Bergson's 1896 theory of perception/memory assumed a framework anticipating the quantum revolution in physics, the still unrealized implications of this framework contributing to the large neglect of Bergson today. The basics of his model are explored, including the physical concepts he advanced before the crisis in classical physics, his concept of perception as ‘virtual action’ with its relativistic implications, and his unique explication of the subject/object relationship. All form the basis for his solution to the ‘hard’ problem. The relation between (...) Bergson and Gibson as natural complements is also explored, with Bergson providing the framework that explicates Gibson's concept of direct perception, with Gibson's resonance model as a precursor to dynamic systems models of the brain and his reliance on invariance laws defining perceived events providing more detail for the mechanisms Bergson only envisioned from afar, and with Bergson providing the basis for an otherwise missing Gibsonian model of direct memory. (shrink)

Bergson, writing in 1896, anticipated “sensorimotor contingencies” under the concept that perception is “virtual action.” But to explain the external image, he embedded this concept in a holographic framework where time-motion is an indivisible and the relation of subject/object is in terms of time. The target article's account of qualitative visual experience falls short for lack of this larger framework. [Objects] send back, then, to my body, as would a mirror, their eventual influence; they take rank in an order corresponding (...) to the growing or decreasing powers of my body. The objects which surround my body reflect its possible action upon them. – Henri Bergson (1896/1912, pp. 6–7). (shrink)

The phenomenon of `consciousness' is intrinsically related to one's awareness of one's self, of time, and of the physical world. What, then, can be learned about consciousness from people who have suffered brain damage such as amnesia which affects their awareness? This is the question explored by Lawrence Weiskrantz, a distinguished neuropsychologist who has worked with such patients over 30 years. Written in an engaging and accessible style, Consciousness Lost and Found provides a unique perspective on one of the most (...) challenging issues in science today. (shrink)

A monumental work by an important modern philosopher, Matter and Memory (1896) represents one of the great inquiries into perception and memory, movement and time, matter and mind. Nobel Prize-winner Henri Bergson surveys these independent but related spheres, exploring the connection of mind and body to individual freedom of choice. Bergson’s efforts to reconcile the facts of biology to a theory of consciousness offered a challenge to the mechanistic view of nature, and his original and innovative views exercised a profound (...) influence on other philosophers--including James, Whitehead, and Santayana--as well as novelists such as Dos Passos and Proust. Matter and Memory is essential to an understanding of Bergson’s philosophy and its legacy. (shrink)

William S. Robinson has for many years written insightfully about the mind-body problem. In Understanding Phenomenal Consciousness he focuses on sensory experience and perception qualities such as colours, sounds and odours to present a dualistic view of the mind, called Qualitative Event Realism, that goes against the dominant materialist views. This theory is relevant to the development of a science of consciousness which is now being pursued not only by philosophers but by researchers in psychology and the brain sciences. This (...) provocative book will interest students and professionals who work in the philosophy of mind and will also have cross-disciplinary appeal in cognitive psychology and the brain sciences. (shrink)

Henri Bergson (1859-1941) is one of the truly great philosophers of the modernist period, and there is currently a major renaissance of interest in his unduly neglected texts and ideas amongst philosophers, literary theorists, and social theorists. Creative Evolution (1907) is the text that made Bergson world-famous in his own lifetime; in it Bergson responds to the challenge presented to our habits of thought by modern evolutionary theory, and attempts to show that the theory of knowledge must have its basis (...) in a theory of life. (shrink)

Our understanding of qualia is extremely weak when considerations of time are brought into play. Ignored has been the fact that the scale of time imposed by the brain on the events of the matter-field already defines quality, and that there is an essential “primary memory” or continuity of time that underlies all qualitative events. This weakness is magnified when the concept of qualia is applied to form. The origin of the dilemma lies in the fact that the problem of (...) qualia is posed in the context of an abstract space and time. When the time-evolution of the matter-field is taken as indivisible or non-differentiable, the problem can be reposed. It becomes a problem of the optimal specification of properties of an already qualitative matter-field at a particular scale of time. (shrink)

Henri Bergson (1859-1941) is one of the truly great philosophers of the modernist period, and there is currently a major renaissance of interest in his unduly neglected texts and ideas amongst philosophers, literary theorists, and social theorists. Creative Evolution (1907) is the text that made Bergson world-famous in his own lifetime; in it Bergson responds to the challenge presented to our habits of thought by modern evolutionary theory, and attempts to show that the theory of knowledge must have its basis (...) in a theory of life. (shrink)

I was born in Philadelphia, in 1928. I stayed there until I went through undergraduate school at the University of Pennsylvania, then went on to Harvard for a couple of a years in a research fellowship, and graduate school. When I was done with that, went over to MIT, and I've been in Boston ever since, around Boston since about..

A common approach to explaining the perception of form is through the use of static features. The weakness of this approach points naturally to dynamic definitions of form. Considering dynamical form, however, leads inevitably to the need to explain how events are perceived as time-extended—a problem with primacy over that even of qualia. Optic flow models, energy models, models reliant on a rigidity constraint are examined. The reliance of these models on the instantaneous specification of form at an instant, t, (...) or across a series of such instants forces the consideration of the primary memory supporting both the perception of time-extended events and the time-extension of consciousness. This cannot be reduced to an integration over space and time. The difficulty of defining the basis for this memory is highlighted in considerations of dynamic form in relation to scales of time. Ultimately, the possibility is raised that psychology must follow physics in a more profound approach to time and motion. (shrink)

Within Piaget there is an implicit theory of the development of explicit memory. It rests in the dynamical trajectory underlying the development of causality, object, space and time – a complex (COST) supporting a symbolic relationship integral to the explicit. Cassirer noted the same dependency in the phenomena of aphasias, insisting that a symbolic function is being undermined in these deficits. This is particularly critical given the reassessment of Piaget’s stages as the natural bifurcations of a self-organizing dynamic system. The (...) elements of a theoretical framework required to support explicit memory are developed, to include, (1) the complex developmental trajectory supporting the emergence of the explicit in Piaget, (2) the concrete dynamical system and the concept of a non-differentiable time contained in Bergson’s theory required to support a conscious, as opposed to an implicit remembrance, (3) the relation to current theories of amnesia, difficulties posed by certain retrograde amnesic phenomena, the role of the hippocampus and limitations of connectionist models, (4) the fact that nowhere in this overall framework does the loss of explicit memory imply or require the destruction of experience “stored in the brain.”. (shrink)

For centuries psychologists have been trying to explain how a man or an animal could perceive space. They have thought of space as having three dimensions and the difficulty was how an observer could see the third dimension. For depth, as Bishop Berkeley asserted at the outset of the New Theory of Vision (1709), “is a line endwise to the eye which projects only one point in the fund of the eye.” Space was its dimensions. It was empty save for (...) a collection of objects or bodies. For an observer, the objects were in different directions at various distances and the question was how these distances could be detected. For two hundred and fifty years we have tried to answer this question and failed. The explanations have been controversial, contradictory, and confused. (shrink)

In proposing that their model can operate in the concrete, perceptual world, Rogers & McClelland (R&M) have not done justice to the complexities of the ecological sphere and its invariance laws. The structure of concrete events forces a different framework, both for retrieval of events and concepts defined across events, than that upon which the proposed model, rooted in essence in the verbal learning tradition, implicitly rests.

Is experience stored in the brain? The universal assumption is that it is, yet the answer to this question is critical to the theory of consciousness. If “yes,” it must be understood that this answer absolutely constrains all theories of the origin and nature of consciousness. Memory images, dreams, even perceptual images and perceptual experience must somehow be generated from stored elements within the neural substrate. If the answer is “no,” Searle’s principle of “neurobiological sufficiency,” as one example, carries no (...) force, while on the other hand, a theory of direct perception can be construed to actually require this “no” answer, but then also requires a theory of memory to support this. Yet a model of memory which does not require storage of our experience within the brain has not been attempted. An initial review is undertaken of Gibson’s (1969, 1979) ecological perception, his notion of the “direct specification” of the external perceptual image, and subsequent findings of the ecological research paradigm. Central to this model is the notion of invariance laws defining external events, for example, the mathematical laws defining texture gradients, velocity flow fields, tau ratios on these fields, inertia tensors, etc. This invariance law information drives the brain’s “specification” of the environmental image/event. Yet, problematically, the specification is necessarily always to the past, i.e., to a past form of the transformation of the environmental field. Gibson’s model has a high affinity with a model developed by Henri Bergson (1896). The model presciently assumed holographic properties in the matter-field and broke from the classical model of space and time, arguing that time-evolution or motion of the field must be treated as indivisible or, as physics is now arguing, as non-differentiable. In this framework, the brain can be viewed as supporting a modulated reconstructive wave passing through a holographic matter-field and specifying an image of the past motion of the field. In such a model, experience cannot be stored within the brain for it is not occurring solely within the brain. Yet the model contains a basic mechanism for redintegration or retrieval of experienced events. The research results in cued recall are reviewed in several areas, to include verbal learning experiments, the effect of imagery in paired-associate tasks, priming phenomena, and the very ecologically oriented subject performed tasks (SPTs). The mathematical description of events via invariance allows a precise definition of the similarity of the cue-event and allows for parametric variation of the power of the cue, thus biasing recall or recognition performance. The model is predictive, and at the minimum, holds its own with current memory models. A short survey of current models reveals that most are very vague as to what events are stored, and what “elements” of these events are stored, and even vaguer on how an experience is reconstructed. Since these models ignore the actual structure of events via invariance laws, no current models actually explain the retrieval of events per se. The proposed model, however, does not require the storage of experience within the brain, in fact holding that time-extended events, for example, velocity flow fields, cannot be so stored. Some larger implications are explored: the in principle possibility of retrieval of all experience, the operation of free recall, the nature of cognition in the model, and potential distinguishing experiments relative to current models. (shrink)

The computational hypothesis, with its inherent representationalism, and the dynamical hypothesis, with its apparent absence of representations and its commitment to continuous time, stand at an impasse. It is unclear how the dynamical stance can handle representational thought, or how computationalism can deal effectively with a tightly coupled, reciprocally causative agent-environment system in continuous transformation. Underlying this dilemma is the complex relation of mind to time, a relation encoded in the word experience. We must ask if any hypothesis describes a (...) "device" capable of experience? Yet what is an intelligence and its thought without experience? Is a computational device, whether supporting a symbolic processor or connectionist net, intrinsically condemned to a zero degree of experience? What is required of a dynamical device? It is argued here that “semantic” intelligence and thought rests upon experience, fundamentally upon the invariance laws defined over time within conscious perception. The structure of experience is intrinsically unavailable to the computational device, limiting it to a “syntactic” intelligence. An alternative conception of a device is offered, based on Bergson conjoined with Gibson, which supports the qualitative and structural aspects of experience and the semantic. It frames a dynamical model of perception and memory in which invariance laws are intrinsic, creates a deeper notion of situatedness, and supports a concept of semantically based, representative thought founded upon perception. (shrink)