Bohm’s View of the Self and the Observer

Bohm’s View of the Self and the Observer

with Paavo Pylkkänen

Sunday August 13, 2023
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 considers Bohm’s view of the self and the observer in the light of the recently published Bohm’s letters to Jeffrey Bub. (C. Talbot ed. (2020) David Bohm’s Critique of Modern Physics. Letters to Jeffrey Bub, 1966-1969. Cham: Springer).  Bohm’s view is influenced on the one hand by the situation in quantum physics, where the role of the observer is an important topic.  But there are also influences from his discussions with Krishnamurti. According to Bohm the plain fact in the mental domain is that observation is going on, but there is no separate observer inside the mind, who would be “doing the looking”.  Is this view plausible and consistent, and how does it relate to other contemporary views of the self?

To see the Full Beyond Bohm Program

Paavo Pylkkänen, Ph.D., 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/