Bergson, Lived Experience, and the Myth of the Given Ray Brassier

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Self-transcribed from the recording's audio/video with Whisper ASR, then drawn from the frozen curation of the CCRU oral archive. The identifiers below fingerprint the exact source transcript files.

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Adjudicated APPROVED 2026-07-11 (basis: stage-1 acceptance ruling — lane unknown approved for opus-only hosting; mp3 tier deferred pending a disk volume). Series: standalone. Source: audio original (.mp3).

Timestamped map

These jump targets come from timestamps preserved in the source transcript, so they work as navigational anchors rather than editorially invented section labels. Timings are approximate — they mark where a passage begins, not exact word timing.

• 00:00:00

  So today I'm going to talk about, my talk is going to carry on some themes from Martin's talk, because I'm going to start off by talking about Bergson, and what Bergson means by experience and the experience of duration specifically. Okay, and what I want to do now, so first of all, the paper has, when I started this…

• 00:06:50

  So basically, Bergson proclaims, you know, as is well known by now, a provocative reversal of Platonism. It's not being that is degraded into appearing, but appearing that is being. It's not the sensible, the sensible is not the occlusion of the intelligible, the intelligible is the occultation of the sensible. Being…

• 00:13:08

  So, once again, Bergson claims that he is simply describing the phenomena, the data of consciousness, the data of lived experience, without any kind of conceptual transposition or importation. In the first case, you will find a difference between S and S-dash. S and S-dash are two sensations. In the first case…

• 00:20:11

  And makes it seem as if the succession of conscious states could be understood in spatial terms. As a kind of, you know, the linear unfolding of a physical movement. And this is what Bergson will famously denounce as the kinematographical illusion. But what, so spatialization shows that the attempt to characterize…

• 00:27:06

  And this is the true empiricism is the real metaphysics. The work is one of extreme difficulty because not one of the ready-made conceptions that thought uses for its daily operations which works only according to measure sees itself obliged to make an absolutely new effort for which for each new object it studies. It…

• 00:40:28

  is two things he's going to challenge the claim that he's going to challenge classic accounts of the nature of thinking and of the nature of sensing he's going to challenge the claim that for instance that intentionality or directedness is the mark of the mental now you can understand the relationship between mind…

• 00:51:32

  So what is going on then when someone has a sensation? Because the claim is that. So Sellers asks the following question, so what is common to A, seeing that X over there is red, it's looking to one that X over there is red, and it's looking to one that there is a red object over there. These, what's interesting about…

• 00:58:50

  of the particular image and recognize that in this non-particulate image the qualities of sense are a dimension of natural process which occurs only in connection with those complex physical processes which when cut up into particles in terms of those features which are the least common denominators of physical…