Basil Hiley
Birkbeck, University of London
Quantum Consciousness depends on physics classical computers do not reproduce
Basil Hiley (1935-2025), Emeritus Professor of Physics at Birkbeck, University of London, was David Bohm’s principal collaborator and the formal architect of the Bohm program’s later development. His work on the quantum potential recast quantum dynamics as the action of active information, a quantity that guides a system’s behavior by its form rather than by energy, and his algebraic reformulations of quantum theory pursued the structure beneath the standard formalism. The mind-matter question was never peripheral to this program. Bohm and Hiley treated active information as a candidate bridge between physics and experience, and Hiley’s late papers, including the collaboration with Paavo Pylkkänen on whether mind can affect matter via active information, made the connection explicit.
This site records Hiley’s dates on his profile because his death in 2025 closes a career that shaped how a generation of physicists could take mind-physics questions seriously without leaving physics. His position survives as a research program with a formalism attached, unlike many quantum mind proposals that carry only metaphors.
For the AI consciousness debate, Hiley’s legacy is a standing alternative ontology. If information acts by form in the quantum domain, the classical bit is not the last word on what information can do, and the site’s substrate debates inherit that caveat.
Known for. The quantum potential and active information, Bohm's collaborator for decades, algebraic foundations of quantum theory, mind-matter questions in the implicate order
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Basil Hiley is listed with the other quantum theorists, who hold that consciousness depends on physics classical computers do not reproduce. The theory family behind that position is set out in the index of consciousness theories. Every researcher covered on this site is indexed in the directory of consciousness researchers.