Nervous Complexity Is Not the Source of Consciousness Bergson, "Matter and Memory," and the Scientific View of the Late Nineteenth Century

Nervous Complexity Is Not the Source of Consciousness Bergson, "Matter and Memory," and the Scientific View of the Late Nineteenth Century
Behind Bergson's assertion that the nervous system does not produce consciousness or representations was a major shift in scientific worldview from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. At that time, physiology and brain science were dissecting the structure of the nervous system with precision and revealing the correspondence between stimuli and responses one after another. The viewpoint that viewed the brain as a machine gained strength, and there was strong momentum to explain mental phenomena as the sum total of neural excitation. At the same time, however, the difficulty of explaining the quality of subjective experience was becoming widespread, no matter how much research was done on the correspondence between stimuli and sensations. As science became more precise, there was a growing suspicion that the "brain creates consciousness" explanation was a leap forward.
In this vein, Bergson rethought the complexity of the nervous system not as a causal center but as a signaling device that regulates our connection to the world. The nervous system is a mechanism for weakening, passing, blocking, and selecting the vast number of actions arriving from the world, not a factory for generating consciousness. The world comes first, and the body is part of that web of action. The nervous system acts as a relay station to organize that web, regulating the flow of action in the direction necessary for survival, according to Bergson's position.
This view was not merely a reaction against nineteenth-century mechanism, but a reversal of perspective to compensate for what science could not explain. It was a decision to reposition the brain as a regulator if the over-assumption that the brain is the cause of the problem clogs up the explanation. This opens the way for consciousness and memory to be explained in terms of the way the body makes contact with the world, and that neural complexity is only necessary to coordinate that contact. The view of the brain not as a privileged brain but as a signaling station that regulates contact with the world prepared the way for a larger horizon to follow Bergson's theory of memory and freedom.