Mind, Matter and the Implicate Order (The Frontiers Collection) [Hardcover]

Paavo T. I. Pylkkänen (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 3540238913 | ISBN-13: 978-3540238911 | Publication Date: November 10, 2006 | Edition: 1

This accessible and easy-to-follow book offers a new approach to consciousness. The author’s eclectic style combines new physics-based insights with those of analytical philosophy, phenomenology, cognitive science and neuroscience. He proposes a view in which the mechanistic framework of classical physics and neuroscience is complemented by a more holistic underlying framework in which conscious experience finds its place more naturally.

Editorial Reviews

Review

From the reviews: "This is an excellent addition to Springer’s (equally excellent) Frontiers Collection. … I can highly recommend it to philosophers (of mind), philosophers of various sciences, physicists, (especially those working in foundation of physics), and anyone interested in the contemporary debate on consciousness. It would also provide a good way to become acquainted with the more difficult of Bohn’s later ideas. The book assumes no prior knowledge of quantum mechanics." (Dean Rickles, Mathematical Reviews, Issue, 2007 g)

From the Back Cover

Quantum theory predicts experimental results brilliantly but simultaneously raises difficult conceptual issues. Paradoxes such as Schrödinger’s cat, the EPR paradox, or the nonlocality demanded by Bell’s inequalities have hampered philosophers in their attempts to include quantum theory when discussing the relation between mind and matter. Pylkkänen proposes that Bohm’s alternative interpretation of quantum theory resolves these paradoxes and thus enables one to base new philosophical theories upon quantum physics. He uses Bohm’s concepts of "implicate order", "active information" and "soma-significance" as tools to tackle several well-known problems in the philosophy of mind. These include mental causation, the hard problem of consciousness, time consciousness, and virtual reality. Pylkkänen’s eclectic approach combines new physics-based insights with those of analytical philosophy, phenomenology, cognitive science and neuroscience and he proposes a view in which the mechanistic framework of classical physics and neuroscience is complemented by a more holistic underlying framework in which conscious experience finds its place more naturally.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 291 pages
• Publisher: Springer; 1 edition (November 10, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 3540238913
• ISBN-13: 978-3540238911
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,038,382 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Bohm's Implicate Order as a full Cosmology, April 9, 2009

By 

Herbert L Calhoun "paulocal" (Falls Church, VA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Mind, Matter and the Implicate Order (The Frontiers Collection) (Hardcover)

Professor Paavo Pylkkanen, in what can only be considered a fitting tribute to his close friend and colleague, the late David Bohm, here has brilliantly delineated and expanded upon Bohm's ontology of the implicate order. Following carefully in Bohm's footsteps, (and in close consultation with Bohm in his final days), Pylkkanen has expanded the implicate order into a full-fledged Cosmology that effectively solves, once and for all, the intractable mind-body problem.

This new ontology, in a rather spectacular way, can be said to complete the Newtonian project. It finally allows us to end our over-reliance on the Newtonian clockwork, by turning to a new broader paradigm in which, through the idea of a "holomovement," motion itself is posited as the primary substance of existence. As one would hope, and in the classic fashion of T.S. Kuhn's paradigms shift, it does this by taking up where Newtonian physics leaves off, adding on to, and expanding the old paradigm into what was previously thought to be anomalies and externalities of both relativity and quantum physics. In the new paradigm, what were once viewed as quantum and relativistic anomalies become ordinary elements in a broader unified more all-encompassing reality. And as we would hope and expect (and as Kuhn predicted), in the new framework, Newtonian physics becomes a "limiting case."

In order to fully appreciate what Pylkkanen has done with Bohm's ideas, one has to understand that Bohm's concepts of the "implicate" and the "explicate" order, the "holomovement," and especially the ideas of "soma-significant" and signa-somatic," remain difficult if not entirely slippery concepts. At the very least they require the reader to reorganize his brain in order to fully grasp the metaphysics of their meanings. And here Professor Pylkkanen has done a yeoman's job in assisting us in rethinking everything we used to take for granted about the classical Maxwellian/Newtonian vision of the world.

Here he takes us by the hand and leads us step-by-step to a full acceptance that our current understanding of the classical Maxwellian/Newtonian notion of matter as "elementary particles," is all wrong. He suggests, and then sets out to prove that the fabric of reality requires a deeper and broader theory that at the very least takes into account the things that we can already verify empirically; i.e., the wave-particle duality, non-locality, and the discontinuity of movement, just for starters. But more importantly, at this deeper level, lie the questions of the relationship between mental phenomena and the physical processes in the brain, and matter more generally -- as does that of what is the relationship between meaning and the physical items that carry meaning. Unfortunately logical positivism alone does not get us very far along the road to answering these questions. (Anyone who doubts this should review the forays by Karl Popper and other Logical Positivists into these same areas.)

Following Einstein's strongest suggestions, a theoretical leap of faith is sometimes required to get us to the next conceptual level. And that is where this manuscript shines. To get from mind to body and back, for instance, Pylkkanen introduces the critically important idea of "active information" by observing that the effect on the field describing the action of a particle depends only on the "form" of the field, and not on its intensity. Thus the field must contain information that literally informs (or puts form) into the energy of the particle. The point being that there is a strong analogy between the way information in a quantum field acts on elementary particles and the way information in our subjective experience acts on the body. The supreme example of this kind of course, is the way the DNA molecule provides "active information" in shaping the growth of a biological organism. It seems that the DNA has a mind of its own, right?

One may argue that this is thin gruel upon which to hang a potent and powerful theory, one that ultimately completes (or arguably, overthrows) the Newtonian paradigm. However, there is more here, a lot more in this very fine book, which for anyone into Bohm, as I am, will agree that this is even better than what Bohm offered himself.

This book is devastatingly clear, thorough, and true to Bohm's and Einstein's ideas. Well worth the price, which is not cheap.

Fifty stars