The Illusion of Drawing Branches on a Windless Tree: Bifurcation Diagrams Deprive the Future of Freedom (1890s) Bergson, "Time and Freedom

The Illusion of Drawing Branches on a Windless Tree: Bifurcation Diagrams Deprive the Future of Freedom (1890s) Bergson, "Time and Freedom
Bergson criticized the way of thinking that draws a bifurcation diagram of actions in which choosing A will lead to this, and choosing B will lead to that, which seems to visualize freedom. The bifurcation diagram arranges actions as spatial lines or points and reconstructs the future as a set of already existing options. Such a vision of the future, however, deprives the persistence of a living consciousness of its inherent generativity and transforms freedom into a mere task of choice. The bifurcation diagram shows not the future, but only an afterthought, an arrangement of past events. The free act is a creative event in which the persistence of the entire personality is condensed and a new qualitative state opens up, and instead of choosing from existing branches, the branches themselves are born with the act. Modern cognitive science and brain science also argue that the assumption that choices are fixed is incorrect, and that choices are generated later along with fluct
uations in emotional attention, memory, and value judgments, which overlaps with Bergson's insight that the future is created in the context of persistence. A bifurcation map is useful for organizing the past, but it cannot depict the freedom of the future. Freedom is not a branch drawn on a map, but a new line that emerges by itself from the deep flow of persistence.