Maverick Minds: Bohm and Everett on Mind and Consciousness

Maverick Minds: Bohm and Everett on Mind and Consciousness

with William Seager

Saturday August 12, 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 and Hugh Everett were both mavericks in physics,  bucking the Copenhagen trend (which was exceptionally  powerful during their formative years and long after). They each developed a surprising and novel interpretation  of quantum mechanics, which shared some features but were  also radically dissimilar, almost as dissimilar as their  personalities and outlook on life. Their views have been much  discussed, but less has been said of the place of mind  and consciousness within their interpretations. Bohm wrote  more explicitly about this, but Everett said very little about  the nature of mind. Here, I want to explore their views, to outline Bohm’s approach to the mind and to see how mind can  be integrated with the so-called Many-Worlds interpretation we owe to Everett.

To see the Full Beyond Bohm Program

William Seager is Professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto Scarborough. He has been working on the the philosophy of mind and especially the problem of consciousness for about 45 years, but still hasn’t gotten very far. Two recent books of his are Theories of Consciousness (2nd ed. 2016) and The Routledge Handbook of Panpsychism (2020).