possibility of continuous observation. That is why I said it is better to regard a particle not as a permanent entity but as an instanta-neous event. Sometimes these events form chains that give the illusion of permanent beings—but only in particular circum-stances and only for an extremely short period of time in every single case.” (Erwin Schrödinger, op. cit., pp. 131-132).

Despite this warning, for metaphysically-inclined philosophers, quantum phe-nomena and their quasi-objects present the perfect opportunity to give free rein to their ontological imagination. The new status of quantum “objects’” suggests replacing substances and states with process and events without support: grins without cats. Lewis Carroll thus joins the conversation, soon accompanied by Julio Cortazar, Alfred Whitehead, and Bergson again. The latter explained that real change—qualitative change, irreducible to spatial movement—alone possesses true substance: it is more substantial, in fact, than the “something” supposedly changing by moving through successive states. The core of all becoming, he claimed, what accounts for its cohesion and robustness, is precisely memory—but memory internal to change, i.e., the past’s continuation and preservation within the present. Following another metaphysical thread, we might identify the Cheshire cat itself as a bundle of smiles, meows, purrs, and backs-archs, forming a bouquet of “tropes” or “abstract particulars” detached from any subject. Whatever solution we adopt, the ultimate question remains whether we can apprehend grins purely adjectivally or adverbially rather than attributively. Returning to Wonderland, we must forget the cat and simply say “it smiles” as we say “it rains”: up in the tree, smiling occurs, and perhaps a cat materializes around it... Similarly, regarding the double-slit black box where particles behave wave-like, we should say interference occurs, and wavelike behavior generally, in a way that confers inevitable indeterminacy to measurement, without pronouncing on the phenom-enon’s intrinsic nature, which as we said truly is neither wave nor particle.

Memory poses a problem of the same kind. We fix it by recalling it, with varying clarity and detail, thereby giving it a new profile: collapse of the mnemonic wave packet... In reality, as psychologists and neuroscientists agree, we reconstruct it entirely, contributing to its “reconsolidation,” potentially impoverishing it or dis-tilling it to an outline that may be handled by semantic memory modules. It’s as if memory constitutes itself while projecting into multiple distinct self-versions. But again, how do we account for its individuality? As suggested earlier, conventional connectionist descriptions notably miss an important feature of memories, namly their distinctive cadence, the temporal physiognomy or profile that allows them to mesh with the continuity of psychic life without completely losing their singular-ity. Before being recovered as an image or diluting as a schematic idea, memory first develops and preserves itself in the action itself, when it occurs: it’s inherently linked with the temporal individuating principle that Bergson recognizes in the dynamics of duration, and consequently in every thread of experience, insofar as it is lived in duration. Change comes with an internal memory that saves it from the fleeting punctuality of the moment, gives it resilience and a form of super-existence evidenced by its second life as memory. This led Bergson to the startling claim that memory forms not afterward, once perception has passed, but simultaneously with it: this contemporaneity of memory and perception is illustrated by the fascinating “déjà vu” anomaly, which he describs as a “memory of the present” (Henri Bergson, “Memory of the present and false recognition,” in Mind-Energy, New York, Henry Holt, 1920).The principle of past preserving and continuing itself in the present explains why what is in the making, enduring real change, itself doesn’t pass away, precisely because it is not formed in the instant, or moment by moment, but in an uninterrupted, continuous flow of duration. Only the present passes; the past doesn’t pass but preserves itself. Carried away by these startling claims, Bergson is very close to dissolving the problem altogether: