Beyond Bohm 2025, Part 2 – Consciousness, Reduction and Quantum Psycho-Physical Laws

Consciousness, Reduction and Quantum Psycho-Physical Laws

with Paavo Pylkkänen

Sunday August 17
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.

David Chalmers (1996) proposed that because it does not seem likely that consciousness (understood as phenomenal properties) can be reduced to physical properties, it is better to assume that phenomenal properties are fundamental and connected to fundamental physical properties by fundamental psycho-physical laws. While this proposal is interesting there is the problem that it leaves phenomenal properties causally inefficacious, making the view a form of epiphenomenalism. In this talk an alternative approach is explored. This approach borrows from Chalmers the idea that information at least sometimes has both phenomenal and physical properties. It tries to avoid epiphenomenalism by making use of Bohm and Hiley’s ontological or ‘pilot wave’ interpretation of quantum theory where information is fundamental and causally efficacious and can be extended to include mental and conscious states.

Paavo Pylkkänen, PhD, is Senior Lecturer in Theoretical Philosophy and Director of the Bachelor’s Program in Philosophy at the University of Helsinki, Finland. He is also Associate Professor of Theoretical Philosophy (currently on leave) at the Department of Cognitive Neuroscience and Philosophy, University of Skövde, Sweden, where he initiated a Consciousness Studies Programme. His main research areas are philosophy of mind, philosophy of physics and their intersection. In his book Mind, Matter and the Implicate Order (Springer) he proposed that new notions emerging from quantum physics (especially Bohm and Hiley’s interpretation) provide new ways of approaching key problems in philosophy of mind, such as mental causation and time consciousness.  In 2018-2020 working as the Vice Dean of Research at the Faculty of Arts he had the main responsibility for developing the new profiling area Mind and Matter for the University of Helsinki 
https://www2.helsinki.fi/en/mind-and-matter.

Paavo Pylkkänen has been a visiting researcher in Stanford University, Oxford University, London University, Charles University Prague and Gothenburg University and was a member of the Academy of Finland Center of Excellence in the Philosophy of Social Sciences (TINT). 
https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/persons/paavo-pylkkänen/publications/