in the process set.
Additional reading : Bergson and medicine
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