Abstract

In Creative Evolution (1907), Henri Bergson exposed what he termed “cinematographic intelligence”: the intellect’s constitutive tendency to spatialize becoming, substituting discrete frames for the indivisible movement of durée. This critique is not historical, it identifies the ontological grammar of computation itself. AI operates precisely through that substitution: it translates qualitative continuity into quantifiable discreteness, experience into data, intelligence into algorithm. It is the technological fulfilment of the cinematographic mechanism. This special session interrogates the philosophical consequences of that fulfilment. If AI consummates the spatialization of the continuum, what is thereby excluded, and what does the exclusion reveal about the nature of intelligence, time and experience? We invite contributions exploring: the ontological status of computational intelligence; durée as irreducible to algorithmic processing; memory, creativity and qualitative intensity beyond recombination; embodiment and pain as limits of formalization; and the ethical implications of reducing lived temporality to discrete measure.

Description

Henri Bergson’s critique of the intellect was not a rejection of science or technology, but an ontological diagnosis. The intellect is constitutively oriented toward spatialization: it grasps becoming by arresting it, translates quality into quantity, substitutes the homogeneous for the heterogeneous. This is a structural condition, action requires the immobilization of the real into manipulable segments. “Cinematographic intelligence” names exactly this: the decomposition of continuous movement into static images that, reassembled, produce only the simulacrum of motion. Artificial Intelligence represents the most consequential instantiation of this mechanism. Machine learning, neural networks, large language models, all translate qualitative phenomena into discrete, computable units. The computational paradigm does not merely use spatialisation as method; it presupposes it as ontology. Data is not neutral: it results from a prior decision to treat the continuum as decomposable, the qualitative as measurable, durée as reducible to Kronos.The philosophical question is not whether AI “works” but what its functioning presupposes and what it structurally forecloses.

This session brings Bergsonian philosophy into rigorous dialogue with contemporary AI across several axes:

Intelligence and Its Ontological Conditions

Bergson distinguishes the intellect (which spatializes) from intuition (which coincides with durée). What does this imply for the ontological status of artificial intelligence? Can we articulate a concept of intelligence not exhausted by computation?

The Measure and the Measured

AI depends on converting experience into data, recapitulating what Bergson identified as the fundamental confusion of modern thought: mistaking the symbolic reconstruction for the thing itself.

Memory, Creativity, Novelty

Matter and Memory distinguishes habit-memory (sensorimotor repetition) from pure memory (qualitative conservation of lived duration). Machine learning exhibits analogues of the former but has no access to the latter. Can algorithmic output constitute novelty in a philosophically robust sense?

Embodiment, Affectivity, Pain

Among the strongest limits of computational intelligence is the irreducibility of qualitative intensity. Pain is a processual phenomenon: it unfolds in durée, resists extensive measurement, and constitutes an ontological domain inaccessible to formalization.

Temporality, Ethics, Resistance

If computation operates exclusively within spatialized time, what are the consequences for ethical life, which requires projection, memory, responsibility, and temporal continuity? How might Bergson offer resources for an ethics of durée against algorithmic reduction?

We welcome contributions from philosophy, literary studies, cognitive science, computer science, STS, and related fields engaging rigorously with Bergson’s texts while addressing the philosophical, cultural, and ethical stakes of artificial intelligence.