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Henri Bergson’s debate with Albert Einstein swayed the 1921 Nobel committee

nautil.us

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Re: Henri Bergson’s debate with Albert Einstein swayed the 1921 Nobel committee

#31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Einstein did pretty well with quantum mechanics, as judged against his contemporaries. At least he knew something was wrong with the statistical/Copenhagen view. I think if he were told the Many-Worlds interpretation, he would find it beautiful and in line with what the character of natural law is supposed to look like.

The opposition didn't feel rational. For example, the EPR paradox was presented as a failure of quantum mechanics, when quite the opposite was true - and indeed quantum entanglement has been proposed for commercial applications. Simply put, in his later years people were already using QM to solve real world problems, while he was telling them their theories were wrong.

Well, the theories were wrong. History has been kind to his viewpoints.

Re: Henri Bergson’s debate with Albert Einstein swayed the 1921 Nobel committee

#32
So, I worked with Bergson's texts quite a bit in grad school, as he is heavily in vogue at the moment in certain disciplines. To break down his argument to its essentials, the whole concept he is railing against is the spatialization of time. That is, for Bergson, time cannot be subdivided into the "mechanistic time" of the ticking clock, and the idea of a timeline is an abomination.

Hence Bergson's framing of time as duration: for Bergson the essence of experiential time is that our consciousness is always experiencing the latest moment sliding smoothly into the next. Time, he says, cannot be spatialization and counted as can space. Bergson railed against the idea of time being extrapolated to just another metric dimension like the 3 dimensions of space. The spatial dimensions, to him, were static, fixed, dead. It is only duration that gives our existential experience of the lived experience that we know. Spatialization, to Bergson, was a dirty word; it was the spatialization of our lived experiences that rendered industrial life dead, static, mechanistic and uninteresting. Bergson was railing against the idea of a physics that could predict everything, a popular thought in the early 20th century.

After WWII, Bergson was largely forgotten until Deleuze & Guatarri ressurected him. Deleuze in particular was an enormous fan of Bergson and promoted his ideas heavily.

But what was revolutionary about Deleuze's handling of Bergson was his incorporation of post-war complexity/chaos theory and quantum mechanics to recover space as a dynamic and mutable. Influenced by such concepts as Reimman mana olds and fractal theory, Deleuze recognized that space wasn't a static and mechanistic concept at all, but instead, like Bergson's duration, can give rise to all types of unpredictable behaviors, experiences, and mathematics.

Rather than focus on one concept of "space" - the abstracted Euclidean grid - they classified space in two broad classes, the smooth and striated. Smooth spaces are spaces that are analogous to Bergson's duration: the experienced space of the journey, nomadic spaces, spaces that unfold rather than increment, that are uncountable and unexpected. Striated spaces are the class of spaces Bergson focused on exclusively: coordinate spaces, the countable spaces of the Euclidean grid and the map, or that of the timeline.

Essentially, D&G 'recovered' mathematical space as an exciting and unpredictable philosophical concept. All spaces arise from continuously recapitualtion of smoothing and striation, and counting spaces always give rise to the uncountable and to emergent behavior.

A good example is Conway's Game of Life: a simple set of rules played out on a metric space in countable time (striation) gives rise to emergent organizational patterns and a higher level of emergent behavior that simply cannot be predicted or quantified using the original simple set of rules alone (smoothing). Or, to take another case, the Mandlebrot set: a simple pattern gives rise to a recursive, self-similar-yet-never-identical structure that persists to infinity. For D&G it the uncountable always arises out of the act of counting.

This comment is somewhat outside the normal domain of HN, I know, so I hope you will excuse it. I rarely get to show off the hundreds of hours I dumped into D&G and Bergson in gradschool in my day job. :-D

Re: Henri Bergson’s debate with Albert Einstein swayed the 1921 Nobel committee

#33

Consonant with the theme of deposing humanity from the center/top e.g. geocentric to heliocentric. Bergson's perspective, which I interpret as 'things don't matter until they matter to someone', strikes me as more like engineering or economics: use not truth. OTOH there's that quantum mechanics idea (that I don't understand) that a waveform only collapses into particles when observed by a conscious "observer"... seem…

Mmmm, sort of. It's probably easier to understand the why of Bergson's theories in their historical context. In the early 20th century, General Relativity and Special Relativity had space and time 'figured out' and quantum mechanics wasn't really a thing yet.

The common train of thought post-Einstein but pre-quantum mechanics was that physics was close to a theory of everything: that the universe could be described with a set of deterministic equations and everything, including human behavior, could be successfully predicted from the beginning of time to the end of time.

Bergson's objections to Einstein are rooted in the concept of free will. They centered on Einstein's handling of time as another spatial concept. Physics would never be able to quantify human behavior, according to Bergson, because Einstein used the wrong model of time. Time (again, according to Bergson) isn't a countable and finite dimension like space is - and thus Einstein was wrong.

Bergson was also had no small amount of mathematical understanding, although he certainly wasn't at Einstein's level. Prior to this debate, he wrote an entire book about Einstein's Twins Paradox, and why it the premise it started from - that of a countable, space-like time, was wrong.

One reason that the Bergson-Einstein debate impacted the Nobel committee to such a degree was academic politics. At the time, many thought that physics had everything figured out and it wasn't long until everything, including human behavior, could be predicted using the scientific methods of physics and relativity.

Not unsurprisingly, a LOT of non-physicists had a problem with this idea.

Now off to read to the article, so I can see what was actually discussed there....

Re: Henri Bergson’s debate with Albert Einstein swayed the 1921 Nobel committee

#34

Seems like the last gasp for philosophy as a publicly influential field of work. I'd never heard of Bergson before, but I've certainly heard of Einstein. When was the last time a philosophical argument or book was front-page news? I can't remember it happening. Stories of scientific discovery make the news pretty frequently.

Perhaps that is the fault of a deficient classical education, rather than the merit (or lack thereof) of Bergson's ideas? To extrapolate from your example argument, there are thousands of historical figures you have never heard of. And yet, their decisions and actions have had a profound effect upon trajectory of history, and the way the world appears to you today. Are they unimportant just because you have yet to personally learn about them?

Or perhaps it is a lack of imagination: Bergson was certainly a large part of the intellectual milieu in which Einstein was working. His thoughts pushed Einstein in certain directions Einstein might not have gone otherwise. Even if Bergson is unremarkable for his own work, surely he is important for no other reason than his impact on the thought of the remarkable and memorable theories of Einstein?

Taking 'I haven't hear of them' as your starting point of historical importance seems like an intellectually lazy argument to me. Each to their own, however, and you are certainly entitled to your opinion.

Re: Henri Bergson’s debate with Albert Einstein swayed the 1921 Nobel committee

#35

So, I worked with Bergson's texts quite a bit in grad school, as he is heavily in vogue at the moment in certain disciplines. To break down his argument to its essentials, the whole concept he is railing against is the spatialization of time. That is, for Bergson, time cannot be subdivided into the "mechanistic time" of the ticking clock, and the idea of a timeline is an abomination. Hence Bergson's framing of time a…

Interesting. The vocabulary disconnect with General Relativity (which is the more relevant theory of relativity here, I think) is pretty frustrating, although one thing that struck me is that at the time Bergson was making these arguments, there was a lot of GR jargon yet to be invented. Also, crucially, a formal process for foliating a "block universe" spacetime was decades off (the 3+1 Arnowitt-Deser-Misner formalism arose in the late 1950s), so a late 1910s criticism of GR as treating the timelike axis as "dead" like the spacelike ones was almost reasonable.

Other important and relevant tools were either extremely fresh (e.g. Noether's first theorem) or had yet to be formalized (e.g. gauge theory), and these put practical limits on conceptual attacks on dynamical spacetimes (that's one reason why externally static vacuum metrics, like Schwarzchild's, were popular at the time). Numerical relativity wasn't even a dream in the 1920s.

However, in spite of not-yet-existing tools, it was pretty clear that General Relativity's coordinate freedom combined with diffeomorphism-invariant models of matter would accomodate standard approaches to time-series evolutions of field content (e.g., initial values surfaces and physical laws). Additionally, "ticking clocks" that appeared in Einstein's and others' GR papers were meant as shorthand for much more general objects -- basically anything that has some state that isn't time-translation-invariant. Ideal gases and other thermodynamic composite "objects" count, as do fundamental particles, as does an entire expanding or contracting universe. "Ticking" is simply the application of some arbitrary coordinates (not necessarily linear or even uniform ones; in GR they only have to admit a diffeomorphism) on those "clocks".

One of the interesting things that was pretty fresh prior to Einstein's Nobel was the resolution of the hole argument, which essentially abandoned manifold substantialism. Spacetime without a clock is simply an irrelevance; it's only the presence of at least one (or more) "ticking clocks" that gives meaning to any system of coordinates one puts down on the manifold -- and in particular it's the "ticking clock" or clocks that generate the metric; it is not something that is a property of wholly empty space, and that in turn led to a deeper understanding of the G_{\mu\nu} + \Lambda g_{\mu\nu} side of the Einstein Field Equations (i.e. the curvature of spacetime determined by the metric).

There was undoubtedly some "philosophy" going on in the early days of General Relativity, but frankly most of the work was on modelling gravitational collapse in general, which was both fairly difficult technically and also a deep well of unexpected consequences that were even more strikingly different from Newtonian gravitation than the Kepler problem in GR.

I'm fairly confident that the ideas raised related to this Bergson-Einstein debate were uninteresting (and possibly even mostly unknown) to most of the scientists exploring the golden age of General Relativity (1960s & 1970s mainly). GR, especially post-Einstein, racked up some extremely precise quantitative predictions of the behaviour of large bodies (and small things near large bodies) that matched later observations with high precision.

By the 1980s, the space for thinking about the philosophy of General Relativity was already mainly at inaccessible energy-densities or at almost pointlessly timelike-separations from us (e.g. the earliest we could see the consequences of black hole evaporation is about a hundred billion years in the future), so what's more interesting (I think) is the study of the mechanisms that generate the metric and the exploration of non-exact solutions, rather than picking at the scabs of GR's unremovable background.

Re: Henri Bergson’s debate with Albert Einstein swayed the 1921 Nobel committee

#36
post #19

This is a kind of thing that have always fascinated me: People from past epochs (Bergson in this case) trying to convey a though and we being unable to parse it. My favourite example is one of Robert Musil's essays. There are multiple versions of it, showing that he desperately tried to convey a thought and make it as precise as possible, but the meaning escapes me. The reason for fascination is that even in the past…

While I get what you mean, there's absolutely no (soft or hard) limit in 1850 or any date in the past for that matter.

People have always been people, and most of their concerns and theories were more or less similar. Even the most alien ones can still be relatable (in fact that's already an ancient, roman, idea: "Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto", by Terence).

Until very recently (up until the seventies or so) when humanities still reigned supreme in universities and schools, being able to read, enjoy and understand anything from Homer and Plato to Shakespeare and Kant was nothing special for higher education people.

That said, often being able to parse those things is question of being accustomed not to an era, but to a way of thinking. (E.g. Anglo-saxon vs continental philosophy).

Re: Henri Bergson’s debate with Albert Einstein swayed the 1921 Nobel committee

#37

Consonant with the theme of deposing humanity from the center/top e.g. geocentric to heliocentric. Bergson's perspective, which I interpret as 'things don't matter until they matter to someone', strikes me as more like engineering or economics: use not truth. OTOH there's that quantum mechanics idea (that I don't understand) that a waveform only collapses into particles when observed by a conscious "observer"... seem…

Of course it's not right. The Many Worlds interpretation is a much more elegant explanation that does not privilege humans or consciousness.

And why would that be "more elegant"?

If, after merely a few centuries of industrial revolution, we are nearing to be able to make a good enough physics simulation, and thus it's conceivable that in th future (100-1000 years) we could create a very fine simulation of a world (with simulated humans in it too, a la Sims).

Then the same (that they themselves will be eventually able to create a simulation) can be said for the inhabitants of the simulated world we've created.

This means that in the end, there might be thousands or millions of such simulations inside a prior simulation.

This begs the question: why would then our world not be a simulation itself? Certainly if there are 1000's of simulations, it's more probable that we're somewhere in the middle than on the top of the stack.

Now consider the simulation above us: they create our universe as a simulation.

It would then make sense that:

1) the simulation would be in final analysis discreet. 2) it would only spare computation cycles when it was worth it.

So, (1) would involve something like Planks length (and related constants).

And (2) would make it so that "reality" (active simulation) exists only when one of us (humans/consciousness) look at it.

Re: Henri Bergson’s debate with Albert Einstein swayed the 1921 Nobel committee

#38
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it's not right. The Many Worlds interpretation is a much more elegant explanation that does not privilege humans or consciousness.

And why would that be "more elegant"? If, after merely a few centuries of industrial revolution, we are nearing to be able to make a good enough physics simulation, and thus it's conceivable that in th future (100-1000 years) we could create a very fine simulation of a world (with simulated humans in it too, a la Sims). Then the same (that they themselves will be eventually able to create a simulation) can be said fo…

MWI is just the unitary, deterministic, local, continuous, linear evolution of a partial differential equation. There's no extra semantics that need to be added to tell you how to interpret it.

It's the only interpretation of quantum mechanics that has all of these properties. Others fail most of those qualifications. I'm particularly bothered by the thought that we don't live in a deterministic universe. This is what I mean by "more elegant".

As for whether our universe is a simulation, I'm familiar with Bostrom's argument, which you outlined. It's certainly an interesting idea and might be correct, but orthogonal to the original question of interpretations of quantum mechanics.

Re: Henri Bergson’s debate with Albert Einstein swayed the 1921 Nobel committee

#39
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And why would that be "more elegant"? If, after merely a few centuries of industrial revolution, we are nearing to be able to make a good enough physics simulation, and thus it's conceivable that in th future (100-1000 years) we could create a very fine simulation of a world (with simulated humans in it too, a la Sims). Then the same (that they themselves will be eventually able to create a simulation) can be said fo…

MWI is just the unitary, deterministic, local, continuous, linear evolution of a partial differential equation. There's no extra semantics that need to be added to tell you how to interpret it. It's the only interpretation of quantum mechanics that has all of these properties. Others fail most of those qualifications. I'm particularly bothered by the thought that we don't live in a deterministic universe. This is wha…

Well, (1) and (2) don't seem so orthogonal to quantum mechanics. Rather they'd explain them.

Re: Henri Bergson’s debate with Albert Einstein swayed the 1921 Nobel committee

#40
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I might have found it in PDF (with an annoying download timer) at http://docslide.fr/documents/la-theorie-de-la-relativite-dei... or http://bit.ly/23vLiif (Google Books preview), found via exerpts at http://dialog.ac-reims.fr/wphilo/philoreims/articlesb6fe.htm... which cites Bergson-Einstein, Bulletin de la Société Française de Philosophie, T. XVII, 1922, Paris, A. Colin, p. 25 as the original source. This PDF might…

found it, in french: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.b3075319;view=1up... which matches your bitly link: http://bit.ly/23vLiif ; and the bitly link has a clearer typeface also, it seems the pdf is the same document.. well done on the results! one of your other links led me here: http://www.2iceshs.cyfronet.pl/2ICESHS_Proceedings/Chapter_2... from there i got the citation: The meeting was recounted in the B…

This is useful - thanks for tracking it down.
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