The document discusses the philosophical concepts of Henri Bergson, particularly focusing on the idea of 'durée réelle' or real time, and its implications for understanding creativity, life, and evolution. It examines the interplay between science and philosophy, highlighting the importance of microphysical indetermination in time, consciousness, and free will. Additionally, it explores the responsibilities of humanity within the framework of a universe that is not deterministic but allows for creative emergence and self-organization.

1. Virtuality, Becoming, Life. Deleuze Studies Conference Rome 2016
Durée réelle :
microphysical
indetermination :
creative emergence
David Kreps

2. Agenda
✤ Introduction - my first time, be gentle with me!
✤ Theatre - Arts Mgt - Cultural Theory - Sociology -
Information Systems - Business School
✤ Book: Bergson and Systems Theory :
✤ Philosophy need neither be the ‘handmaiden of science’ nor divorced
from instrumental reality
✤ Science need neither compromise its principles nor attempt to go
beyond its scope
✤ Time - Bergson’s durée réelle and irreversible time in physics
✤ Becoming - durational succession and microphysical indetermination
✤ Life - élan vital, complex environmental biology and creative emergence

3. Durée Réelle
Bergson’s Core Philosophical Insight
✤ Real time – the durée réelle.
✤ Scientific time spatialises time, and does not endure
✤ Zeno’s paradoxes - Achilles does overtake the tortoise: movement is not a series of immobilities
✤ Free Will: ’the movement from past to present to future is pregnant with possibilities and it is
choice, based upon memory of the past and imagination of the possible future, which settles on one
rather than another.’ Time and Free Will
✤
Evolution: the élan vital - that which drives durée réelle forward, acting in opposition to entropy - the
means by which consciousness enters into inert matter through life: vitalism
✤ Often described as a dualist Bergson insists he is a monist: characteristic ‘deconstruction’ of
dualities
✤ He uses a great deal of scientific literature in his philosophy
✤ He praises Darwin for his clarity about the (secondary) adaptationist force in evolution
time

4. Irreversible time
Modern physics and the durée réelle
✤ Reversible time:
- classical dynamics, Einsteinian physics
Irreversible time:
- thermodynamics, geology, evolution
✤ Irreversible time in quantum and astrophysics:
Macroscopic: Hubble’s expanding universe
Microscopic: Planck’s quanta / Bohr’s Wave-Particle Duality of light /
Heisenberg’s uncertainty - ‘God plays dice’ irreversibility
✤ de Broglie: wave/particle duality of ALL subatomic particles
…in Bergson we find Heisenberg before Heisenberg, Bohr before Bohr:
the “author’s doctor’s thesis, dates from 1889 and consequently
antedates by forty years the ideas of Niels Bohr and Werner
Heisenberg on the physical interpretation of wave mechanics”
Bohr
time

5. Microphysical Indetermination
de Broglie and durational succession
✤ de Broglie: “when an experiment or an observation makes it
possible to define the state of a particle at an instant t1 …
wave mechanics is in a position to announce what will be the
particle’s possible locations at a succeeding instant t2 and
their respective probabilities; but it can not generally make
definite predictions, and it is in thus substituting for the
definite predictions of the older mechanics simple
probabilities referring to diverse possibilities, that quantum
mechanics finds itself renouncing the rigorous determinism of
classical physics. If now, at the instant t2 which follows t1, an
experiment or observation permits us to precisely locate the
particle, the situation changes completely for us, since it is
one of the possibilities and no other which is realised. Thus
in quantum theory far more than in classical theories, time
seems to produce, in flowing, new and unforeseen elements”
de Broglie
becoming
t1 -> t2

6. Microphysical Indetermination
Durational succession,conscious choice
✤ “Durational succession is intelligible only in terms of the
qualitative differentiation of present from past, which
differentiation itself depends on the mnemonic survival of the
past in the present.” Bjelland
✤ Our experience of duration is multiple, pregnant with
possibilities, encompassing past, present, and potential futures
✤ Čapek: organisms may be thought of as amplifiers of quantum
mechanical indetermination - as suggested by Neils Bohr in 1931
- choice - free will
✤ Durational consciousness - making choices - is thus central to
Bergson’s understanding of a physical universe that endures -
and places humanity at the centre of the universe
✤ Deleuze: “durations that are inferior or superior are still internal
to us”
Bohr
becoming

7. life
Bergson Complexity
élan vital
self-organisation /
order at the edge of chaos
tendencies attractors
durée réelle
life is not an accident
shortest description
Kauffman
Durée Complexe
The Irreversibility ofTime and the Complexity of Life
✤ Systems theory : ecology, biology, general systems theory,
cybernetics, 2nd order cybernetics, complex adaptive systems:
open systems - no closed systems - spatialised time
✤ Complex evolutionary biology and the élan vital in Creative
Evolution (1907)
✤ Open systems; dissipative structures (bath-tap); Belousov-
Zhabotinsky reactions; network dynamics

8. Creative Emergence
The Responsibilities of Humanity - Knights of faith?
✤ Creative emergence as a composite of Bergson’s ideas and those of
complexity theory : a post-Darwinian evolutionary theory
✤
Jeremy England at MIT - statistical physics suggests self-organising
complexities more efficient entropy producers: life is inevitable
✤ A universe understood upon the model of consciousness, engendering
life, begets a Human exceptionalism (shared by Deleuze):
✤ not because we are inevitable or perfect, but because something
like us is the ultimate point - for life to become self-aware - the
only ‘finality’ which Bergson will allow in creative evolution
✤ counter both to religiously inspired notions of our innate
perfection, and biodeterminist notions of our accidental
irrelevance - a universe making itself up as it goes along
✤ It places on us a responsibility to know that we are in it together, we
can fail as a species just as likely as we can succeed, and we will only
have ourselves to blame – or praise - if we do.
Bergson memorial coin
Jeremy England
life

9. Contact
✤ Dr David Kreps
✤ http://david.kreps.org
✤ www.creativeemergence.info
✤ d.g.kreps@salford.ac.uk