Decoding David Bohm’s Metaphysics

Do David Bohm’s ideas about quantum mechanics better explain reality?

Physicist David Bohm, working with various collaborators, developed an idea about reality that went beyond explaining the mysteries of quantum mechanics. Filled with advanced mathematics, it is a metaphysical idea reaching to the deepest levels of our ideas of what is real. This is the first in a short series of posts exploring his “active information” and “implicate order” ideas that Bohm used not only to explain mysteries such as quantum entanglement but also how mind and matter are not two separate things, but aspects or manifestations of a single underlying unity.

Physics and the Mind-Body Question

The great divide between materialists (aka physicalists) and non-materialists is largely centered on the mind-body question. What is consciousness? How can mind and body, or mind and matter interact? There is a lot at stake for interested observers. If conciousness (mind) is produced by the brain as part of an emergent, evolutionary, random process, the religious, spiritual and philosophical convictions of many will be significantly challenged. If physicalist science fails to show that consciousness is a mere epiphenomenon of the brain, as it has so far, then the theist-transcendentalist position will continue to be very credible, perhaps even increase in credibility.

That is a very binary construction of the big question. What if there was another way? Could a physicalist answer be…