The Beyond Bohm 2024 series is oriented toward sharing unique and unusual perspectives that complement and amplify the work of David Bohm. Now in our fourth year, we are continuing that tradition with an array of new faces and presenters that we are especially excited about.

The Beyond Bohm series is oriented toward sharing unique and unusual perspectives that complement and amplify the work of David Bohm. Now in our fourth year, we are continuing that tradition with an array of new faces and presenters that we are especially excited about.

Cheryl Brant will share with us various aspects of her work spanning four decades, culminating in current explorations of the nature of consciousness as an innate aspect of the living world.

Melissa Nelson (Turtle Mountain Chippewa / Métis) and friends will continue our dialogue tradition, sharing indigenous perspectives on a variety of culturally-oriented issues and concerns.

What is it like to be a square living in a two-dimensional world? How would other inhabitants —such as lines, triangles, circles, or irregular shapes—cohabitate with one another in Flatland? What would they say if a sphere came down into their world? Could they glimpse a higher dimensional reality?

Published 140 years ago, this 96-page satirical novel is of contemporary relevance. Under the pseudonym “A Square”, the English schoolmaster and theologian E. A. Abbott narrates the daily adventures of such geometrical figures and provides valuable insights into human transcendence.

From subtle geometry to intricate sociology, Flatland helps us make the supernatural natural by conceiving it as high-dimensional. It is indeed a timely parable to deal with ontological shock of certain anomalous experiences in the age of science. Seeing a greater reality requires a greater vision. Our limited view of the world can be expanded via mathematical imagination.

After an introduction to Bohm’s physics, we will explore the relations between Russellian monism, William James’s radical empiricism and Bohm’s implicate order; some traditional and recent (e.g., Johanna Seibt’s) work on process philosophy and how it connects with Bohm’s ideas; the idea of quantum properties of matter as potentialities in Bohm’s early thought; the influence of Hegel on Bohm’s ideas about fragmentation and wholeness; and whether Bohm’s notion of active information is a candidate for a unifying notion of information.

David Bohm made very important contributions to a range of different areas in Physics. Amongst these, his work on quantum theory is possibly the most relevant to Pari discussions. In this talk I will attempt to outline Bohm’s ontological interpretation of quantum theory, which has since been developed by Basil Hiley amongst others. I will also discuss Bohm’s development of the Einstein Podolsky Rosen paper which lead to John Bell’s work and our current understanding of entanglement.

Willam James’s Radical Empiricism and cognate views going under the general title of Neutral Monism encompass a picture of reality with many attractive features. It presents a straightforward and intuitively attractive solution to the so-called Hard Problem of Consciousness. It endorses a view of perception and cognition which puts us in direct contact with the world, indeed, in direct contact with the fundamental nature of reality, where mind does not mirror nature so much as inhabit it. Yet it avoids any facile solutions to the problem of philosophical skepticism. It supports the idea that the world can be scientifically described in terms of structural relations without lapsing into implausible scientistic reductionisms. But it is a truly radical vision of reality raising many immediately apparent objections (many of which date back to James’s original statement of the view). In this presentation, I aim to sketch out a version of Neutral Monism, canvas its virtues and try to at least deflect the main objections.


Samuli Isotalo will present two ways of doing metaphysics in their general outlines, but do so from the perspective of process metaphysics. Thelma Nylund will argue that Johanna Seibt rejects successfully several traditional ontological presuppositions and that understanding entities as the more or less indeterminate, yet concrete individuals of general process theory, provides philosophers with novel tools for ontological inquiry. 

One year before his 1952 ‘hidden variables’ paper David Bohm presented a physical-ontological interpretation of standard (‘Copenhagen’) interpretation of quantum theory in his 1951 646-page textbook.  He proposed that properties of quantum particles such as electrons ought to be seen as ‘opposing potentialities.’  They are ‘potentialities’ in the sense they typically do not exist in a well-defined sense before measurement and ‘opposing’ in the sense that if one measures, say, position accurately, one cannot measure momentum accurately at the same time in the same experimental situation (‘complementarity’).  Bohm’s discussion is philosophically intriguing—for one thing he suggests that we cannot derive the macroscopic world (which we need to actualize the potentialities of quantum particles) from quantum theory.  And yet the behaviour of the macroscopic, classical level can only be understood in terms of a quantum theory of its component molecules.