Quantum dialogues: The rhetorics of religion and the metaphors of postmodern science

By prefiguring the American master-rhetorician Kenneth Burke as a postmodern social critic, both the language of the New Age movement and the divine principle involved in the science of postmodern consciousness studies can be demonstrated as entangling within new world-based religious mysticism. This dissertation argues a field position composed of rhetorical theory re-examined within three contexts: postmodern literary theory, the evolution of consciousness, and the Dialogue project of David Bohm. These can be extended towards a rhetorical analysis of postmodern science, represented in part by David Bohm's practical interpretation versus Niels Bohr's romantic approach to quantum interpretation. In particular, the Bohmian approach has been featured in debates regarding the hard problem of consciousness and the more recent construction titled "Quantum Dialogue." The conflicting rhetorics of theoretical quantum mechanics reflect an historical structure wherein elements of a scientific and aesthetic epistemology signal the workings of ideology and dogma.;David Bohm and Kenneth Burke are viewed as key figures who encourage a re-examination of the models of quantum theory and language structure suggested by the rhetorics of religion, the structural systems of thought, and postmodern quantum dialogue. This dissertation has been fashioned as a position paper connecting rhetorical threads from the Copenhagen Interpretation through the gradual waning of the American structuralist movement to the rise of the New Age movement. It is designed to construct a rubric to investigate the language field in which reside contemporary studies of artificial intelligence, artificial consciousness, and the artifices of postmodern literary realisms.