A Teacher
Paavo Pylkkanen
Active information and the implicate order in mind
The transmission
Paavo T. I. Pylkkanen, born in 1959, is a Finnish philosopher of mind, Senior Lecturer in Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Helsinki and long associated with the University of Skovde in Sweden. He worked directly with the physicist David Bohm in the 1980s and has spent his career developing the philosophical implications of Bohm’s interpretation of quantum mechanics for the study of mind and consciousness, placing him at the more rigorous, physics-literate edge of the idealist and process-oriented streams in this Atlas.
His principal work, Mind, Matter and the Implicate Order (2007, Springer’s Frontiers Collection), applies three Bohmian concepts - the implicate (enfolded) order, active information, and soma-significance - to long-standing problems in philosophy of mind such as mental causation, the hard problem of consciousness, and the unity of experience.
Bohm’s notion of active information, in which a subtle quantum field guides a particle much as meaning guides behavior, offers Pylkkanen a candidate bridge between physical process and mental meaning. It must be stated plainly that this is a philosophical and interpretive program, not an established empirical result: Bohmian mechanics is one minority (though fully viable) interpretation of quantum theory, and the claim that it explains consciousness is a contested hypothesis without experimental confirmation.
Pylkkanen is himself careful and analytic about these boundaries, distinguishing what the physics shows from what the philosophy proposes.
What they gave
Active information as a mind-matter bridge: Develops Bohm’s idea that information can be physically efficacious, a disciplined way to think about how meaning and attention might bear on process (The Inner Creates the Outer).
- The implicate order applied to mind: Treats conscious experience as an unfolding from a deeper enfolded order, giving the idealist intuition a structured, physics-derived vocabulary.
- Soma-significance: Articulates Bohm’s claim that the somatic (physical) and the significant (meaningful) are two sides of one reality, relevant to mind-body and belief-effect questions (The Inner Creates the Outer).
- Honest limits: This is interpretive philosophy built on a minority reading of quantum mechanics, not confirmed science; the consciousness claims remain hypotheses.
The line they stand in
Influenced by: David Bohm, with whom he worked directly; Basil Hiley, Bohm’s collaborator on the ontological interpretation; Karl Pribram’s holonomic brain theory.
- Influenced: Contemporary Bohmian philosophy of mind and the consciousness-studies discussions that draw on implicate-order and active-information concepts.