David Bohm was a major twentieth-century theoretical physicist. His scientific work concerned plasma and the foundations of quantum mechanics and, connected to his scientific work, Bohm was deeply interested in the philosophy of science and psychological studies. Bohm’s influence on psychology derived more from his philosophical writings than from his scientific works. This paper considers both of Bohm’s works while distinguishing them. This is further necessary because anyone intending to work on Bohm’s legacy needs to develop his un-consensual ideas further. This paper makes a brief and non-technical description of Bohm’s works in physics and his philosophical views, related to the idea of wholeness and the implicate order, which includes his incursions in psychology. It ends with some caveats about the better extension of his reflections.
David Bohm was a major twentieth-century theoretical physicist. His scientific work concerned plasma and the foundations of quantum mechanics and, connected to his scientific work, Bohm was deeply interested in the philosophy of science and psychological studies. Bohm’s influence on psychology derived more from his philosophical writings than from his scientific works. This paper considers both of Bohm’s works while distinguishing them. This is further necessary because anyone intending to work on Bohm’s legacy needs to develop his un-consensual ideas further. This paper makes a brief and non-technical description of Bohm’s works in physics and his philosophical views, related to the idea of wholeness and the implicate order, which includes his incursions in psychology. It ends with some caveats about the better extension of his reflections.
David Bohm was one of the foremost scientific thinkers and philosophers of our time. Although deeply influenced by Einstein, he was also, more unusually for a scientist, inspired by mysticism. Indeed, in the 1970s and 1980s he made contact with both J. Krishnamurti and the Dalai Lama whose teachings helped shape his work. In both science and philosophy, Bohm's main concern was with understanding the nature of reality in general and of consciousness in particular. In this classic work he develops a theory of quantum physics which treats the totality of existence as an unbroken whole. Writing clearly and without technical jargon, he makes complex ideas accessible to anyone interested in the nature of reality.
This thesis aims to explore the relationship between the science, the philosophy and the esoteric imagination of the American physicist David Bohm (1917-1992). Bohm is recognized as one of the most brilliant physicists of his generation. He is famous for his ‘hidden variables’ interpretation of quantum mechanics. Bohm wrote extensively on philosophical and psychological subjects. In his celebrated book Wholeness and the Implicate Order (1882) he introduced the influential ideas of the Explicate and the Implicate orders that are at the core of his process philosophy. Bohm was also a very close disciple of the Indian teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895-1986), whom he recognized to have had an important influence on his thought. Chapter 1 is a general explanation of what I intend to do, why my research is filling an important gap, introduce the field of Western esotericism as a scholarly subject and suggesting that it offers a fruitful way of approaching the thought of David Bohm. I also explain my research principles and a brief description of the philosophical standpoint from which I am approaching the material. Chapter 2 gives a description of the textual sources I used in my research. This is followed by a comprehensive literature review. Chapter 3 is a biographical essay where I give an account of Bohm’s life, career, works, major ideas and their development, stressing their significance for the development of Bohm’s holistic philosophy and his interactions with the esoteric. This chapter is an introduction to the main ideas of the dissertation. Chapter 4 revisits the genesis of the Causal Interpretation, Bohm’s first attempt to deal with the interpretation of quantum mechanics. I make emphasis on the philosophical developments that gave rise to it. I introduce all the relevant physics and give a detailed explanation of the problem of interpretation and Bohm’s first proposal. Chapter 5 is about the philosophical developments in Bohm’s thought brought by the Causal Interpretation. In particular I examine the influence that G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831) had on Bohm’s thought and explain why I take the view that this is an esoteric influence. Chapter 6 reviews the developments in Bohm’s thought during the 1960’s. I describe Bohm’s search for radically new concepts in physics and his exchanges with several thinkers ending with his encounter with Jiddu Krishnamurti. Chapters 7 and 8 are devoted to the study of Bohm’s philosophy as he elaborated it after 1960. Chapter 7 concentrates on the idea of the Implicate Order and it also studies the Ontological Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, Bohm’s last version of his interpretation effort, which is based on the Implicate Order. In chapter 8 I examine Bohm’s theory of how the mind and the body are connected through a ladder of consciousness formed by a series of Explicate and Implicate Orders, and finishes with an exposition of Bohm’s dialogue technique. In the last chapter I summarize my conclusions. An appendix is included with a brief overview of Bohm’s legacy. All the relevant details about the esoteric currents that Bohm encountered during his life and that are required to understand our argument are introduced as they are needed throughout the main body of the text.
David Bohm (1917-1992) was a major figure in 20th century physics and one of its most original thinkers. From the time of his classic textbook Quantum theory (1951), through Causality and chance in modern physics (1957), The special theory of relativity (1965), to Wholeness and the implicate order (1980), Bohm was concerned with deep philosophical issues, even more than Niels Bohr. Bohm’s ontological emphasis was “holonomic,” that is, ontology under the law of the whole. The Bohmian program continues to be carried forward today in physics by Basil Hiley and in philosophy by Paavo Pylkkanen.
This paper explores the theme “quantum approaches to consciousness” by considering the work of one of the pioneers in the field. The physicist David Bohm (1917-1992) not only made important contributions to quantum physics, but also had a long-term interest in interpreting the results of quantum physics and relativity in order to develop a general world view. His idea was further that living and mental processes could be understood in a new, scientifically and philosophically more coherent way in the context of such a new world view. This paper gives a brief overview of different – and sometimes contradictory - aspects of Bohm’s research programme, and evaluates how they can be used to give an account of topics of interest in contemporary consciousness studies, such as analogies between thought and quantum processes, the problem of mental causation, the mind-body problem and the problem of time consciousness.
This study offers a comprehensive analysis of David Bohm’s article “A New Theory of the Relationship of Mind and Matter” (Philosophical Psychology, 1990) — one of the most original attempts of the twentieth century to overcome Cartesian dualism on a physical foundation. The paper proceeds in sequence through the historical context of the mind–body problem, the physical basis of the causal interpretation of quantum mechanics, the central concept of active information, and the implicate order. Bohm’s framework is then compared with several major contemporary approaches: Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Hameroff & Penrose, 2014), the holographic brain model (Pribram, 1991), Integrated Information Theory (Tononi, 2004), and the Global Workspace model (Baars, 1988; Dehaene, 2014). A dedicated section examines the relationship between Bohm’s ideas and Rovelli’s Relational Quantum Mechanics (Rovelli, 1996), as well as Loop Quantum Gravity (Rovelli, 2004; Rovelli & Smolin, 1995), and Qbism, developed by Christopher Fuchs, Rüdiger Schack, and Carlton Caves (Fuchs, 2002; Fuchs et al., 2014). The concluding section evaluates the compatibility of Bohm’s ideas with quantum field theory and modern quantum information science. The principal conclusion is that Bohm’s 1990 article does not constitute a complete theory of consciousness, yet it anticipates with remarkable prescience the information-ontological tendencies of the twenty-first century and may best be understood as a philosophical-physical metatheory whose relevance has only grown since its publication.
David Bohm was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, in 1917. His father ran a successful furniture business, making his way to the USA from what was then Austria-Hungary. There appears to be no physics whatsoever in the family background. Bohm, himself, became interested in science at an early age, being urged on by a fascination of finding out how things worked. By the age of eight he had already been introduced to science fiction. This fired his imagination and generated in him a deep interest in real science. But it was the nature of the real world that fascinated him most. He recalls the profound effect that a book on astronomy had on him in those formative years. He was struck by the vast order and regularity of the universe. This impressed him so much that he began to devote a great deal of time to science.