Can Bohmian Quantum Information Help us to Understand Consciousness?

Don Nelson Page

Tonatiu Campos-García

This essay develops a post-Bohmian framework for understanding reality as an informational and computational ontology rather than a material substrate. Building on David Bohm’s implicate order, it proposes that consciousness functions as the active rendering mechanism of reality—transforming quantum potential into phenomenological form through observation and interaction. Integrating insights from quantum mechanics, neuroscience, and systems theory, the text argues that perception operates as an adaptive interface, not as a transparent window to an external world. The concept of computational efficiency is introduced to reinterpret physical constraints—such as the speed of light and quantum indeterminacy—as expressions of systemic optimization within a larger simulation-like architecture. Further, the essay explores how biological systems act as distributed rendering nodes that stabilize reality through coherent interpretation, and how altered states of consciousness reveal the underlying informational substrate by temporarily bypassing perceptual filters. Ethically, the work redefines human responsibility: consciousness is not a passive byproduct of the universe, but its active co-creator. The act of perception is thus both epistemic and ontological—a process through which the universe continuously updates itself. This post-Bohmian synthesis aims to reconcile the experiential, physical, and informational dimensions of existence under a unified paradigm of conscious computation.

Enrique Colomés, Guillermo Albareda, Zhen Zhan +4 more

This chapter discusses how Bohmian mechanics can help us to understand and model the behavior of novel electron device prototypes at the nanometer and picosecond scales. It shows that how Bohmian mechanics can help us in the understanding and designing the upcoming electron device prototypes. The chapter also discusses how Bohmian mechanics can help us to study many-particle quantum electron transport phenomena in nanoelectronic devices and an important advantage of Bohmian mechanics: its ability to treat many-particle systems. It explains the birth of the electronics and its evolution towards nanoelectronics. The chapter also shows that the Bohmian perspective provides useful tools when dealing with the continuous measurement of the electrical current in nanodevices. The former appears at nonzero temperature, where the thermal agitation causes the occupation of energy states to fluctuate. The practical expressions for the computation of the current fluctuations within Bohmian mechanics are quite simple.

Sheldon Goldstein

Richard A. Mould

Basil J. Hiley, Paavo Pylkkänen

Abstract The paper proposes that quantum theory implies a radically new notion of matter which has not been properly understood before David Bohm’s groundbreaking work. Bohm proposed that the fundamental particles of physics (such as electrons) are not merely pushed around mechanically by classical forces but are also able to respond to information. Information is thus assumed to be an objective commodity which can exist independently of the human mind and which actively guides or instructs physical processes. This notion of active information also applies in computational, biological and psychological phenomena, thus helping us to understand how the mental and the physical sides of reality are related. It may even help us to understand the nature of conscious experience. The latter part of the paper considers the deeper mathematical and physical background of quantum theory and suggests that we need to revise our basic assumptions about quantum objects, such as the role of the wave function.