David Bohm on consciousness.
David Bohm: Physics, Mind, and the Nature of Reality
David Bohm (1917–1992) was one of the most original theoretical physicists of the 20th century, and uniquely among his peers, he pursued a sustained attempt to integrate the nature of consciousness into his broader physical and philosophical worldview.
Quantum Mechanics and the Implicate Order
Bohm’s starting point was his dissatisfaction with the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, which he felt was philosophically incomplete — particularly its treatment of measurement, observer effects, and the apparent randomness of quantum events.
In response, he developed the concept of the “Implicate Order” (most fully elaborated in “Wholeness and the Implicate Order,” 1980). The core idea is that the reality we perceive — the “explicate order” of distinct, separable objects in space and time — is a kind of unfolded surface manifestation of a deeper, enfolded reality in which everything is fundamentally interconnected. He used the metaphor of a hologram, in which each part encodes information about the whole.
His associated interpretation of quantum mechanics, the “pilot wave / ontological interpretation” (building on de Broglie), proposed that particles have definite trajectories guided by a “quantum potential” or “active information”— a field that “informs” the motion of a particle rather than simply pushing it mechanically. This was significant: Bohm introduced the concept of “information” as a fundamental causal category in physics.
Consciousness as Part of the Implicate Order
Bohm explicitly refused to treat consciousness as an anomaly or epiphenomenon. He argued that mind and matter are not fundamentally separate — they are two aspects of a single, undivided process enfolded within the implicate order.
Key ideas include:
Bohm extended the concept from physics to mind. Just as the quantum potential “informs” a particle, meaning shapes and directs mental and physical processes. Consciousness, on this view, is not a mere by-product of brain chemistry but a process of the “unfolding of meaning.”
The Soma-Significance Framework— Developed with philosopher Mark Johnson, this held that matter (“soma”) and meaning (“significance”) are inseparably linked at all levels of reality, not just in human minds. Meaning is not something imposed on an otherwise meaningless physical world; it is intrinsic to existence.
Thought as a System — In “Thought as a System” (1994, posthumous) and in his dialogues, Bohm argued that much human suffering arises from a fragmentation in thought itself — the tendency of the mind to divide reality into separate pieces and then mistake those divisions for the real structure of things. He called this “fragmentation” one of the central pathologies of modern consciousness.
Dialogue and Collective Consciousness
Bohm was deeply concerned with how consciousness operates “collectively.” He developed a practice of “Bohmian Dialogue” — a form of structured group conversation designed not to debate or persuade, but to allow shared meaning to emerge and to make the usually invisible assumptions and reflexes of thought visible to participants. He saw this as a kind of collective therapy for fragmented thinking.
Collaboration with Krishnamurti
One of the most remarkable aspects of Bohm’s later life was his decades-long friendship and dialogue with the philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti. Their conversations (collected in *The Ending of Time*, 1985, and “The Limits of Thought,” 1999) explored whether the structure of thought itself could be fundamentally transformed — whether human consciousness could be freed from its conditioned, fragmented patterns. Bohm brought the physicist’s precision; Krishnamurti brought a radical, non-system-building inquiry. Both agreed that thought, while useful instrumentally, generates serious distortion when it attempts to grasp the totality of experience.
Legacy
Bohm’s work on consciousness remains controversial but influential. He is cited in debates around the hard problem of consciousness,” panpsychism, and quantum approaches to mind (such as the Penrose-Hameroff “Orchestrated Objective Reduction” theory, which draws on related ideas). His insistence that physics cannot simply bracket out the question of the observer — or consciousness — without impoverishing itself remains a live challenge to mainstream science.
His broader vision was of a science grounded in *wholeness* rather than fragmentation: one in which the division between observer and observed, mind and matter, is understood as a useful abstraction rather than an ultimate feature of reality.