LECTURE

David Bohm and the Causal Interpretation

Philosophy and Science Lecture, chaired by Victor Suchar

Dr. Chris Philippides,

Bath University

5 May 2004

Summary

Philosophy has had a long and productive history of engaging with contradictory notions. From Socrates to Hegel the conceptual difficulties that arise from simultaneously asserting and negating a proposition were seen as starting points for the development of new directions in argument and thought rather than as sterile impasses. By contrast, scientific thought has historically felt very uncomfortable when faced with contradictions. Its reductionist instincts inclined it towards seeing them as difficulties to be eliminated rather than as tensions to be developed. The quantum theory is a striking case of a theory that has been shaped by its confrontation with some particularly intractable contradictions. In its attempt to orchestrate the dissonance of opposing concepts, such as a wave and a particle, an individual and a collective, an observer and an observed, the theory ended up by deforming one of the most basic pivots about which scientific discourse articulates: the exposition of the causes that lie behind the appearances.

The quantum theory, as formulated by the end of the 1920s, placed a heavy emphasis on information gathering. In so doing it switched attention away from the subject, i.e. the thing that the information is about, to the methods and the results of data collection. By this tactic it managed to avoid addressing the contradictions directly but the consequence was the serious loss of scientific intelligibility. By contrast, David Bohm’s ‘Causal Interpretation’ is a formulation of the quantum theory that sets out from the outset to incorporate the tensions produced by the co-existence of opposing notions. The speaker illustrated its approach by tracing how the conflict between autonomy and independence is treated by both the conventional theory and Bohm’s version of it.

Dr. Chris Philippides