The Undivided Universe: An Ontological Interpretation of Quantum Theory

David Böhm, Basil J. Hiley, Peter Holland

Gregg S. Jaeger

Sheldon Goldstein

This is a review-essay on ``Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics'' by John Bell and ``The Undivided Universe: An Ontological Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics'' by David Bohm and Basil Hiley. The views of these authors concerning the character of quantum theory and quantum reality---and, in particular, their approaches to the issues of nonlocality, the possibility of hidden variables, and the nature of and desiderata for a satisfactory scientific explanation of quantum phenomena---are contrasted, with each other and with the orthodox approach to these issues.

David Böhm, Basil J. Hiley, P. N. Kaloyerou

Paavo Pylkkänen

Western philosophy and science have a strongly dualistic tradition regarding the mental and physical aspects of reality, which makes it difficult to understand their possible causal relations. In recent debates in cognitive neuroscience it has been common to claim on the basis of neural experiments that conscious experiences are causally inefficacious. At the same time there is much evidence that consciousness does play an important role in guiding behavior. The author explores whether a new way of understanding the causal role of mental states and consciousness could be provided by the ontological interpretation of the quantum theory (Bohm and Hiley, Phys. Rep. 144:323–348, 1987; Bohm and Hiley, The undivided universe: An ontological interpretation of quantum theory. Routledge: London, 1993). This interpretation radically changes our notion of matter by suggesting that a new type of active information plays a causal role at the quantum level of reality. The author thus considers to what extent the alleged causal powers of consciousness involve information, and then moves on to consider whether information in (conscious) mental states can be connected to the information at the level of quantum physics. In this way he sketches how quantum theory might help to throw light upon one of the grand challenges facing the social sciences and the humanities, namely the question of whether consciousness plays any genuine causal role in the physical world.

Vassilis Savvides

This paper proposes Universal Field Theory (UFT), an ontological interpretation of quantum mechanics in which the Universal Field is taken to be a real structure containing all physically possible configurations permitted by the laws of physics. Observable physical reality corresponds to the subset of configurations that become realized as excitation patterns within the field. In this framework, quantum probabilities arise from the density of realizable configurations encoded in the wave structure of the field. The approach preserves the predictive formalism of quantum mechanics while offering a unified conceptual interpretation linking field ontology, configuration space, and the emergence of physical reality.