What Lights in the Depths of Fluctuation: Neither Chance nor Causation, the Source of Freedom (1890s) Bergson, "Time and Freedom"

What Lights in the Depths of Fluctuation: Neither Chance nor Causation, the Source of Freedom (1890s) Bergson, "Time and Freedom"
Bergson pointed out that the idea of explaining free action by applying an external framework of chance or causality is itself a fallacy. Chance is an unpredictable fluctuation, and causality is a picture in which external conditions inevitably force the outcome, but both of these are only external categorizations of action and do not capture the core of freedom. The free act is not an addition of external factors, but a qualitative event in which the persistence of the entire personality condenses at a certain moment and crystallizes as a decision. Memory, emotion, values, and experience are not separate elements, but are blended together in the internal continuity, and the totality of this state gives rise to the free act. Determinism only draws a line of reasoning after an action has become a past event, and does not show the depth of its creation. The position that equates freedom with chance is also a misunderstanding that reduces freedom to randomness. Recent neuroscien
ce understands decision making not as a simple chain of inputs and outputs, but as a dynamic process in which the entire brain switches states in a nonlinear manner, which echoes Bergson's insight. Freedom is not a midpoint between causality and chance, but a crystallization of internal persistence that does not belong to either of them, a generative event that cannot be captured by external categorization.