Chapter:

Translator's
Preface

50

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Bergson restarts his footnote counts on each page. So to refer a footnote, one must state page number and footnote number.

Our bold and color highlights follow a code:

• black-bold - important to read if you are just scanning our review
• orange-bold - text ref'd by index pages
• green-bold - we see Bergson suggesting axiomatic memes
• violet-bold - an apparent classical problematic
• blue-bold - we disagree with this text segment while disregarding context of Bergson's overall text
• gray-bold - quotable text
• red-bold - our direct commentary

We feel obliged to answer Bergson's first sentence question, and just do it outright. Light is qualitative, just as we earlier exclaimed in our page 45 comments that sound is qualitative. Light is a quality! Sound is a quality! All quantum actual manifestations of reality are qualities. Why? How? Reality is quantum flux and quantum fluxings' amplitudes qualitative~characteristics are probabilities (i..e., stochastics; see PPL)! Probabilities (i..e., stochastics; see PPL) are n¤t classically, certainly quantifiable.

We didn't know, when we did this review in early 2001, how to burrow deeply into quantum issues of lightings, and Doug isn't sure how much value it adds here nearly a decade later. Just in case you are interested, see Doug's more recent CeodE 2008-2009 efforts on quantum~scintillation. Doug - 4Jun2009.

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"Still more important are the changes of hue which coloured surfaces, and even the pure colours of the spectrum, undergo under the influence of a brighter or dimmer light. As the luminous source is brought nearer, violet takes a bluish tinge, green tends to become a whitish yellow, and red a brilliant yellow. Inversely, when the light is moved away, ultramarine passes into violet and yellow into green; finally, red, green and violet tend to become a whitish yellow. Physicists have remarked these changes of hue for some time; ⁽¹⁾ but what is still more remarkable is that the majority of men do not perceive them, unless they pay attention to them or are warned of them. Having made up our mind, [classically] once for all, to interpret changes of quality as changes of quantity, we begin by asserting that every object has its own peculiar colour, definite and invariable. And when the hue of objects tends to become yellow or blue, instead of saying that we see their colour change under the influence of an increase or diminution of light, we assert that the colour remains the same but that our sensation of luminous intensity increases or diminishes. We thus substitute once more, for the qualitative impression received by our consciousness, the quantitative interpretation given by our [SOMwitted CTM] understanding."

Note (1): Rood, Modern Chromatics, (1879), pp. 181-187.

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"Helmholtz has described a case of interpretation of the same kind, but still more complicated: "If we form white with two colours of the spectrum, and if we increase or diminish the intensities of the two coloured lights in the same ratio, so that the proportions of the combination remain the same, the resultant colour remains the same although the relative intensity of the sensations undergoes a marked change. . . . This depends on the fact that the light of the sun, which we consider as the normal white light during the day, itself undergoes similar modifications of shade when the luminous intensity varies." ⁽¹⁾

"But yet, if we often judge of variations m the luminous source by the relative changes of hue of

Does experiment prove that we can measure directly our sensations of light?

the objects which surround us, this is no longer the case in simple instances where a single object, e.g. a white surface, passes successively through different degrees of luminosity. We are bound to insist particularly on

this last point. For the physicist speaks of degrees of luminous intensity as of real quantities: and, in fact, he measures them by the photometer. The psychophysicist goes still further: he maintains that our eye itself estimates the intensities of light. Experiments have been attempted, at first by Delbœuf, ⁽²⁾ and afterwards by Lehmann and Neiglick, ⁽³⁾ with the view of constructing a psychophysical formula from the direct measurement of our luminous sensations."

Note (1): Handbuch der Physiologischen Optik, 1st ed. (1867), pp. 318-319.

Note (2): Eléments de psychophysique, Paris, 1883.

Note (3): See the account given of these experiments in the Revue philosophique, 1887, Vol. i, p. 71, and Vol. ii, p. 180.

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"Of these experiments we shall not dispute the result, nor shall we deny the value of photometric processes; but we must see how we have to interpret them.

"Look closely at a sheet of paper lighted e.g. by four candles, and put out in succession one, two,

Photometric experiments. We perceive different shades and afterwards interpret them as decreasing intensities of white light.

three of them. You say that the surface remains white and that its brightness diminishes. But you are aware that one candle has just been put out; or, if you do not know it, you have often observed a similar change in the appearance of a white surface when the illumination was

diminished. Put aside what you remember of your past experiences and what you are accustomed to say of the present ones; you will find that what you really perceive is not a diminished illumination of the white surface, it is a layer of shadow passing over this surface at the moment the candle is extinguished. This shadow is a reality to your consciousness, like the light itself. If you call the first surface in all its brilliancy white, you will have to give another name to what you now see, for it is a different thing: it is, if we may say so, a new shade of white. We have grown accustomed, through the combined influence of our past experience and of physical theories, to regard black as the absence, or at least as the minimum, of luminous sensation, and the successive shades of grey as decreasing intensities of white light."

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In other words, classical science forces its adherents to misinterpret quantum, qualitative reality! Bravo! Bravo Bergson!

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"The meaning of the photometric experiments will now be understood. A candle placed at a

In photometric experiments the physicist compares, not sensations but physical effects.

certain distance from a sheet of paper illuminates it in a certain way: you double the distance and find that four candles are required to produce the same sensation. From this you conclude that if you had doubled the distance

without increasing the intensity of the luminous source, the resultant illumination would have been only one-fourth as bright. But it is quite obvious that you are here dealing with the physical and not the psychological effect. For it cannot be said that you have compared two sensations with one another: you have made use of a single sensation in order to compare two different luminous sources with each other, the second four times as strong as the first but twice as far off. In a word, the physicist never brings in sensations which are twice or three times as great as others, but only identical sensations, destined to serve as intermediaries between two physical quantities which can then be equated with one another. The sensation of light here plays the part of the auxiliary unknown quantity which the mathematician introduces into his calculations, and which is not intended to appear in the final result.

"But the object of the psychophysicist is entirely different: it is the sensation of light itself which he studies, and claims to measure."

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This is a crucial observation. This observation rests at physics very heart and soul, and it is physics' own source of its own imminent failure! Quantum reality, due its process' absolute flux, denies any classical idea or concept of identity! Poincaré understood this, too.

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Of course, Bergson is correct, n¤ two macro actualities can ever be classically 'identical' to one another. Indeed, as we show elsewhere in Quantonics, n¤ two Planck quantons are, in general, 'identical.' See our One is the Onliest Number...

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"As soon as it is proved that two sensations can be equal without being identical, psychophysics will be established. But it is this equality which seems to me open to question: it is easy to explain, in fact, how a sensation of luminous intensity can be said to be at an equal distance from two others.

"Let us assume for a moment that from our birth onwards the growing intensity of a luminous source

In what case differences of colour might be interpreted as differences magnitude.

had always called up in our consciousness, one after the other, the different colours of the spectrum. There is no doubt that these colours would then appear to us as so

many notes of a gamut, as higher or lower degrees in a scale, in a word, as magnitudes. Moreover it would be easy for us to assign each of them its place in the series. For although the extensive cause varies continuously, the changes in the sensation of colour are discontinuous, passing from one shade to another shade. However numerous, then, may be the shades intermediate between the two colours, A and B, it will always be possible to count them in thought, at least roughly, and ascertain whether this number is almost equal to that of the shades which separate B from another colour C. In the latter case it will be said that B is equally distant from A and C, that the contrast is the same on one side as on the other."

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58

"But this will always be merely a convenient interpretation: for although the number of intermediate shades may be equal on both sides, although we may pass from one to the other by sudden leaps, we do not know whether these leaps are magnitudes, still less whether they are equal magnitudes: above all it would be necessary to show that the intermediates which have helped us throughout our measurement could be found again inside the object which we have measured. If not, it is only by a metaphor that a sensation can be said to be an equal distance from two others.

"Now, if the views which we have before enumerated with regard to luminous intensities are

This is just the case with differences of intensity in sensations of light. Delbœuf's underlying postulate.

accepted, it will be recognized that the different hues of grey which Delbœuf displays to us are strictly analogous, for our consciousness, to colours, and that if we declare that a grey tint is equidistant from two other grey tints, it is in the

same sense in which it might be said that orange, for example, is at an equal distance from green and red. But there is this difference, that in all our past experience the succession of grey tints has been produced in connexion with a progressive increase or decrease m illumination. Hence we do for the differences of brightness what we do not think of doing for the differences of colour: we promote the changes of quality into variations of magnitude. Indeed, there is no difficulty here about the measuring, because the successive shades of grey produced by a continuous decrease of illumination are discontinuous, as being qualities, and because we can count approximately the principal intermediate shades which separate any two kinds of. grey."

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"The contrast A B will thus be declared equal to the contrast B C when our imagination, aided by our memory, inserts between A and B the same number of intermediate shades [mean gradations method] as between B and C. It is needless to say that this will necessarily be a very rough estimate. .We may anticipate that it will vary considerably with different persons. Above all it is to be expected that the person will show more hesitation and that the estimates of different persons will differ more widely in proportion as the difference in brightness between the rings A and B is increased, for a more and more laborious effort will be required to estimate the number of intermediate hues. This is exactly what happens, as we shall easily perceive by glancing at the two tables drawn up by Delbœuf. ⁽¹⁾ In proportion as he increases the difference in brightness between the exterior ring and the middle ring, the difference between the numbers oil which one and the same observer or different observers successively fix increases almost continuously from 3 degrees to 94, from 5 to 73, from 10 to 25, from 7 to 40. But let us leave these divergences on one side: let us assume that the observers are always consistent and always agree with one another; will it then be established that the contrasts A B and B C are equal?"

Note (1): Eléments de psychophysique, pp. 61, 69.

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Note, reader, this is 'science's' goal! See Kuhn. Science wants all its practitioners, ideally, to be clones of one another! It is called a "paradigm." Now, consider: Culture... Law... Religion... Sexuality... Truth...

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To accomplish this in light/color theory would be analogous mathematics' Peano induction which assumes 1=1.

Quantum science shows us that Planck quanta are probabilistically unequal to one another, in general. I.e., in general, n¤ two Planck quanta ever have identical phases, n¤r loci, n¤r momenta, and so on...

So, we can now show, anticipating Bergson's results, that Fechner flubbed it.

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