Events

While our first two weekends will focus on two views of wholeness – in the natural world and in the human-made world – our final weekend will take up Bohm’s “hard problem”: that is, changing the reflexive, thought-centered nature of our everyday consciousness. Bohm pointed to the necessity of apprehending and altering our age-old engagement with what he called “thought as a system” – the tacit, culture-wide commitment to a pervasively fragmented worldview, inclusive of ourselves and our own individual consciousness.

Following an illuminating introduction to Bohm’s revolutionary physics, we embark on an exploration of potentiality and its intricate relationship with actuality, drawing upon the insights of both Bohm and Charles Burton Martin; we will delve deeply into the terrain of panpsychism, examining consciousness not as a mere biological phenomenon confined to humans and animals, but as a fundamental architectural principle woven into the very fabric of physical reality; we investigate whether Bohmian quantum theory might inspire new forms of psycho-physical laws; we will examine the conception of ‘strict monism’ and its relation to Bohm’s ideas of undivided wholeness; we will illuminate Bohm’s distinctive philosophy of science as manifested in his causal interpretation of quantum theory; we will consider the implications of quantum materials on humanity’s evolutionary trajectory, examining how these emerging technologies may fundamentally reshape our civilizational future; and we provide an introduction to a new worldview: the Dynamic Universe—a proposal that provides a new way of understanding relativistic phenomena.

Introduction to Bohm’s physics with Jonathan Allday Saturday August 29:00am 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’s work in physics spanned a range of areas and interests, but he always came back to the foundations of quantum theory. […]

This talk explores the nature of potentiality and its relation to actuality through the views of David Bohm and Charles Burton Martin.

At the start of the presentation three general premises will be offered: 1. All is process, 2. We are part of nature and 3. Three world experiments are currently underway. During this talk we may explore how these premises relate to the making and usage of materials in the development of humanity.

Panpsychism has emerged as a compelling perspective in contemporary philosophy of mind, asserting that consciousness is not confined to humans and animals but is a fundamental feature of the physical world. The primary motivations for panpsychism include the continuity argument, which seeks to address the apparent gap between mindless matter and conscious experience, the argument from intrinsic natures, which posits that consciousness is an intrinsic property of all entities, and the conceivability argument, which explores the possibility that consciousness could be a universal property in a way that is both metaphysically coherent and scientifically plausible.

The Dynamic Universe: a New Holistic World View with Tuomo Suntola Saturday August 169:00am PDT  | 12:00pm EDT  | 5:00pm BST  |  6:00pm CEST 2-hour session. The session is live and you will be sent the RECORDING. The Dynamic Universe (DU) offers an approach to understanding and predicting the natural world by describing three-dimensional space as […]

Consciousness, Reduction and Quantum Psycho-Physical Laws with Paavo Pylkkänen Sunday August 179:00am 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 […]

The talk investigates David Bohm’s philosophy of science as a form of fallibilist realism that underpins his causal interpretation of quantum mechanics. Bohm’s central aim is to establish the superiority of his interpretation over the standard Copenhagen framework, particularly in contrast to that of Niels Bohr. Whereas Bohr asserts that knowledge of quantum phenomena is restricted to the statistical outcomes of measurement, Bohm’s approach is distinctly realist in orientation. Responding to the challenges posed by Einstein and other physicists, Bohm relies on extra-empirical criteria such as determinism, objectivity and intelligibility.

There is a long tradition in thought and mysticism which holds that the world is, somehow, ONE. Here I survey the large variety of monisms to try to understand what the monistic claim really is. Following tradition and thinkers up to and including David Bohm, one supreme form of monism keeps reappearing, which I call ‘strict monism’. Strict monism makes the highly paradoxical claim that all differentiation, diversity, categorization and conceptualization is fundamentally misrepresenting
reality. Despite the intuitive implausibility of this position, a number of arguments point in its direction, although – as befits the nature of strict monism – arguments themselves are part of the misrepresentation.