Bergson's Virtual Action

Bergson's Virtual Action

Stephen E. Robbins

Bergson (1896) left us a conception of virtuality much different than what is understood today. Perception, he stated, is virtual action. This concept was embedded within a holographic framework and within a model that established the relationship between subject and object in terms of time. The invariance structures of Gibson provide the information for driving the action systems and partitioning the environmental field into a virtual subset as Bergson required. When applied to the problem of the brain’s imposition of a scale of time upon the universal field, where the brain is viewed as a dynamical system, this model reveals relativistic implications demanding a far different conception of perception and action.

Implicit in this framework is a different model of memory. If perception is not occurring solely within the brain, then experience is not being exclusively stored there.The brain as a reconstructive wave in a holographic field yet serves for remembering.The invariance structures defining events yet create the constraints defining the modulation pattern of this wave. I see a certain pattern of movement in the grass, and immediately the experience of seeing a snake long ago is reconstructed or “redintegrated”. The invariance structure of the current event, , has driven the modulation of a wave reconstructing a past event, E. This is a “broadly computational” architecture in a sense left fully open by Turing(cf. Copeland 2000). Within it, thought itself rests upon complex modulatory patterns defining waves which manipulate virtual objects/events in time. Even a simple thought, e.g., “The man is stirring coffee with a spoon”, rests upon a dynamic invariance structure defined across experience and specifying the event—the radial flow field, the haptic inertial tensor (Turvey & Carello 1995) defining wielding of the spoon,the acoustical quality, etc. The higher the degree of abstraction, e.g., “The human moved the coffee surface with the utensil”, or yes, the “computation” 2 + 2 = 4, the higher the order of invariance. Bergson’s virtual action then, taken in conjunction with the mathematical approach to events inherent in Gibson, provides a framework for using virtuality to resolve along standing problem of perception, and carries, I believe, a potential we have barely begun to explore.