August 28, 2025 Bergson, "Creative Evolution."

August 28, 2025 Bergson, "Creative Evolution."

Let's see, I'm talking about Bergson's "Creative Evolution", which means that mechanism and objectivity cannot explain evolution. I think the point is that it cannot be explained after it has unfolded in space.

Daigo Umehara, a professional gamer, said, "The shortcut to improvement is not to compare yourself with others but to compare yourself with your past self." Philosophically speaking, this means that comparing oneself with others is "comparing oneself with the image of others developed in space," which I think is a mechanical or objective evaluation. If you try to measure evolution or growth by what is developed in space, you will not grow rather than grow. This is related to Bergson's "Consciousness and Freedom": if we represent things spatially in terms of branches and curves, we lose the meaning of the original activity. It means that we should not be too overconfident in human intelligence.

As Nassim Nicholas Taleb has said, human intelligence is for prediction, but it is only an analytical capacity based on a spatial development constructed by humans, which is blinded at the time of its framework. It is a fallacy to speak of the future or evolution based on that. When we improve or develop organically, it is not "comparison with others" but "comparison with our past" and in history, it is important to consider several possible branches in the past and recognize that the present is established by a series of coincidences. That is the key to moral development.

Based on this premise, the history of living organisms is discussed in Chapters 2 and 3. In the beginning, the whole consciousness diverged into inorganic and organic, and organic matter diverged into plants and animals. The nebula is mentioned, and the view is that life would have been able to manifest even in a planetary system without a sun. Plants took a form that could store sunlight as energy and began to take in light via chlorophyll. Later, they branched off into animals. In other words, Bergson's suggestion is that plants and animals arose in the solar system on the basis of photosynthesis, but that other forms of life could exist in other stellar systems.

The issue of consciousness is fundamental here, and it is because "movement" became necessary that consciousness became more evident in animals. As the nervous system develops and accumulates uncertainty along with movement, consciousness becomes clearer. The greater the difference between possible actions and actual choices, the clearer consciousness becomes. This is the milestone of Chapter 3. Furthermore, humans liberate consciousness by creating tools and externalizing the motor mechanism. The condition for further evolution is to direct that liberated consciousness toward the self and to link intuition and intellect.

Chapter 3 goes into the positioning of the human being. It is the human intellect that finds matter, and matter is understood as a human principle, i.e., increasing entropy. Matter does not fill the universe, but is manifested by the intellect at the moment of cessation or descent of the entire consciousness. There are therefore two kinds of order: the "passive order," which manifests itself by descent, and the "creative order," which arises by ascent. This corresponds to the order of music and art and the order of material arrangement.

By externalizing the intellect and splitting it up like a machine or artificial intelligence, man can escape the restraints of the intellect itself. And if he feels a sense of loneliness, he can overcome it by connecting with his intuition. In this respect, man stands in a position beyond animals and is on the way to further evolution.

Chapter 4 returns to the question of matter and order, emphasizing that "no matter" does not mean "nothing." There is no nothing at all, only matter manifested in consciousness and in the fullness of the universe as a whole. Even when there appears to be disorder, on the contrary, there is only a predominant order being established.

Man misunderstands "nothing," creates things, wastes them, and strangles himself with waste. I believe that Bergson is pointing out that the biggest mistake of modern man and the bottleneck of modern civilization is that he is needlessly increasing entropy and involving the entire organism.