[HN Gopher] All Is Unfinished: Henri Bergson's philosophy for ou...
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       All Is Unfinished: Henri Bergson's philosophy for our times
        
       Author : lermontov
       Score  : 29 points
       Date   : 2025-02-18 01:05 UTC (3 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.thenation.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.thenation.com)
        
       | justonceokay wrote:
       | Some of the observations in the article are distilled in a
       | wonderful way by Alan Watts. To paraphrase, most people think of
       | time in terms of cause and effect. So things in the past cause
       | things in the present to happen like a clockwork machine. This is
       | definitely the view of the world you learn in physics 101.
       | 
       | But what if we have it on its head? What if instead we thought of
       | the past like the wake of a ship that we are operating. The past
       | is real in that you can discern where you came from by looking at
       | the wake. But it would be a grave error to think that the wake of
       | the ship caused the boat to move forward.
        
         | CMCDragonkai wrote:
         | The wake is like our perception of the past from the present.
         | But there was a real past, but we cannot ever see it
         | truthfully.
        
         | Pamar wrote:
         | Something similar was also discussed by Borges, who quipped
         | "each new author creates their own precursors".
         | 
         | You can check this apparently paradoxical idea here:
         | https://gwern.net/doc/borges/1951-borges-kafkaandhisprecurso...
        
       | tokai wrote:
       | To me Bergson was a charlatan. The kind of intellectual that
       | would have loved to squash quantum physics, consciousness, and
       | free will together. It's quite positive that he mostly forgotten.
        
         | baruchel wrote:
         | I'm not entirely sure about the claim in your second sentence,
         | as Bergson was very skeptical of scientific metaphors,
         | analogies, and similar concepts. I'm fairly certain that his
         | ideas are carefully defined to explain free will without
         | relying on scientific vocabulary.
        
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