Events

When David Bohm arrived in California in the early 1940s for graduate studies he had already consolidated two intellectual trends which would characterize his whole life. He knew what kind of physics he enjoyed working on; while he was attracted to theoretical physics and had exhibited skills in mathematics, he had no patience for the solving problem style of physics he had found at Caltech. Instead he looked for speculative and conceptual science. Bohm, however, was not only concerned with science, for him science was part of a larger picture involving society as a whole.

Chris Dewdney will review a selection of the animations that he originated during the period from 1979, when the Two-Slit calculations were first published, up to the more recent field-matter interaction examples. The animations will be shown (many in the updated form seen in the documentary Infinite Potential) during his talk and he will explain in a non-technical way, how they were produced and exactly what they show. For each animation, the implications for our understanding of quantum mechanics and the nature of reality will be drawn out.

Experimental evidence clearly shows classical physics is wrong. Sure, it works at the classical level, but there is some deeper order necessary to understand the new physics. Nevertheless this deeper process must approximate to the macroscopic world we experience.  David Bohm suggested that the algebraic quantum formalism should be understood in terms of the implicate order. For him this was the order that we directly perceive and from our experiences we abstract an array classical orders, the explicate orders from which we construct the an order which allows us to find a way to survive.

Bohm’s notion of implicate order resonates with the Eastern notion of Dao. Dao is the invisible current that brings the ‘ten thousand things’ to manifestation, but it is also described as the attractor that calls them back to return to their root, to no-thingness, to the unmanifest. And ultimately these two states, the manifest, the explicate, that which can be named, and the unmanifest, the implicate, that which has no name, are one and the same. Holding them together in our awareness is, Laozi tells us, the ultimate secret, the door of all mysteries.

The main reason we are divided in politics is not only polarization between parties, or fragmentation within the parties, but because of how we think. We tend to think in partial fragments, not in contextual wholes. David Bohm was keenly aware of this. Bohm was also aware that this lack of coherency was not necessarily the case in Indigenous cultures that have a history of shared meaning and participatory consciousness. In the USA, the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy had a profound effect on the very idea to unite the states and also on the foundational values of liberty, equality, and natural rights enshrined in the US Constitution—and then on the unwritten rules of engagement that govern political protocols.

David Bohm is known primarily for his work in physics and cosmology, but his contributions to the field of psychology were equally profound and significant. His understanding of the nature and dynamic structure of consciousness, and their relevance to the ordinary affairs of daily life, had several sources. His views were shaped in part by his experience with members of the scientific community and his disillusionment with their independence of mind and objectivity. He also drew upon the work of Hegel and Piaget, among others. The greatest influence upon his outlook on psychology, however, was the philosophy of J. Krishnamurti, and the quarter-century of dialogue and collaboration between the two men.

His main research areas are philosophy of mind, philosophy of physics and their intersection. The central problem in philosophy of mind is how to understand the place of mind—and especially conscious experience—in the physical world. Pylkkänen has explored whether this problem can be approached in a new way in the framework of the new holistic and dynamic worldview that is emerging from quantum theory and relativity. He has in particular been inspired by the physicists David Bohm and Basil Hiley’s interpretation of quantum theory and has collaborated with both of them.

How is it that one of the world’s most gifted and innovative theoretical physicists would stray from his primary calling of uncovering the secrets of the universe?  What so captivated his interest that, with that same intense creativity brought to his science, he would divert his exploration to uncovering the basis of human thought and the roots of social discord?  Using David Bohm’s own words and those of his associates, we will plumb these queries by tracing the stories of his experience that called him to this deep practice of dialogue.

Over the years that David Bohm presented his vision of dialogue, he pointed to three aspects of the human being—the individual, the collective, and the cosmic. While the individual and collective aspects have been much studied and practiced, the cosmic aspect has received little attention. In this presentation we will open up what this cosmic aspect might mean, and, of equal importance, what is involved in conducting such an investigation. The first hour will consist of laying out the terrain involved. The second hour will be discussion and question and answer. There will be no attempt to conduct a dialogue.