Neural Complexity Is Not the Source of Consciousness Bergson, "Matter and Memory" The Range of Scientific Thought at the End of the Nineteenth Century

Neural Complexity Is Not the Source of Consciousness Bergson, "Matter and Memory" The Range of Scientific Thought at the End of the Nineteenth Century
From the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century, brain science and physiology were rapidly advancing, and the structure of nerves and the correspondence between stimuli and responses were being precisely elucidated. Under these scientific circumstances, the mechanistic view that the human psyche can be explained as the sum of neural excitations gained strength, and the tendency to believe that the brain is the center that generates consciousness and representations spread. At the same time, however, no amount of analysis of neural structure could explain the quality of subjective experience, and scientific progress was beginning to cast doubt on the idea that the brain was the generator of consciousness. Bergson, taking in the atmosphere of the times, reversed the idea of the nervous system as the source of causation. For him, the nervous system is merely a signal station that weakens, selects, and discards the vast number of actions coming from the world, not a devic
e that generates consciousness. The view that the world exists first, the body acts as a part of it, and the nervous system merely coordinates the connections offered an alternative perspective to the mechanistic theory of the time. Rather than giving excessive origins to the brain, the path of redefining consciousness and memory in terms of the relationship between the body and the world was characteristic of Bergson's philosophy, and formed an important foundation for his later theories of memory and freedom.