[The following is summary. My commentary is in brackets.]
Henri Bergson
Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience
Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness
Chapter III. "The Organization of Conscious States. Free Will."
Chapitre III. "De l'organisation des états de conscience : la liberté."
Part LII: Real Duration and Prediction
"La durée réelle et la contingence"
§119 Confusion arising from prediction of astronomical phenomena
Peviously Bergson discussed a third fallacy that determinists commit. They argue we may predict the future-course of a person's mental-states and decisions, if we know everything about them up-to now. Bergson used his wavy line diagram to show that this involves a spatialization of time. But duration is not spatial at all.
Bergson now explains a possible reason we might think that we can make predictions. Astronomy does it all the time. They can foretell eclipses many centuries into the future. [See §71 for a previous discussion of astronomical prediction]. Although this is true, astronomers are not predicting someone's future voluntary actions. Bergson claims that "the future of the material universe, althought contemporaneous with the future of a conscious being, has no analogy to it" (193a). And there is something else that Bergson will explain later: the reasons why we are able to predict astronomical events are the same causes for why we cannot predict someone's future free choices.
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