Bergson, Free Will, and the Philosophy of Cognitive Enhancement

Bergson claims that free will exists. It occurs in moments when a living being experiences duration, which is tuning into the internal sense of an experience, and a freely-determined action flows from this state. His reasoning is that “if duration is heterogeneous [if we are tuned into the internal sense of experience], the relation of the psychic state to act is unique, and the act is rightly judged free.” An act is free if it flows from an internal qualitative experience. He suggests we understand this by considering an example in our lives of having made a serious decision; where even searching for such an example already starts to evoke the qualitative aspects, unique psychic states, and then the free-action undertaken as a result. The crux is that “We should see that, if our action was pronounced by us to be free, it is because the relation of this action to the state from which it issued could not be expressed by a law, this psychic state being unique of its kind and unable to ever to occur again.” Turning inward to our unique experience causes freely undertaken action to flow as a result, even if this action is a formulation of our mental state.

Philosophy of Cognitive Enhancement
The reason that Bergson is useful for the philosophy of cognitive enhancement is that he provides a reasonable ontological explanation for free will with prescriptive recommendations for its achievement. He draws our attention to the qualitative and characterizes it in usable detail instead of dismissing it as inaccessible due to being subjective (as did Kierkegaard). This could help in developing a philosophy of cognitive enhancement by articulating some of the goals and experience of what it might mean for humans to engage in such practices. It is not necessary to agree with Bergson's claim in favor of free will to implement some of the underlying ideas. What is important to us in cognitive enhancement (the targeted improvement of natural human cognitive abilities) is not just better memories, but accelerated subjectivation - the ability to extend our capacity by becoming ‘more’ of who we are and can be more quickly.

Cognitive Enhancement Tools
One first cognitive enhancement application of Bergson might be in having greater activation of free will; catalyzing more ‘living now’ moments where free will could be realized. Our everyday acts are quantitative and undoubled but cognitive enhancement tools might be able to help with greater activation of the qualitative experience of life. Another application could be exploring the emergence of freedom as a property of internal experience. Bergson does not discuss whether we are free to perceive our inner states in different ways, or just one default way. It would seem that qualitative multiplicity could extend to having discretion over experience. This could inspire an ethics of perception, and an ethics of reality, as topics of cognitive enhancement philosophy. Another application area could be quantitative-qualitative transitions; tracing how the quantitative becomes the qualitative, as this might be a way into a richer, ongoing, free will-activated experience of life. There could be many applications trying to help improve our psychic states, both in their quality and accessibility, and in our awareness and perception of them.

Reference: Bergson, Henri. (2001, 1889). Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience). London UK: Dover Publications. Bergson, Free Will, and Cognitive Enhancement

Connected World Wearables Free Cognitive Surplus

The immediate reaction to the Connected World (26 billion devices by 2020 as predicted by Gartner; more than four connected devices per human; or really 1 for some and 20 for others) is the notion that man is becoming infantilized: over-tracked, over-surveilled, and over-directed by technology, and certainly over-dependent upon technology. We no longer seem able to think for ourselves with the cloud automatically piloting all aspects of day-to-day life with reminders, notifications, and ambiently-updating data. Worse, our lives seem automated and automatonish; where is the caprice and serendipity, the humanness?

What is the Connected World?
Increasingly we are living in a seamlessly connected world of multi-device computing that includes wearable computing, Internet-of-Things (IOT) sensors, smartphones, tablets, laptops, Quantified Self-Tracking devices (i.e.; Fitbit), smarthome, smartcar, and smartcity. We enjoy the benefits of the automation that comes with this: cloud linkage of quantified-self wearable sensor data, online social profiles, calendaring, email, smart home controls, and smart transport connected to smart city data feeds. Google automatically wakes us up in the morning (knowing our schedule (Google calendar) and our biorhythms (sleep monitor)). Google contacts continuously monitor our glucose level, and in cahoots with MyBasis (number of steps walked) and Vessyl (drink detection), recommend food and drink choices during the day, and give us our fitness profile, calories consumed, and health biostatus reports at the end of the day. Apple HealthKit (iOS 8) automatically records and uploads 200 different biometrics to the cloud. Apply Pay automates payment. Amazon Fresh quadcopter drones could circle our homes with replenishment supplies within one hour of detecting an empty milk bottle. NFC/iBeacon proximity marketing could push-notify us at the aisle level when we are in the store. TrackR alerts us if we have lost our wallet or keys, and loved ones track our geo-presence and send us haptic hugs through our MyTJacket.

Cognitive Surplus Unleashed
The easy knee-jerk reaction is that this is bad news - the Connected World means the infantilization of man by technology. However, going beyond this, it must be asked what is really happening at the higher level with the connected world, and how this could be beneficial. In fact, what is happening at the higher level is that huge classes of human time-occupying planning and coordination activities are being removed from human purview and pushed onto technology. Currently we spend exorbitant amounts of time and energy on coordination, planning, and organizing our activity, and dynamically updating and re-organizing it on demand; all the while also engaged in the subordinate activity of seeking and obtaining information related to planning and coordination. Planning and coordination constitutes 100% of our time sometimes. What Connected World cloud technologies do at the higher level is automate all of this. 

The Connected World relocates planning as a whole class of human cognitive activity, it is outsourced to technology. 

While many people might enjoy relinquishing planning and coordination as a class of human cognitive activity, others might regard it as a humanness that should be preserved, that is some how unnatural to discard. However, the more relevant question is what we will do with all of the time saved once technology has automated our planning and coordination activities. The Connected World as automated life-planning could free up over 50% of our time and allow us to more fully cogitate higher-level problems and develop new learning and interest areas. The Connected World is the automation and outsourcing of lower-level cognitive tasks that currently consume prodigious amount of our time and effort. In the newly-freed cognitive expansiveness, we could become engaged in new classes of problems, and more fully actualize our potential as humans.

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.

Integrated Information as a Measure of Consciousness

The fourth FQXi international conference was held in Vieques Puerto Rico January 6-10, 2014 on the Physics of Information.

The first and primary focus was on information in the quantitative physical sense, as opposed to the epistemic sense, particularly as information is used in quantum mechanics. There are several objective measurable definitions of information such as Shannon information. Objective information and other mathematical and physics theories were also used to formalize definitions and distinctions between determinism, free will, and predictability, and intelligence versus consciousness.

Many talks and debates helped to sharpen thinking regarding consciousness, where we have been stuck with crude explanatory heuristics like ‘consciousness may be an emergent property of any sufficiently complex system.’ Interesting and provocative research was presented by Giulio Tononi and Larissa Albantakis from the Center for Sleep and Consciousness at the University of Wisconsin. They have an objective measure called ‘integrated information’ which is meant as the compositional character of experience (including subjective experience), and represents the causality amongst macro-level elements within a system. There could be systems that are complex at the macro level but have low integrated information if there are not extensive mechanisms with causal relations within the system. In other words, complexity does not necessarily confer consciousness, and the relevant factors to look for could be causality and experience. 

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.