Bergson, Creative Evolution, Chapter 1 - Of Aging and the Individual."

Bergson, Creative Evolution, Chapter 1 - Of Aging and the Individual."

I am talking about "Aging and the Individual" in chapter 1 of Bergson's "Creative Evolution". The "individual" here is not a beautiful thing constructed by man or science, but something constituted by nature.

In other words, a living organism "ages," and this cannot be explained by pure mathematics. If you ask whether real numbers can be expressed in terms of natural numbers, probably not.

At the same time, Gödel presented the Incompleteness Theorem, which ultimately asks the question, "Can the real numbers be expressed in terms of natural numbers? He took the position that real numbers cannot be expressed in terms of natural numbers. In other words, we now see that there are two domains, one infinite and unpredictable, and the other finite and predictable.

However, these boundaries and differences are still not clear. What is important in Bergson's argument is that "now" is a real-valued sequence, different from the delimited time that we use in our daily lives.

As Bergson points out, the world that mathematicians deal with is a world that can be cut out moment by moment, the kind of temporal structure that Descartes assumed when he spoke of the geometric imagination. Descartes' and Newton's view of time, that is, clock-like time that ticks "tick-tock," is not cumulative, only generated and reset.

The phenomenon of "aging," however, is not such a non-accumulative thing, but unfolds in substantial real numbers. That is why it cannot be explained mathematically. The deterioration and decomposition of matter and the life phenomenon of aging are essentially different, according to Bergson.

For example, questions such as "Why do we have eyes?" cannot be fully explained by mathematics or science. Bergson speaks of such cases as symbolic of vital phenomena that cannot be captured by mathematics or physics.

Also, expressing the current state in terms of an equation is about physical "quantities of state". So is the conservation law of energy, etc.

However, viewing the existence of living things in terms of their state is only after they have already been cut out of the flow and isolated. The "flow" or "continuity" in the first step, that is, the real number itself, cannot be captured by the description of the state of affairs.

Bergson said, "There is no such thing as the moment immediately preceding an instant. In spatialized real numbers, it is possible to see the previous state as defining the present, but this is only a symbolic understanding that is already spatially shaped.

For example, when we think of a mountain, only the "elevation" matters, and not the "route taken" is an example of spatialized understanding. Bergson's conception of the real world is not so, but is real as a flow, not cut off moment by moment, where the meaning of aging and generation has a completely different context.