Beyond Bohm 2025, Part 2 – Potentialities in Nature and the Nature of Potentialities

Potentialities in Nature and the Nature of Potentialities: David Bohm’s 1951 Quantum Theory and C. B. Martin’s Dispositionalist Metaphysics

with Alex Carruth (and Paavo Pylkkänen)

Sunday August 3
9:00am PDT  | 12:00pm EDT  | 5:00pm BST  |  6:00pm CEST 
2-hour session.

The session is live and you will be sent the RECORDING.

This talk explores the nature of potentiality and its relation to actuality through the views of David Bohm and Charles Burton Martin.

Bohm suggested in his 1951 textbook Quantum theory that quantum properties ought to be understood as potentialities that are actualized when they interact with a suitable, classically describable system (such as a measuring apparatus, but in principle any classically describable system, for instance a crystal at the bottom of the sea). Central to Bohm’s view is a conception of potentialities as having three key features: they are incompletely defined; opposing and probabilistic. Furthermore, the view implies that quantum theory presupposes the level of classical physics, which raises questions about the completeness of quantum theory.

Interestingly, the dispositionalist metaphysics proposed by philosopher Charlie Martin has in some ways similar views about both the nature of potentialities and how they relate to manifest being, opening up the possibility that the situation in quantum mechanics may be an example of a more general metaphysical principle.

First, Martin’s unorthodox view of dispositions as massively multi-track and as coming to manifest through reciprocal, mutual partnerings seems to accommodate the three key features Bohm identifies in a way which neither orthodox views of dispositions nor non-dispositionalist views of properties can.

Furthermore, Martin rejects the notion of pure potentiality on the grounds that to move from potency to act, some determinate, manifest being is required (cf. Bohm’s classically describable system). A world of pure potentiality would be a world of ‘promissory notes’ which are never made good on. He also rejects the notion of pure manifest or actualised being, on the grounds that being that is ‘in pure act’, that is, being that always manifests everything of which it is capable, would actually amount to non-being (at least in the case of concrete, material phenomena; perhaps abstract beings such as numbers might be in pure act). In Bohmian terms this is like the question whether the explicate order could exist without the implicate order.

Alex Carruth is a metaphysician, philosopher of science and philosopher of mind. He received his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Durham in 2013. Amongst other things, he works on the nature of properties; emergence and reduction; causation; consciousness; mental causation, and perception. He is currently a senior researcher at the University of Turku in the Research Council of Finland project Temporality in Predictive Processing and is the PI of the Kone Foundation project Navigating Complexity: Between Emergence and Reduction at the University of Helsinki.