In this paper, I aim to clarify the unconscious ideologies and attitudes held by physicists through Prigogine's work. Prigogine was an outstanding chemist and physicist who made significant contributions to the development of non-equilibrium thermodynamics. At the same time, he extended his ideas beyond physics into the humanities, engaging in an interdisciplinary exploration of scientific and philosophical thought. Due to his unique career, Prigogine's reception has been deeply divided. This study highlights his intellectual endeavors to formulate two distinct agnostic attitudesーone held by dynamicists and the other by Prigogine himself. Building on this formulation, I examine how physics has been spatialized, drawing on the philosophy of Bergson. Finally, I explore an alternative path that Prigogine might have envisionedーthe temporalization of physicsーin a broader context to extend and revitalize his philosophy.

One of the key objectives in the study of time in physics is to understand the emergence of macroscopic irreversibility from microscopic reversible dynamics. Prigogine proposed a worldview based on the probabilistic picture, in which irreversibility appears as a fundamental property of the dynamical system itself. This idea was formulated through the use of the complex spectral representation. On the other hand, contemporary physics in the study of isolated quantum systems with a small number of degrees of freedom explains irreversibility from the trajectory picture by using the concept of typicality. This paper reviews Prigogine's theory of irreversibility and compares it with the concept of typicality. By placing Prigogine's approach at the center, it provides a conceptual overview of how irreversibility is treated in physics, focusing on the contrast between probabilistic and trajectory pictures.

Henri Bergson and Ilya Prigogine, despite divergent starting points, converge on a common indictment of orthodox science: by flattening the present into discrete instants or coarse graining away “irrelevant” micro dynamics, standard models amputate the very thickness that renders time both irreversible and generative. Drawing on Prigogine's complex spectral framework, this paper identifies the temporal structure behind that critique: genuine novelty emerges from the mutual interference of coexisting relaxation modes, each anchored on a distinct timescale. We make the link explicit by mapping Bergson's tripartite temporal architectureーpure memory, imperfective durée, and pure repetitionーonto corresponding bands in the Liouvillian spectrum, thereby installing Prigogine's physics as the dynamical foundation for Bergson's philosophy of time and consciousness. This spectral correspondence allows their distinctive contributions to be integrated into a single paradigm. Prigogine's account of irreversible dynamics in matter and Bergson's philosophy of conscious experience are thus revealed not as separate domains, but as complementary descriptions of a stratified temporal reality. The resulting framework bridges physics, biology, and phenomenology, offering an interdisciplinary foundation for understanding creative temporality.

The author of this paper had worked closely with Ilya Prigogine and had written many joint papers with him on the problem of broken time reversal symmetry. From his perspective, the author will explain the historical evolution of Prigogine's understanding of the dynamical origin of irreversibility based on fundamental laws of physics in thermodynamic systems.