Notes on part 2 of Bergson's introductory essay on metaphysics

This post is a continuation of the last entry.
http://hesterbestingenprotest.blogspot.com/2015/08/analysis-of-part-1-of-henri-bergsons.html
I will use terminology from the analysis of part 1. Comments and suggestions are much appreciated. We are here:
https://youtu.be/nXs_tIRrlVU?t=9m32s
There is also a text version here:
http://www.reasoned.org/dir/lit/int-meta.pdf

This part concerns phenomenology of perception as perceived by ourselves! It's a pretty long part but the points are simple enough: Analysis probes intuition, but assembling true intuition of, say, personality (or Paris) from sketches given by analysis is impossible though far from useless. He talks about personality. Aspects of our personality form clear, cohesive images. We can try to collate those images to form a unit. But the way we weigh each different part becomes arbitrary, and it's hard to know everything and how it interacts. So our analysis remains incomplete and changes our perception of what we try to understand. In this way, his phenomenological investigations arrive at an understanding of the epistemic limitations of inquiry. We now delve a bit deeper into the essay.

We have an intrinsic understanding of our own personality floating through time. Looking inside on our own self we see perceptions coming in from the outside world as if interacting with a surface. The perceptions are clear and distinct, and some cluster into object. These objects then trigger resembling memories to materialise from our inner self to adhere to these perceptions and interpret them. These memories appear as if detached from us, adhering to the surface through which we perceive. We are then stirred into "virtual" actions and habits by these impressions. Together this forms a kind of "surface" of perception turned toward the world.

As he focuses inward to our deeper self, our personality, he notices a continual flux of states, which naturally predict and flow into each other and build on each other. As an intrinsic whole in the first place (and presently), but they are also analytically (see part 1) disectable into states. This flux of states form a history of states. One can think of a snowball, rolling through the snow in one continuous motion, an object in space-time, only that past events, say through analysis, comes to the fro and changes the current intrinsic flux. The flux is always in a state of becoming. He states that consciousness means memory (of this flux), or the tracing out of this flux, but this is up to some interpretation. There are then no two identical moments being in consciousness.

Any given sensation is interpreted (via memory) with the entire personality (the flux). This means that any given sensation is always changing to us because we are in constant change, through remembering. He states that a consciousness that can experience two identical moments two different points in time would be one without memory, and die and be reborn continually. Make of that what you will.

He moves to a deeper analysis of unconsciousness as a continual spectrum, like a fibrous many-coloured cord developing through space through which a current of feeling flows changing with respect to and reflecting in the many colours of the spectrum (operadic in a sense, if you know what an operad is). The fibrous many-coloured cord has an intrinsic and several analytic interpretations in the form of juxtaposed states, internal forces, and of duration.

We can hope to get closer to at an intuition of the intrinsic understanding by a multitude of different conceptual imagery exhibiting parts of the behaviour of the unconscious. But these images will be symbols, mere substitutes for aspects of the object they are studying. Combining these different images produces only a superficial, analytic representation of the object.

He makes the point we observed in the previous post that analysis changes or shows "deformed" aspects of the object under study, which do not fit exactly. Further, if we start with a concept and try to reconstruct the object through patching together conceptual imagery, different and arbitrary weight is placed on the different concepts. This is an instance of the "choice of perspective" implicit in analysis.

He attributes to different choices of weight of the concepts, different schools of philosophy. The goal of metaphysics however, is to transcend the conglomeration of weighted concepts to reach full intuitive grasp. Psychology resolves the self by analysis, dissolving the self into sensations, feelings, ideas, etc., which are studied separately.

This is the kind of arbitrary weighing of concepts he talks about. Even still, concepts are important in achieving intuitive grasp, not to mention for the science of psychology. But in psychology, the specifics of personality must be ignored in order to form concepts sufficiently general for psychology. This is no less very analogous to the way an polynomial equation "cuts out" a space of solutions, which is only an aspect of the full space. The point about deformation above is that is that if you imagine your aspect to be a curve inscribed on a surface, the curve may not be inscribed in the surface exactly but be only in a neighbourhood of it. The concepts must be truly fluid and ready to be molded and changed to have any hope to "get at" intuition.

(It is certainly helpful to think of the non-reduced schemes of Grothendieck if you understand those.)

Given the intuition, it is possible to inscribe an analytic concept within the intuition, but to begin with, as he points out, a sketch of a building in Paris does not allow one ti assemble Paris, i.e., the other way around is not possible, and it is a common mistake of rationalism and empiricism to think that it is. While empiricism asserts there is nothing but the multiplicity of different impressions, rationalism purports to assemble concepts into an intuition of the thing itself.

This insight is treated in mathematics by saying that any given object presents a model for the object under study, and that the actual object may be seen as some kind of identification of all these models up to a notion of equivalence that preserves what we see as innate to the intuition. The homotopy type of a space is its equivalence class up to homotopy, or, with less jargon, two spaces are considered to denote the same homotopy type if they may be deformed into each other.

(He begins to distinguish ways of being as forms of concepts in themselves: unity and multiplicity. An object under study may be a synthesis of both unity and multiplicity, but analysis sees only parts at any one time.)