Högskolan i Skövde

This is an obituary for the British physicist Basil J. Hiley (1935-2025). Most people knew him as someone who worked for 30 years with the physicist David Bohm, who was a student of Robert Oppenheimer and an associate of Albert Einstein. Together they developed a new holistic framework for physics which includes both a general implicate order approach, and a more specific ontological interpretation of quantum theory (variously known as the Bohm theory, ‘hidden variables’ interpretation, pilot-wave theory, de Broglie-Bohm interpretation, and the causal interpretation). After Bohm died in 1992, Hiley developed the research programme for more than 30 years.

The key concept for Hiley was movement and process. For Bohm and Hiley movement was something fundamental, a dynamic 'implicate order', from which material particles and fields, along with space and time, emerge into an 'explicate order'. Mathematically they adopted an algebraic approach, suggesting that the primary meaning of an algebraic symbol is that it describes a certain kind of movement.

Hiley was also interested in philosophical issues such as the relation of mind and matter.  In this area he collaborated with the author (Paavo Pylkkänen), and even taught a course on philosophy of quantum theory at the University of Skövde in the early 2000s.

The idea that consciousness is somehow needed to collapse the wave function was emphasized especially by Eugene Wigner in 1961 and has recently been discussed by e.g. David Chalmers and Kelvin McQueen. We revisit the reasons why the idea was proposed in the first place and briefly consider Chalmers and McQueen’s discussion.

David Chalmers (1996) proposed that because it does not seem likely that consciousness (understood as phenomenal properties) can be reduced to physical properties, it is better to assume that phenomenal properties are fundamental and connected to fundamental physical properties by fundamental psycho-physical laws.  While this proposal is interesting there is the problem that it leaves phenomenal properties causally inefficacious, making the view a form of epiphenomenalism.  In this paper an alternative approach is explored.  This approach borrows from Chalmers the idea that information at least sometimes has both phenomenal and physical properties. It tries to avoid epiphenomenalism by making use of Bohm and Hiley’s ontological or ‘pilot wave’ interpretation of quantum theory where information is fundamental and causally efficacious and can be extended to include mental and conscious states.

These are the proceedings of Physics and Reality 2024, International Conference on Philosophy of Physics, held at University of Helsinki, Finland, 4-6 June 2024.

The conference was organised by the research project Appearance and Reality in Physics and Beyond that started in June 2023. The project is located in the Department of Philosophy, History and Art Studies, University of Helsinki.

The conference explored central themes in philosophy of physics, including interpretations of quantum theory, geometric vs. dynamic approaches to relativistic phenomena, the project of unifying quantum theory and general relativity, and extending quantum theory to new domains, such as cognition and free will. The conference provided a platform for representing well-informed novel ideas, which are needed as the theoretical foundations of physics are not ready. Moreover, it is to be noted that the greatest 20th century philosophers of science —Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Imre Lakatos and Paul Feyerabend— reminded us that rival theories are needed to fully understand the weaknesses of a paradigmatic theory.

This paper presents and discusses the physicist David Bohm’s views on information, meaning and consciousness, and sketches a new mind-matter view, interactionist dual-aspect monism, based on them.

Perhaps more so than any other twentieth-century physicist, David Bohm was trying to develop an ontological interpretation for quantum theory, i.e. an interpretation which tells us what quantum theory says about the nature of reality. He is best known for presenting in 1952 an improved version of de Broglie’s ‘pilot-wave’ theory, which says that an electron is a particle always accompanied by a new type of quantum field or pilot wave which guides it. In later research Bohm realized that the pilot wave is not pushing and pulling the particle mechanically but rather contains information which guides the particle, analogously to the way radar waves guide a ship on autopilot. The postulation of such objective and active information to the quantum level is a radical metaphysical move which also opens a new way to understand how the material and mental sides of reality are related to each other. It might even make it easier to understand what phenomenal properties are and how they could play a causal role in the physical world. This paper provides an overview of not only the pilot-wave theory, but also Bohm’s other related frameworks, namely the implicate order and soma-significance. It is suggested that these views point to a new theory of the relation of consciousness and matter which we can call interactionist dual-aspect monism. This theory suggests, against illusionism, that phenomenal properties exist and, against idealism, that the world has a material aspect which exists independently of the human mind ‐ thus ‘real consciousness in a real world’.

One of the more radical ideas to have emerged in recent metaphysics of quantum theory is wave function realism, according to which the fundamental spatial framework of the world is one of very many dimensions.  At first sight this idea sounds similar to the notion of a multidimensional implicate order the physicist David Bohm proposed on the basis of quantum theory in the 1980s.  This paper briefly considers Bohm’s various attempts to provide a realist interpretation of the wave function in order to clarify whether or not Bohm was anticipating and even endorsing wave function realism with his implicate order theory.  The underlying question is what quantum theory — and non-locality in particular — is trying to tell us about the more fundamental nature of the physical world.

The paper examines the potentialities-centred interpretation of quantum theory developed by David Bohm in his 1951 book Quantum Theory and aims to situate it within a general ontological framework, focusing on Charlie Martin's views.

This is a Festschrift in honour of Valtteri Arstila, a professor of theoretical philosophy at the University of Turku. The book is structured in three sections. The first two—‘Mind and Action’ and ‘Time and Temporal Experience’—include papers focussed on issues particularly close to Arstila's own research specialisation. The final section contains papers on various further philosophical issues. The first section, ‘Mind and Action’, collects together contributions on a variety of topics such as consciousness, content, agency and normativity; encompassing approaches from within analytic philosophy, phenomenology and the history of philosophy. The second section, ‘Time and Temporal Experience’, collects together papers on topics including the nature of time itself; of our experience of time and of historicity and temporality more broadly; approaching these issues from a variety of perspectives including historical approaches. The final section brings together papers that touch on issues within philosophy of science, logic, philosophy of language, political philosophy and more besides.

The hard problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining how and why physical processes give rise to consciousness (Chalmers 1995). Regardless of many attempts to solve the problem, there is still no commonly agreed solution. It is thus very likely that some radically new ideas are required if we are to make any progress. In this paper we turn to quantum theory to find out whether it has anything to offer in our attempts to understand the place of mind and conscious experience in nature. In particular we will be focusing on the ontological interpretation of quantum theory proposed by Bohm and Hiley (1987, 1993), its further development by Hiley (Hiley and Callaghan 2012; Hiley, Dennis and de Gosson 2021), and its philosophical interpretation by Pylkkänen (2007, 2020). The ontological interpretation makes the radical proposal that quantum reality includes a new type of potential energy which contains active information. This proposal, if correct, constitutes a major change in our notion of matter. We are used to having in physics only mechanical concepts, such as position, momentum and force. Our intuition that it is not possible to understand how and why physical processes can give rise to consciousness is partly the result of our assuming that physical processes (including neurophysiological processes) are always mechanical. If, however, we are willing to change our view of physical reality by allowing non-mechanical, organic and holistic concepts such as active information to play a fundamental role, this, we argue, makes it possible to understand the relationship between physical and mental processes in a new way. It might even be a step toward solving the hard problem.