Wholeness and the Implicate Order

Hooray, another brilliant physicist who rejects the idea that nature is fundamentally mechanical. Key ideas: theories are conceptual models, not actual depictions of reality. We need to develop not just new mathematics, but new words to describe the operations of a more fundamental order, in which particulars are abstracted from a flowing wholeness, rather than a complex reality being built up from particulars. Quantum theory and relativity are both descriptions of emergent phenomena; there is a more fundamental level of reality from which those phenomena emerge. The cosmos is not made up of disparate things but concentrations of energy and matter that emerge out of and fold back into one another. Its more fundamental operations, which show more he describes as enfolding and unfolding, or an implicate order and an explicate order, resemble much more how living organisms develop from seeds containing all the necessary information for their unfolding than the unaltering, isolable operations of a machine. He resorts to - perhaps better said originates - the holographic paradigm - which string theorists are now also toying with - of three-dimensional space being a projection of a higher dimensional space, and I wish that wasn't necessary... I'd like to think we really are at home in this universe, and not just things like Plato's shadows on the wall. But all in all, beautiful, useful thinking. Too bad that thirty years later, it's still the outrider view.

In fact, for his interest in mysticism, Bohm has apparently been consigned by many in his field to the untouchable zone where the woo-peddlers live. What a strange place science has come to. It's like an historical cycle of abuse: abused by the Church in its infancy, science now represses, demeans, and exiles any shadow of teleological or non-mechanistic thinking; it has its own triumphant Inquisition purging its ranks of heretics. And conveniently ignoring how capable of error and of corporate or ideological capture science still can be. Religious zealots with a political agenda are still dangerous, no one's denying that. Some so-called mystics may really be quacks, or somebody with something to sell you, but many of science's most ardent defenders seem to be throwing a bunch of promising babies out with the bathwater. show less

I’ve heard agroecology researchers such as Rafter Sass Ferguson spurn analogies relating to quantum physics in the field of permaculture. Regardless of whether or not you’re judgmental of such references, it seems as though Bohm’s work may have significantly contributed to the cliché that particle physics has everything to do with cosmology.

“Wholeness and the Implicate Order” is an annotated collection of essays, spanning the years 1962 to 1976, with the compilation first published in 1980. The author, David Bohm, was an influential American theoretical physicist in the 20th century. As such, this book is heavy on calculus (although there are still long stretches appropriate for the layperson).

The book explores cosmology show more through the lens of theoretical physics. The paradox at the heart of the text is the discontinuous world of quantum physics, juxtaposed with the continuous world of relativity. Bohm seeks to transcend these seemingly-incongruous paradigms with a unified field theory, or a theory of universal wholeness.

In the introduction, he states:

“Science itself is demanding a new, non-fragmentary world view” (page xi).

He reiterates this a little later, saying:

“What is primarily need is a growing realization of the extremely great danger of going on with a fragmentary process of thought” (page19).

Although he doesn’t cite any examples in the text, what comes to mind for me when hearing such warnings are nuclear weapons, and cost/benefit analysis, both of which leave us with impossible choices. I would agree that our fragmentary process of thought is one of the biggest threats to humanity and the planet.

How can we begin shifting to a paradigm centered on wholeness? Bohm first explores the avenue of language. In what ways does language influence our conception of separateness and inter-relatedness? Whereas our current grammatical structures emphasize the noun, what would happen if we gave priority to the verb? Whereas nouns emphasize objects and things, verbs emphasize relationships.

At this point, we’re exposed to more playful side of Bohm. His creativity, both in the words he makes up or unearths (such as “implicate"), as well as in the creative sentence structures he deploys, are both pertinent and sometimes comical. After an exploration of language, Bohm moves in to a dispelling of the concept that “reality” could be a useful concept for humanity.

“Any describable event, object, entity, etc., is an abstraction from an unknown and undefinable totality of flowing movement” (page 49).

In other words, every concept we have, every model we use—they can only ever be naïve oversimplifications. To be human is to constantly create and reference maps of the world around us fed by our sensory perception.

To better explain this concept, it might be useful to consider the word “fact.” Etymologically, facts are “manufactured,” or “made” (page 142). In other words, facts are not absolutely “right” or “wrong.” Rather, facts are an emergent property of their cultural contexts. Bohm dusts off an old word for the process of summoning context: “relevate: to make relevant."

In a paradigm defined by interconnection, we can’t compartmentalize through the construct of separation, but we can draw thresholds that distinguish between different organs of a system. In regard to thresholds, Bohm explores the word “measure.” Traditionally, this word was associated with limits or boundaries.

“To illustrate this meaning of the word “measure” in physics, one could say that “the measure of water” is between 0º and 100ºC. In other words, measure primarily gives the limits of qualities or of orders of movement and behavior” (page 118).

In our world today of Big Data and endless analytics, I wonder if there are things to be gained by drawing upon this older method of measurement.

Moving on to the core subject of the book: what is implicate and explicate? The implicate order is the medium of reality; it structures everything that is. The explicate order is that which our human minds can comprehend and interact with: what we call the physical world (an abstraction in itself), and the mental maps by which we navigate it.

These terms can quickly become disorienting—is the implicate that which is within, and the explicate that which is without? And yet, isn’t it our minds that create the explicate, and the implicate that is fundamental reality? These sorts of questions are one indicator that Bohm is onto something. This paradigm is alive and in motion, and can’t by daintily summed up, but rather, can only be understood through lived experience.

The implicate and explicate are related through a process Bohm terms “enfoldment.” The explicate in enfolded within the implicate. And the implicate unfolds to reveal and manifest the explicate. Although Bohm doesn’t reference the concept of potential in the text, the implicate has a lot to do with the world of potential.

At this point it is worth highlighting Bohm’s relationships with one of his contemporaries, J. G. Bennett. Bennett, a Brittish intellectual, was a student of the mystic G. I. Gurdjieff, and steward of a spiritual lineage called the Fourth Way or the Work. Bohm and Bennett had an extensive correspondence, and I can’t help but wonder what sort of cross-pollination might have been a result of their overlapping endeavors.

In conclusion, Bohm’s work is alive and well today; it is one of the sources upon which Carol Sanford’s Development School regularly draws upon in her work with regenerative business. With the existential crises such as climate change, Bohm’s ideas are more necessary than ever before, and it wouldn’t hurt if this book became more widely read and discussed. show less

This is an excellent book from beginning to end. It exemplifies, in a nutshell, the wholeness, the oneness, of life via a blend of mysticism and science.

An important book from a renowned quantum physicist. This book is often cited as one of the keys linking quantum physics to spirituality/metaphysics. It greatly expanded my understanding of reality.

In a four-dimensional reality, all lower dimensions would appear as abstractions from the totality in the same way that a line or a plane presently have no actual existence to us and are abstractions. There are no perfect lines or planes, in the mathematical sense, except in mathematics. Every line also has width and is therefore potentially a plane and every plane has depth and is potentially a solid.

The Russian philosopher, P. D. Ouspensky developed these and other ideas in his book Tertium Organum. He became a mystic and disciple of Gurdjieff and his ideas were somehow transmitted through Gurdjieff to the theoretical physicist David Bohm (later collaborator with J. Krishnamurti) whose efforts to find a common reality that would show more explain the quantum-relativity dilemma resulted in Bohm's theory (published in his book "Implicate Order").

It's mind-blowing, the idea, the likelihood, that time is pseudo-emergent, an illusion born of not being able to step outside ourselves. We always find ourselves in one 'frame' of the movie of our lives. But we would experience that movie of our lives in exactly the same way even if there was no projector and the 'frames' were jumbled in a heap on the floor. There's no need for an outside mechanism like the 'flow of time' to make sense of that bundle of frames, because there's only one possible order in which they make sense. And we exist in each frame, with particular memories and expectations. Our minds would experience what we call the flow of time even if time is fundamentally an illusion.

The problem has historically been seen in an inability to identify/find/pin-point.... the "self". Several philosophers have sought the "self" and have not to found it. Mostly (I think), like Hume, they have decided that there isn't one.

Indeed the idea that there is a Self that is independent of the body that its inhabitants seems to me to be just recreating the" Ghost in the machine". A quantum leap, such as from the lowest to the next level of an electron in a hydrogen atom is actually the smallest change of energy possible. Sure, time doesn't exist for photons, because they are massless. A photon that was created shortly after the Big Bang doesn't differ from one which was emitted from the lightbulb in your room a fraction of a microsecond ago. But iff (if and only if) you have mass, time exists, see next paragraph. Determining if time exists for neutrinos is something I'll leave to experimental physicists - as solar neutrinos change state on their way to detectors on earth, this would tend to suggest that time *does* exist for *some* massless particles, or that they aren't massless after all (But they carry momentum. E = pc for photons. Einstein's often misquoted equation is E^2 = m^2.c^4 + p^2.c^2 . They have energy, and thus momentum, but no mass.). Theoretical physicists and experimental physicists are like men and women, i.e., we may not always understand each other, and sometimes we disagree, but for the most part we get on fine. We've known about neutrinos since the 1930s, at least theoretically, but they're slippery little beggars and I'll leave the nature of whether time exists for them to the experimental physicists.

If time doesn't exist, I would suggest that that you try this experiment: simplified into only one dimension your position is given by the equation s = ut + 1/2.a.t^2. This is an equation involving time, t. Now if your position is up the embankment of a motorway, because you just ran there, I would suggest this makes quite a big difference than if your position is directly in front of a 38-tonner doing 100 km/h. You may, for example be able to take acid and do physics rather better in the former case than the latter.

Do I mean all of these a la Poincairé or a la Gödel? The “point of a pyramid” intersecting 2 space is the pyramid, but it isn't. That's what David Bohm's book is all about. Perception is to some degree your map...not the territory...the point to that is if your experience is limited so is your mapping...mathematics is a closed/abstracted system...that neglects certain points in order to proceed....some of those neglected points are things that define this system. Plato said that this world descended from a world of forms...that the world of forms was used to construct this reality...along with other intersecting worlds of ideas...I was pointing out that although they exist conceptually, they don't exist in reality...because of the entangled warped nature of space there is no such thing as a straight line...parrots see in the ultraviolet as well as the full range of humans.

Bohm’s book is all about perception and reality and maps. I think of it as perception may not be reality but it is based or derived from reality. Perception is my map and my map was derived from reality. I can't separate the two, except in abstraction, which is not necessarily real. The neglected points that I can think of are 0 & 00 and they bracket the universe. Plato's idea that this world is descended from a world of forms, would need to show that a world of forms exists in reality. I think he was high on something when he said that, IF he said that. Some things get lost in the translation. Worlds of form intersecting with worlds of ideas. Too deep for me. Done spun off into never never land I guess. Same as the point of a pyramid intersecting 2 space Is the pyramid I wrote about above.
This is dangerous...what if they prove our universe doesn't exist?! Then we aren't here and are not having this conversation which is a contradiction. Don't worry, we do exist. Existentialism had its day and has come to an end. show less

Gerald Griffin