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.

So discontinuous a discontinuity

A key aspect of thinking systemically about the future is being able to see how rapidly advancing technologies across many fields interrelate. Whatever next Internet-like discontinuity or singularity occurs will influence whatever comes thereafter. It is likely that some high percentage of what are now thought to be expected future advances will recede or be reshaped at minimum, for example:

• If all chronic disease and aging becomes controllable and there is effective immortality, does uploading matter as much?
• If artificial general intelligence is achieved, how does that change the exigency and requirements of molecular nanotechnology?
• If affordable space launch and space-based solar power is achieved, what happens to ethanol, electrical and other terrestrial alternative vehicle and transportation infrastructure solutions?
• If immersive virtual reality and post-material scarcity are achieved, does molecular nanotechnology matter and what happens to global political systems?
• If whole human genome testing is available, do single SNP tests go away? If there are home health monitors and nanodiagnostics, do primary care physicians go away?

Evolving Gender Roles

Women are notoriously absent from nearly all aspects of public life: politics, business, technology and the press but blogs may provide a flexible creative don't-have-to-be-an-expert structure that could be a powerful medium for female expression and provide innovative new viewpoints.

At the Accelerating Change technology conference, I encountered many men who had written or were about to write books, and no women, even when they often had better and at minimum different memes, that were interested in writing a book, whereas they do blog. And women's sparse quality presence on IT Conversations is also remarkably noticeable and a dichotomy with all of the different insights women have and new ways they are involved in using and experiencing technology.

Evolving gender roles for both sexes allows greater ideation. As city densities continue to increase and women must work as an economic imperative and increasingly by realizing the intellectual benefits of working on non-family related projects or jobs, their voices will shape whatever medium they are in. Men are experiencing evolving gender roles as the creative class norm is away from early or in many cases any family development which leaves both men and women with much more time and acceptability to ideate and create.