The Light Unextinguished Moment - The Shadow of Determinism Sewn into the Past (1890s) Bergson, "Time and Freedom"

The Light Unextinguished Moment - The Shadow of Determinism Sewn into the Past (1890s) Bergson, "Time and Freedom"
Bergson pointed out that determinism's very attitude of explaining human action as a causal chain misses the essence of freedom. Determinism treats actions as nothing more than the result of spatialization and fixation in the past, and does not reflect the thickness of the moment in which the action is produced. The actual act is generated in the interior of the continuity of consciousness, where memories and feelings permeate the present and consciousness continuously fluctuates and flows. There, the action is not an extension of the cause, but appears as a creative leap that condenses the entire consciousness to a single point and opens it anew. Later explanations may draw a line between cause and effect and make it seem as if it has been determined from the beginning, but this is a hindsight reconstruction that does not touch on the essence of freedom. In modern neuroscience, decision making is understood to be a nonlinear leap that occurs at the moment when emotional memo
ry expectations cross a threshold, acting in a multilayered fashion, and this echoes Bergson's insight. Freedom is not captured in a causal scheme, but dwells within the persistence of the present that generates it.