David Bohm and An Order Between and Beyond

David Bohm and An Order Between and Beyond: Toward a New Human Being and a New Culture

with David Schrum

and guests Steven Rosen and Paavo Pylkkänen

Saturday August 26, 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.

David Bohm was a physicist and an explorer of mind who probed deeply the question of what might bring about a transformation of consciousness in the individual and in society as a whole. Such a renaissance he perceived could arise as humanity awakened to what he termed orders between and beyond, new orders of cognition within which thought would operate in a movement subtle and creative. One approach that he brought to opening this understanding to others was to bring attention to how new orders of perception may be formed by bringing together and transcending orders already present.

We will look into several such transformations of order to develop a feeling for this, following which we will focus on the ubiquitous orders of understanding which Bohm terms ‘literal’ thought and ‘participatory’ thought. The processes involved in these two sorts of comprehension, we nowadays recognize as corresponding respectively to left hemisphere- and right hemisphere-dominated activities of the brain. Considering these orders brings out David Bohm’s approach to exploration of consciousness, and it opens into his perception of truth as a process. This latter view brings questions as to its possible relevance to metaphysics and to cognitive science.

We will explore what it is to enter into these issues not only conceptually but also in movements subtle beyond words, as it is in the liminal region beyond the poles of concepts on one hand and felt movement on the other, that we may participate in a vital order between.

After the presentation, a roundtable discussion with Paavo Pylkkanen, Steven M. Rosen, and David Schrum will consider these issues. This will be followed and continued by participation of the group as a whole.

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To see the Full Beyond Bohm Program

David Schrum received his PhD in quantum theory at Queen’s University, following which he spent two post-doctoral years with David Bohm at Birkbeck College. Here, he entered Bohm’s world of creative and subtle philosophical approaches to physics and his enquiry into consciousness and what may lie beyond.

David Schrum continues in these explorations, in physics developing a new approach to relativistic quantum theory and, through the dialogue process, going into what it is to bring to light that which lies enfolded within our individual and collective consciousness.

Steven M. Rosen is Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the College of Staten Island of the City University of New York. After receiving his Ph.D. in psychology from the City University in 1971, he began exploring the foundations, frontiers, and poetics of science, his work becoming transdisciplinary and philosophical in nature. Rosen’s essays have appeared in journals and collections spanning the fields of philosophy, psychology, theoretical physics, education, semiotics, and ecology. His published books include Science, Paradox, and the Moebius Principle (1994), Dimensions of Apeiron (2004), Topologies of the Flesh (2006), and The Self-Evolving Cosmos (2008). Rosen’s website is embodyingcyberspace.com.

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/