Bergson: Free Will through Subjective Experience

Advance in science always helps to promulgate new ideas for addressing long-standing multidisciplinary problems. Max Tegmark's recent book, the Mathematical Universe, is just such an example of new and interesting ways to apply science to understanding the problem of consciousness. However, before jumping into these ideas, it is important to have a fundamental knowledge of different theories of perception, cognition, and consciousness.
 
One place to turn for a basic theory of cognition is French process philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941). Although we might easily dismiss Bergson in our shiny modern era of real-time fMRIs, neo-cortical column simulation, and spike-timing calculations, Bergson's theories of perception and memory still stand as some of the most comprehensive and potentially accurate accounts of the phenomena.

Bergson's view is that there are two sides to experience: the quantitative measurable aspect, like a clock's objective ticking in minutes, and the qualitative subjective aspect, like what time feels like when we are waiting, or having fun with friends.

Bergson's prescription for more freedom and free will is tuning into subjective experience. In the example of time, it is to 'live in time,' experiencing time as duration, as internal themes and meldings of time.

We must tune into the subjective experience of time to exercise our free will. 

How this actually occurs is that we are more disposed to freedom and free will when we choose spontaneous action, which happens when we are oriented towards the qualitative aspects of internal experience, and see time as a dynamic overlap between states, not as boxes on a calendar.

Considering that we may espouse a futurist ethics that supports freedom, empowerment, inspiration, and creative expression of the individual in concert with society, the Bergsonian implementation would be ethics models that facilitate awareness of subjective experience, a point that Deleuze subsequently takes up in envisioning societies of individuals actualized in desiring-production.

Subjective Experience and the Existence of Free Will in Bergson

With burgeoning progression in neuroscience projects across a variety of fields including stem cell generation, brain scanning, and natural language processing, the free will / determinism debate remains vibrant. One resource for understanding the problem is French philosopher Henri Bergson and his claim that free will exists, and can be understood through how time and free will are connected.

Henri Bergson lived 1859-1941. 1900s. He was well-known in philosophy and intellectual culture more broadly in the early 1900s, including for anticipating quantum mechanics 30 years ahead of its discovery due to his assessment of time as being asymmetrical. In the 1960s, the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze reawakened interest in Bergson, highlighting the importance of Bergson’s concepts regarding multiplicity and difference. Now Bergson continues to be relevant to neuroscience and other areas interested in the understanding of subjective experience, free will, and mind/body dualism. Bergson published three masterworks:

• Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (1889) arguing in favor of free will 
• Matter and Memory (1896) resolving mind/body dualism with a larger problem frame taking both dimensions into account 
• Creative Evolution (1907) linking the idea of the time as energy and the energy of time to evolution 

Linking Time and Free Will 

According to Bergson in Time and Free Will, and as explicated by Suzanne Guerlac in Thinking in Time, we cannot treat the inner world of consciousness and subjective experience with the same model we use to understand the physical world. We need to purify concepts from their objective scientific use for the purpose of examining subjective experience, where the important features are the intensity of qualities, the multiplicity of overlapping mental states, and duration, the lived experience of time. Time is a force because it has a causal role in experiences not being the same each time, or over time, and in allowing experiences to accumulate through memory. Time is therefore a force, but an internal force not subject to the laws of nature as external forces. Exactly because time is not governed by mechanistic external forces, it allows room for the exercise of free will. The force of time makes free will possible and we exercise it when we are living in time, tuned into our subjective experience, and acting passionately and decisively. A more accurate conceptualization of our freedom is not in deciding between two alternatives but rather in experiencing free actions carving themselves out of our hesitation as we plunder though the constant becoming of life. 

Further explanation: YouTube video

Technology vs. Free Will? Tuning into the Internal Qualitative Experience of Time

Henri Bergson, the French philosopher, was living and writing in a time (early 1900s) similar to today where the furious pace of innovation in science and technology was promising to elucidate the deepest secrets of the world such as how the mind works.

Determinism Victory from the Application of Quantitative Methods? 
As the social sciences gelled into departments of academic study unto themselves and sought to apply techniques from the hard sciences, Bergson became concerned about the potential loss of free will and a victory for determinism. Humans might be reduced to billiard balls in the sense that if human behavior could be predicted mechanistically like that of a billiard ball, it would mean that humans would lose their liberty and free will.

Doublings: Experiences with both Inner Qualitative Subjectivity and External Quantitative Objectivity
Bergson proposed that there are several concepts that are different in our internal experience (qualitative, subjective) than in our external experience of the world (quantitative, objective). This difference between internal and external experience (called a doubling) exists in areas like time, intensity, multiplicity, duration, self, and consciousness. The external aspects can be measured quantitatively, but the internal aspects cannot, they are states that overlap, merge into one another, and emerge and recede dynamically.

Prescription: Tune into the Qualitative Aspects of Inner Experience
To Bergson, freedom is most visible in spontaneity, the ability of a person to choose spontaneous action. To maintain free will, one should tune into the qualitative aspects of internal experience, understanding concepts like time as a qualitative overlap and ebb and flow of states dynamically, energetically. Bergson’s nomenclature for inner qualitative time is ‘duration’ as opposed to external quantitative ‘time’ – this is the difference between the sense of waiting for a train to arrive (qualitative) versus the time elapsing on the clock. Being attuned to the qualitative aspects of time, one can live more spontaneously.