Matt: Hi, Victoria! How are you doing this morning?
Victoria: Good. Well, it’s evening for me here in England.
Matt: Right. Well, really lovely to connect with you.
Victoria: Yes!
Matt: I wish I had had more time before our chat to finish reading your entire dissertation, but the chapter I did read is the favorite thing I’ve read in a while.
Victoria: So glad. Yeah, well, I’m so grateful to be on here with you, and also for what you do in terms of the philosophical community. It’s wonderful to have this safe space where the peculiar synthesis of the Platonian-Bergsonian metaphysic is recognized as the superior apotheosis of philosophy.
Matt: That’s right—yeah—and we’re going to amplify that today, I hope. I usually just launch into these things. I don’t know if you had any questions about how to proceed, or I can just start asking you questions and digging into this thesis of yours. Does that sound good?
Victoria: That sounds good. I think we’ll probably have lots to chat about.
Matt: Yeah. So, you know, I’ve definitely read Bergson—certainly he’s a major influence on Whitehead—but my home base is Whitehead’s philosophy, and, like Bergson, this representational theory of mind is one of Whitehead’s main targets. He builds on the ground that Bergson lays out. But let’s back up. I’m curious: why did memory become such an important topic for you? Why did you decide to write a dissertation on that?
Victoria: Such a great question. I was an undergraduate studying philosophy at Columbia, and I was reading the Confessions for the second time when I was about twenty years old. I was really drawn to Augustine’s philosophy, especially his philosophizing in the latter half of the Confessions, in Books 10 and 11, where he starts to discuss memory and time. For some reason, around that time I had also started learning about Bergson independently of my courses, and Matter and Memory was the first Bergson book I picked up. It’s taken me about ten years to really master that text because it’s so complicated—complicated in its simplicity. I was struck by the similarity of these two philosophies: memory is pinpointed by both as a central aspect of psychological, conscious life. All the contemporary philosophy of mind readings I was doing didn’t even really account for memory in the ontology of the human mind—everything was reduced to knowledge, beliefs, perceptions, maybe intentionality in a Dennettian sense. But memory—the continuity of our mental life—had been almost entirely left out of contemporary discourse. And if Bergson’s thesis in Matter and Memory is true, that memory in some way holds the key to the hard problem of consciousness, then surely it deserves more attention from philosophers.
Matt: Yeah—yeah—or the key to getting us out of that false problem, right?
Victoria: Exactly.
Matt: You say at the beginning of Chapter 2 of your dissertation, which focuses on the hard problem and the computational model of mind, that some readers may find this a digressive chapter, while for others it may be the most important of all. Granted, I haven’t read the rest yet, but I’m pretty sure this is the key: understanding how Bergson’s account of perception and memory—over a hundred years ago (Matter and Memory came out in 1896, right?)—is still ahead of philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Similarly, predictive processing is all the rage nowadays, but Helmholtz laid that out almost 150 years ago, and much of today’s philosophy of mind seems to rehash old problems in scientific garb with fancy fMRI images. I’m having trouble knowing where to start—maybe with this localization thesis. Many academics and ordinary folks just assume memories are located somewhere in the brain and that perception is some kind of representation going on inside the skull. Why is that so wrong? We’ll scratch the surface and dig deeper, but why is that so wrong?
Victoria: I think it’s interesting how you bring up the constant catching-up. Scientific facts crash like a tidal wave upon the human race, and thinkers sort through the debris; ideas fall on that shore. It’s not until hundreds of years later that we process these things properly. Similarly, contemporary cognitive science and neuroscience reconceptualize the working hypotheses of eighteenth-century philosophy—Locke and Hume’s kind of atomistic psychology, itself a reincarnation of Democritus and Lucretius. We cleave the mind into distinct entities and force ourselves to imagine they’re united by a priori laws in this container we call “mind.” That container is really just an abstraction of what used to be called “soul.” So the complexity is progressively attenuated. Concepts mold how we think. Nowadays you’ll see a TED talk where a neuroscientist says, “When you remember, your brain wants this.” Hold on—the brain doesn’t want anything! The brain’s not a human being. I actually like Wittgensteinian ordinary-language philosophy sometimes, precisely for pointing out that such sentences are nonsense. There’s no clarity on where empirical observation ends and metaphysical presuppositions begin. Part of my effort was to look at Bergson’s theory in light of contemporary neuroscience: have we made progress? Empirically, yes—but nobody is clear on when observation stops and metaphysical hypothesizing begins. That’s where philosophers should come in.
Matt: Yeah, we have our work cut out for us. Popularizations of neuroscience put us in a place where it seems absurd to question that thoughts occur inside the skull. If you argue otherwise, you’re labeled anti-scientific or “woo.” You mention the BRAIN Initiative that got a billion dollars of funding; when Obama announced it, he joked that maybe we’d finally understand what’s wrong in the brain so Republicans and Democrats don’t like each other. Ha-ha, but the stakes are high: how we understand consciousness shapes our politics and culture. If we reduce the human being to computational processes, we go down a dystopian path. So uncovering where science merges with bad metaphysics is crucial. I hope we can at least give people hesitation before accepting “mind is brain.”
Victoria: I definitely think that idea is dying. People our age and younger aren’t buying into the Four Horsemen atheistic Neil deGrasse Tyson–Brian Cox description of the universe. They’re into manifestation and astrology, spiritual but not religious—partly a reaction to the mechanistic view of the human person. Where philosophy matters is offering a rational, rigorous alternative. The alternative isn’t blanket panpsychism or quantum-entanglement-bro takes. People need a middle path rooted in a deep tradition, drawing on science while honoring mind with a clear positive definition. In contemporary analytic philosophy, reductive eliminative materialism is recognized as failed; most gravitate toward property dualism, emergentism, non-reductive physicalism. These positions admit we’ll never achieve a one-to-one reduction of mind to brain. So we need grounding principles that unite physical and mental without reducing the latter. We’re at a turning point; it’s an interesting time for rigorous middle-path metaphysics.
Matt: Let’s dig into some of your arguments. The information-processing metaphor of mind treats neural connections as both analog and somehow digital code. Can you unpack the problem with this metaphor that forgets it’s a metaphor—that the brain can achieve digital information processing?
Victoria: One of the greatest conceptual revolutions of the past century is Claude Shannon’s theory of information. He applied it to electronic communication systems, engineering between transmitter and receiver. Since then it’s been imputed to physics, computation, and underlies LLM AI tech. Physicists debate whether information is an immaterial principle or reducible to physical goings-on—the “it-from-bit” debate. In computers, hardware innovations enable software advances; ignoring the hardware–software reciprocity leads to ultra-abstract ideas of mind as symbolic software. In neuroscience we observe analog voltage and neurotransmitters, but leaping from that to “information” in a Shannon sense is a hypothesis, not an observation.
Matt: Did you see the Meta-funded study in France using epilepsy patients’ electrodes? They claim LLMs learn language like the human brain. But Meta has vested interests in collapsing that difference to fuel the AI hype bubble. You cite J. J. Gibson as a late-century inheritor of Bergson who clarifies that Shannon information isn’t the semantic information humans deal in. What’s the difference, and how does the metaphor slip into mistaken concreteness?
Victoria: Gibson’s phrase “information pickup” is unfortunate because of its baggage, but he repudiates the idea of coded inputs that must be decoded in the theater of consciousness. He resituates perception in the biological–ecological domain: the animal perceives and acts in its environment simultaneously. Experiments like the visual-cliff show infants perceive affordances directly. Whether one starts from realism or idealism, the representational model yields problems—either the external world is delusive or perception is forever inaccurate. Gibson avoids this by grounding perception in organism–environment dynamics.
Matt: You mention the idea that perception is a controlled hallucination, as Anil Seth says—an idea going back to Helmholtz. A Bergson contemporary, Hippolyte Taine, used “veridical hallucination.” Neuroscience seems a century behind philosophy. The success of Shannon information migrates metaphorically into consciousness studies. Whitehead called this the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Maybe we can talk about LLMs and transformer models: they train on orders of magnitude more text than any human could read, yet people conflate statistical word prediction with thinking. Bergson distinguishes between thinking activity and language as the result of that activity. How does that disabuse us of the idea that ChatGPT will wake up next month?
Victoria: The conflation stems from cognitive science and analytic philosophy, which take language as the best we can know and the paradigm of thought. Thought is assumed to be symbolic and grammar-like. Bergson escapes this trap by viewing mind dynamically—as activities, directions, tendencies. If you look back at the original movement of consciousness, it’s pre-linguistic. Language marks the termination of thought, grasping at what was fluid. Bergson surely drew on Plotinus, who spoke of nous and logos. What happens psychologically mirrors cosmological procession. Seeing mind as movement lets Bergson treat words as solidifications that emerge afterward, not the thinking itself—a process found throughout nature.
Matt: Let’s stay on Plotinus’s influence. I just had a dialogue with Jack Bagby and Pedro Brea about Bergson’s lectures on Plotinus. Where do you feel Bergson transforms Plotinus? Plotinus thinks in emanation, with a return to the One, but Bergson is an evolutionary thinker—that seems a key difference, though there are isomorphisms in their theories of perception and the logos mediating nous and the embodied world. Can you unpack how Bergson translates Plotinus into an evolutionary mode of thought, if you read it that way—or maybe you see it differently?
Victoria: No, I do read it that way. I think that—gosh, I love this topic so much; I’m so glad you brought it up. Yes, I read Plotinus through an evolutionary lens. It all comes back to restoring duration to the world and to our vision of things. For Bergson, it’s always about whether duration is in the picture or not. Plotinus is, for him, both the greatest thinker and the most frustrating one: he gets there in so many ways, yet he remains indebted to that very Greek need to negate the reality of time and subject it to the eternal, unchanging form. At one point, Bergson even calls Plotinus the only real psychologist of the ancient world. Plotinus had this way of penetrating metaphysics through psychological experience and is truly the father of that method—one that later Maine de Biran and Bergson himself take up. To make sense of it, you have to restore a few things. First, restore duration to the world—acknowledge that the processes of the created world are real, that history unfolds without being predetermined, according to radical novelty. Second, restore personality to the human soul. The human person is edified, expressed, and co-creates herself within the fabric of duration; she cannot be reduced to an abstract soul, some primordial intelligible soup or cosmological world soul. We must guard the reality of the individual, and that is done through memory—through reflection on historical memory, not just metaphysical “pure” memory. This is where Augustine becomes interesting and where Christian thought brings a revolution. Third, replace the metaphysic of procession with a metaphysic of creation—that is, adopt a voluntaristic view of the cosmos’ origin, where a will or impetus stands behind the whole. Some interpreters of Plotinus—Jean Trouillard, for instance—read him closer to a metaphysic of creation. Others, like Émile Bréhier, find a middle ground: it’s not all mechanistic procession; there’s something in the superabundance of the One. Plotinus defines that superabundance as generosity—an overflowing. Overflowing implies a natural necessity, yet generosity evokes love, the pinnacle image of creative élan.
I have a hunch everything about this question is contained in a footnote of Creative Evolution—the Mitchell translation, Chapter II. Bergson is describing how, when we let our attention drift while listening to someone, speech scatters into individual words, and between those words we begin seeing complex relations. He uses this as an analogy for how, from real matter, we get extension that can dissolve toward geometrical extensity—“the tendency toward geometry.” In that fascinating, often-overlooked footnote, he writes:
“Our comparison does no more than develop the content of the term Logos as Plotinus understands it. For while the Logos of this philosopher is a generating and informing power—an aspect or fragment of the psychê—Plotinus sometimes speaks of it as a discourse. … Ancient philosophy did not see what consequences would result from mathematics: for Plotinus, like Plato, erected mathematical essences into absolute realities. Above all, it suffered itself to be deceived by the purely superficial analogy of duration with extension, treating the one as it treated the other, regarding change as the degradation of immutability, and the sensible as a fall from the intelligible.”
Bergson says, in effect, “We’re just developing Plotinus’s idea of the Logos—showing how extension emerges at the last stage of procession; therefore mathematics, understood as Euclidean geometry, belongs at that final stage.” Extension cannot be contained in the One or in the interpenetrating intelligible realm. That’s where Plotinus misplaces mathematics. Mathematics cannot be a propaedeutic ascent to the Absolute, as it is in Plato’s Meno, if we look honestly at perception as a tendency toward non-being, with pure geometrical extensity closest to non-being. Plotinus makes that mistake because he sees duration on the model of space.
Matt: Wow—thanks for pointing out that footnote; it’s really helpful.
Victoria: Sorry, that was a big take!
Matt: I’m glad you got excited about that connection. So, to go back to the brain and the idea that perception is some kind of information encoding: what is it about Bergson’s notion of duration—the continuity of the flow of becoming—that makes it impossible to reduce perception or memory to a series of informational states in the brain?
Victoria: It’s everything. Bergson’s theory of duration prevents us from breaking any transformational reality—whether consciousness or external change—into static snapshots and then patching them together to create continuity. You always need continuity itself to move you from state 1 to state 2. That’s why his idea of the two kinds of multiplicity in Time and Free Will is revolutionary. There are intensive, internal parts and extensive, external, juxtaposed parts. Intensive parts—states of consciousness—present a reality that isn’t a pure unity, because distinguishable elements exist. Right now I’m talking to you, thinking of what I was doing earlier; words, thoughts, memories all coexist. I can look back on my day and divide it however I like, yet the flow between events is mutual adherence: nothing really begins or ends; everything bleeds into everything else. That’s characteristic of change—and change is fundamental to life, thought, perception, memory, and even inorganic matter. Once you break change into parts, you can never reconstitute the original transformation. Neuroscience faces two problems. First, it breaks brain activity into “brain states,” though the activity never actually stops. Second, it tries to map those hypothesized brain states onto hypothesized external states. If the brain encodes information, scrambles it, and re-presents it, it needs something static to encode—some snapshot—but perception isn’t static. Both perceiving and brain processing are continuous, so boundaries like “perception 1” versus “perception 2,” or “encoding 1” versus “encoding 2,” become increasingly arbitrary the more literally one takes that metaphor.
Matt: Those two kinds of multiplicity tempt me to return to Plotinus’s Logos: a generative process modeled on embryogenesis, where parts differentiate from a whole. In a mechanistic approach, change is rearrangement of already existing bodies in container-space; in an organic approach, change is growth—creative advance. Before I utter a sentence, I have a vague unity of an idea that then articulates into subject, predicate, and distinct words. The organic metaphor resists translation into an engineering command-control model, which imagines an aggregate of ready-made parts. When we lose the organic metaphor and adopt the mechanistic one, we lose duration, creative process, and wholeness as the basis of thinking. If wholeness exists at all, mechanistic thought sees it as built up from parts—an inversion of the Plotinian-Bergsonian view. These background metaphors inform all scientific research. When we forget the metaphors we’re working within, it’s easy to mistake analogy for evidence. The computational model of mind—software running on brain hardware—gets treated as a research discovery when it’s actually the presupposition inaugurating the research.
Victoria: Exactly. Analogy is the philosopher’s domain. Bergson thinks philosophers should use analogy, but not smuggle it into scientific formulations without awareness. Scientists can be great philosophers—Renaissance figures once did both experimental and conceptual work—but in disciplines like neuroscience, the philosophical dimension often goes unrecognized. The same holds for theoretical physics, much of which is imagined behind a desk, as I do here. Your point about the organic analogy is key. For Plotinus, the seed is the image of life: a single intensive unity containing dynamic relations that, through its potential relation to soil, sun, water, flourishes into the multiplicity of the plant. That’s why Bergson wrote Creative Evolution. He saw that the mechanistic worldview since the Renaissance neglects biology, which is essential for grasping complex philosophical questions about mind and cosmos. The biological realm—evolutionary, creative causality—is the antithesis of mechanism. Bergson doesn’t say the mechanistic view is entirely wrong. We need it for technological progress. He notes that abstraction is crucial for planning, deduction, logical reasoning—for breaking down a perceptual scene, forming hypotheses, acting on the world. Matter itself lends some support: inorganic corporeality tends toward exteriority, extension, instantaneity, dispersion—toward geometric multiplicity. That’s why mathematical treatments often succeed with matter. The problem is applying that mathematical-mechanistic model up the scale of being—to dynamical systems, to organisms, and finally to mind. Biologists today move away from statistical algorithmic views of evolution toward qualitative, holistic accounts of organismic agency—almost Whiteheadian process biology. The mechanistic model already strains at the level of life; at the level of mind it becomes outright false. Documenting mind with that worldview leads to thinkers like Turing and Hume who offer impoverished accounts of thought—accounts that don’t come close to the richness found in a two-year-old holding a leaf or a poet describing a single feeling.
Matt: Yeah, yeah, that reminds me of one of my favorite lines from Whitehead—I think it’s in Science and the Modern World—where he says some people express themselves as though brains, sense-organs, and nerves are the only real things in an entirely imaginary world. Again, he’s criticizing these predictive-processing, free-energy-principle understandings of consciousness as controlled hallucination and pointing out that the brain itself—an image within the field of images—couldn’t be the producer of images. It’s such a violent abstraction to rip ourselves from our embodied experience of the world and imagine we can explain it all with information processing. In these information ontologies, the physical world itself is taken to be “made of information,” yet Shannon information is merely a way of measuring something. Saying the physical world is made of information is like saying it’s made of meters or inches. When you put it that way the absurdity is obvious.
Victoria: And it’s equally absurd because these people call themselves materialists, yet they end up speaking like idealists—almost a Stoic “materialism” that, in modern terms, isn’t materialism at all because Stoic matter is basically spiritual.
Matt: Right. Back to Plotinus for a second. When Bergson lectures on Plotinus, he notes we exist suspended between two infinities: the infinity of the One and the infinity of matter—both unlimited and unthinkable. For Plotinus that difference is crucial; their common unthinkability doesn’t make them equivalent. I resist the hierarchical, emanationist metaphysics—much as I love Plotinus—because I favor an evolutionary view and don’t want physicality to be a mere fall that must be escaped to reach a truth without materiality. In light of the embodied-cognition movement—enactive, extended, etc.—is there tension with Plotinus’s view of matter as privation? Does Bergson help us see matter not as “nothing” but as a real source of resistance that allows the élan vital to take shape and proliferate? Where do you stand on materiality and embodiment vis-à-vis Plotinus?
Victoria: I definitely adopt Bergson’s creative metaphysic—a metaphysic of creation rather than pure procession—implying that the products of creation, the world itself, are not merely a diminution of the One’s essence. There is intentional organization, so the world matters, and the individual human person matters; actions ripple through the whole and survive beyond death. Bergson’s project of defining the soul in terms of memory restores personality at the core of the person. Plotinus recognizes memory as immaterial, but his “pure” memory isn’t personal. Once reunited with the One, he asks, who cares if you remember spouse or children? There’s something in that, yet it feels wrong—it negates the concrete reality of the world. With Bergson—and Augustine, who re-infuses Platonism with personalism after the Christian anthropological revolution—the individual life story and actions truly matter. Plotinus needs incarnation, and his methodology needs integration of scientific data: biology, observation, facts. That’s a Bergsonian innovation—philosophy interpreting empirical data. Plotinus still matters today because he clearly sees dynamic, intensive, invisible realities. These are empirically obvious: discoverable a priori and a posteriori, in psychology, cosmology, biology. Expressing them relies on analogy and poetic theory, but we can discern them—discern the dynamic, spiritual nature of mind. For late antique thinkers, denying invisible realities would have seemed silly.
Matt: In the twentieth century, cognitive science—behaviorism first, then computationalism—dismissed introspection. Computational cognitive science still feels like behaviorism; neurons replace the organism as the black box. Phenomenology, coming from Husserl, focuses on generic structures of experience, not the personal dimension you emphasize.
Victoria: Exactly. Phenomenology studies phenomena qua phenomena. Bergson isn’t a phenomenologist because he studies matter and memory as brute reality—direct access to reality, not mere appearances. Husserl often addresses a generic subject, whereas Bergson speaks directly to me, guiding my attention, which is why people love reading him and why he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. He gives us tools—perceiving everything sub specie durationis. Duration is his introspective method: retrieve the original impulsion of thought as pure, uninterrupted continuity—symphonic adherence—as a starting point for inner exploration.
Matt: It’s empowering when a philosopher tells you to trust experience. Neuroscience says experience is hallucinatory; we need objectifying models of the brain as information processor. That robs personhood of ontological and spiritual significance and misleads science down a blind alley.
Victoria: Bergson jokes that anyone who hasn’t taken philosophy wouldn’t doubt the table before them: perception and object are one. Cartesian doubt is useful pedagogically, but stopping there would be a loss for philosophy—Pascal’s “not worth an hour’s trouble.” Yes, perceptions mislead, but we deepen experience rather than escape it; there’s nothing beyond experience. Even physicists wrestling with black-hole equations never leave mind—they dynamically engage with symbols. Experience can’t be measured or reduced to quantitative laws, yet it’s layered and rigorously explorable. Thought, memory, understanding, will—these dynamic activities can be articulated, restoring selfhood.
Matt: I’ve only a few minutes left. May I ask something personal? Beyond academia, where do you find spiritual orientation?
Victoria: It’s a long story, but: while studying philosophy as an undergraduate I became terribly ill. I spent a year in and out of the hospital, on death’s door several times, with fourteen major surgeries. In that immense suffering I felt transfigured—most spiritual when most sick. I sensed a presence of love; everything was beautiful and okay. I recovered, though still the archetypal “sickly philosopher,” but that experience forged my worldview. I’m passionate about restoring a Christian personalist philosophy—rescuing people from vague spiritualism and orienting them toward a personal Creator and a personal soul that survives. My goal is to articulate a reality that is neither atheism nor impersonal spiritualism, grounding metaphysics in personhood.
Matt: Are you noticing a broader shift? Young people—especially in the U.S. and U.K.—seem to be returning to Christianity. Even some public atheists are converting.
Victoria: Oh, yes. Everyone I know under forty is “into the universe” or some spirituality; everyone over fifty seems still an atheist. I’m not a political philosopher and avoid the cultural-war side of that movement; for me it’s about restoring individual purpose—what gets you out of bed, what it feels like to see sunlight on a river or hug a child. Metaphysics must accommodate that richness, not reduce it to the latest cultural fashion.
Matt: So much more to discuss. I can’t wait to finish your thesis—Chapter 2 was brilliant. I’m heading to a conference of AI accelerationists; now I’m well equipped with new arguments, thanks to you. We should talk again.
Victoria: The dissertation should be published—hopefully by January. Meanwhile I’m working on the will: a dynamic metaphysics of creative will and its relation to human creativity, especially amid AI debates. Does intelligence exist without will? No. Will is dynamic spiritual activity—yet philosophy of mind hardly talks about it anymore. I hope to publish more, though academic careers start notoriously slowly.
Matt: Glad to hear it. I’m sharing your work already. Thank you—this was so much fun. Let’s do it again.
Victoria: Definitely. Thanks so much, Matt. Bye!
Matt: Take care—have a good night.
Victoria: You too. Cheers.
Footnotes2Plato 
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