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Journal of Consciousness Studies

Was David Bohm a Panpsychist?

Andréa Oldofredi

Published Jun 1, 2025• 2 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Many scholars and commentators claim that David Bohm was a panpsychist, for he stated that even elementary quantum particles exhibit a sort of rudimentary or primitive mind-like quality. Analysing in detail both Bohm’s pilot-wave theory and his works concerning the relation between mind and matter, this paper investigates whether it is accurate to consider Bohm a supporter of such a view. By putting some pressure and casting doubts on this generally accepted belief, I offer a new interpretation of Bohm’s views suggesting that panpsychism is not sufficient to faithfully represent his perspective about the link between the mental and physical sides of reality.

DOI
10.53765/20512201.32.5.130

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Many scholars and commentators claim that David Bohm was a panpsychist, for he stated that even elementary quantum particles exhibit a sort of rudimentary or primitive mind-like quality. Analysing in detail both Bohm’s pilot-wave theory and his works concerning the relation between mind and matter, this paper investigates whether it is accurate to consider Bohm a supporter of such a view. By putting some pressure and casting doubts on this generally accepted belief, I offer a new interpretation of Bohm’s views suggesting that panpsychism is not sufficient to faithfully represent his perspective about the link between the mental and physical sides of reality.
Panpsychism is often thought to be an obviously mistaken doctrine, because it is considered to be completely inconceivable how the elementary particles of physics could possibly have proto-mental properties. Pylkkänen points out that quantum theory implies that elementary particles are far more subtle and strange than most contemporary physicalist philosophers assume. He discusses David Bohm’s famous “pilot wave” theory which implies that, say, an electron is a particle guided by a field carrying active information, the latter of which can be seen as a primitive mind-like quality.
Perhaps more so than any other twentieth-century physicist, David Bohm was trying to develop an ontological interpretation for quantum theory, i.e. an interpretation which tells us what quantum theory says about the nature of reality. He is best known for presenting in 1952 an improved version of de Broglie’s ‘pilot-wave’ theory, which says that an electron is a particle always accompanied by a new type of quantum field or pilot wave which guides it. In later research Bohm realized that the pilot wave is not pushing and pulling the particle mechanically but rather contains information which guides the particle, analogously to the way radar waves guide a ship on autopilot. The postulation of such objective and active information to the quantum level is a radical metaphysical move which also opens a new way to understand how the material and mental sides of reality are related to each other. It might even make it easier to understand what phenomenal properties are and how they could play a causal role in the physical world. This paper provides an overview of not only the pilot-wave theory, but also Bohm’s other related frameworks, namely the implicate order and soma-significance. It is suggested that these views point to a new theory of the relation of consciousness and matter which we can call interactionist dual-aspect monism. This theory suggests, against illusionism, that phenomenal properties exist and, against idealism, that the world has a material aspect which exists independently of the human mind ‐ thus ‘real consciousness in a real world’.
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.
In this paper I give a new information-theoretic analysis of the formalisms and interpretations of quantum mechanics (QM) in general, and of two mainstream interpretations of quantum mechanics in particular: The Copenhagen interpretation and David Bohm’s interpretation of quantum mechanics. Adopting Juan G. Roederer’s reading of the notion of pragmatic information, I argue that pragmatic information is not applicable to the Copenhagen interpretation since the interpretation is primarily concerned with epistemology rather than ontology. However it perfectly fits Bohm’s ontological interpretation of quantum mechanics in the realms of biotic and artificial systems. Viewing Bohm’s interpretation of QM in the context of pragmatic information imposes serious limitations to the qualitative aspect of such an interpretation, making his extension of the notion active information to every level of reality illegitimate. Such limitations lead to the idea that, contrary to Bohm’s claim, mind is not a more subtle aspect of reality via the quantum potential as active information, but the quantum potential as it affects particles in the double-slit experiment represents the non-algorithmic aspect of the mind as a genuine information processing system. This will provide an information-based ground, firstly, for refreshing our views on quantum interpretations and secondly, for a novel qualitative theory of the relationship of mind and matter in which mind-like properties are exclusive attributes of living systems. To this end, I will also take an information-theoretic approach to the notion of intentionality as interpreted by John Searle.
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.
Abstract This chapter provides a very short introduction into quantum physics and some of its most prominent ontological interpretations. Interestingly, many of the very founders of quantum physics soon began to associate their revolutionary findings in fundamental physics with the mind-body problem. Physicists like Nils Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, and David Bohm speculated that the wave-particle dualism displayed by quanta might be at the very basis of the mind-body dualism of our every-day experience. Recent investigations by Nikolaus von Stillfried suggest that a modified interpretation of Bohmian quantum physics might pave the way to a unified naturalist theory of mind and matter.