David Bohm would certainly have agreed that his concept of "implicate order" which applied to all energy/matter was synonymous with underlying "consciousness". But we need to understand Bohm's background with repect to his sympathy with Einstein's rejection of QM (God doesn't play dice..) and also his spiritual association Krishnamurti, who advocated the meditational cessation of "thought" and its construction "time" if we were to understand the nature of "spiritual Truth". This hypothetical removal of the time dimension would play logical havoc with a concept of "goal attainment" by any "creative agency".

The antithesis of a "consciousness approach" can be found in the autopoietic systems advocated by the biologist Maturana, who rejected the need for a "vitalistic force", opting instead for the occurrence of spontaneous stucture in dynamic systems (after Prigogine) in order to account for "life". For Maturana, like Dennett, "consciousness" is an epiphenomenon of the general life process but not necessarily from a traditional reductionist
viewpoint. Instead we need to turn to the "systems approach" as described in Von Foersters "Second Order Cybernetics" in order to understand the organizational dynamics of self sustaining complex (non linear) systems. Such systems due not yield to the simplistic logic of "causality" found in linear systems.(The best introduction to this is IMO Fritjof Capra's "The Web of Life".)

To summarize, this thread raises the question of the utility of the concept of "consciousness" with respect to "science", but this inevitably pushes us into the more fundamental epistemological question of what constitutes a "satisfactory explanation".

Last edited by eccles; 04/22/09 01:14 PM.