Interesting stuff about Bohm by Will Keepin:
http://www.vision.net.au/~apaterson/science/david_bohm.htm#CONTENTS:
LIFEWORK OF DAVID BOHM - RIVER OF TRUTH
HOLOMOVEMENT AND THE IMPLICATE ORDER
......
Thoughts About Thinking
Before delving into Bohm's substantive contributions to science, I will touch briefly on his ideas about language and thought. In his penchant for precision, Bohm analyzed ways that our language deceives us about the true nature of reality. We generally consider ordinary language to be a neutral medium for communication that does not restrict our world view in any way. Yet Bohm showed that language imposes strong, subtle pressures to see the world as fragmented and static. He emphasized that thought tends to create fixed structures in the mind, which can make dynamic entities seem to be static. To illustrate with an example, we know upon reflection that all manifest objects are in a state of constant flux and change. So there is really no such thing as a thing; all objects are dynamic processes rather than static forms. To put it crudely, one could say that nouns do not really exist, only verbs exist. A noun is just a "slow" verb; that is, it refers to a process that is progressing so slowly so as to appear static. For example, the paper on which this text is printed appears to have a stable existence, but we know that it is, at all times including this very moment, changing and evolving towards dust. Hence paper would more accurately be called papering--to emphasize that it is always and inevitably a dynamic process undergoing perpetual change. Bohm experimented with restructuring language in this dynamic mode, which he called the rheomode, in an effort to more accurately reflect in language the true dynamic nature of reality.
A primary tenet of Bohm's thinking is that all of reality is dynamic process. Included in this is the very process of thinking about the nature of reality. If we split thought off from reality, as we are conditioned to do, and then speak of our thought about reality, we have created a fragmentary view in which knowledge and reality are separate. Knowledge is then in danger of becoming static and somehow exempt from the conditions of reality. Bohm emphasizes that "a major source of fragmentation is the presupposition that the process of thought is sufficiently separate from and independent of its content, to allow us generally to carry out clear, orderly, rational thinking, which can properly judge this content as correct or incorrect, rational or irrational, fragmentary or whole, etc." (Bohm 1980, 18). In his writing and talks, he was fond of referring to A. Korzybski's admonition that whatever we say a thing is, it is not that. It is both different from that, and more than that (Korzybski 1950).
The artificial separation of process and content in knowledge becomes especially problematic in systems of thought that seek to encompass the totality of existence (as do grand unified theories in physics, for example). As Bohm notes (Bohm 1980), it then becomes quite easy to slip into "the trap of tacitly treating such a view as originating independently of thought, thus implying that its content actually is the whole of reality. From this point on, one will see, in the whole field accessible to one, no room for change in the overall order, as given by one's notions of totality, which indeed must now seem to encompass all that is possible or even thinkable. . . To adopt such an attitude will evidently tend to prevent that free movement of the mind needed for clarity of perception, and so will contribute to a pervasive distortion and confusion, extending into every aspect of experience." (p. 62)
Bohm goes on to suggest that the movement of thought is a kind of artistic process that yields ever-changing form and content. He intimates that "there can no more be an ultimate form of such thought that there could be an ultimate poem (that would make all further poems unnecessary)" (p. 63). Indeed, imagine a Grand Unified Symphony that encompassed all possible symphonies--past, present, and future--thereby rendering all further musical composition redundant and unnecessary. The idea is preposterous, and yet many physicists, not recognizing their theories as art forms, strive for just such an ultimate scientific theory. In truth, science is essentially a creative art form that paints dynamic portraits of the natural world, using the human intellect as its canvas and the tools of reason as it palette. Bohm was rare among physicists in recognizing this, and he exhibited commensurate humility in the interpretation and extrapolation of his theories.
Wholeness And The Holomovement
David Bohm's most significant contribution to science is his interpretation of the nature of physical reality, which is rooted in his theoretical investigations, especially quantum theory and relativity theory. Bohm postulates that the ultimate nature of physical reality is not a collection of separate objects (as it appears to us), but rather it is an undivided whole that is in perpetual dynamic flux. For Bohm, the insights of quantum mechanics and relativity theory point to a universe that is undivided and in which all parts "merge and unite in one totality." This undivided whole is not static but rather in a constant state of flow and change, a kind of invisible ether from which all things arise and into which all things eventually dissolve. Indeed, even mind and matter are united: "In this flow, mind and matter are not separate substances. Rather they are different aspects of one whole and unbroken movement" (in Hayward 1987, 25). Similarly, living and nonliving entities are not separate. As Bohm puts it, "The ability of form to be active is the most characteristic feature of mind, and we have something that is mindlike already with the electron." Thus, matter does not exist independently from so-called empty space; matter and space are each part of the wholeness.
Bohm calls this flow the holomovement. The component terms holo and movement refer to two fundamental features of reality. The movement portion refers to the fact that reality is in a constant state of change and flux as mentioned above. The holo portion signifies that reality is structured in a manner that can be likened to holography. As is well known, holography is a relatively new type of photography, in which the photographic record is not an image of the object (as in normal photography) but rather a set of interference patterns made by splitting a laser beam, and then reflecting one component of the beam off the object before reuniting the two component beams at the photographic plate. When laser light is shined on the hologram, a full three-dimensional image of the object appears, as opposed to the usual two-dimensional photograph. What is especially remarkable about a hologram is that if laser light is shined on just a small part of it, the entire image still appears, although in less refinement and detail. Thus, each small portion of the hologram contains information about the entire image, whereas in a normal photograph, each small portion of film contains a correspondingly small part of the image. As laser light is shined on successively smaller portions of the hologram, the entire image is still preserved, but it becomes progressively more "fuzzy."
In analogy to holography but on a much grander scale, Bohm believes that each part of physical reality contains information about the whole. Thus in some sense, every part of the universe "contains" the entire universe very remarkable claim that at first seems, perhaps, implausible. Yet we have all experienced a glimmer of this in the following commonplace example. Imagine yourself gazing upward at the night sky on a clear night, and consider what is actually taking place. You are able to discern structures and perceive events that span vast stretches of space and time, all of which are, in some sense, contained in the movements of the light in the tiny space encompassed by your eyeball. The photons entering your pupil come from stars that are millions of light-years apart, and some of these photons embarked on their journey billions of years ago to reach their final destination, your retina. In some sense, then, your eyeball contains the entire cosmos, including its enormous expanse of space and immensity in time--although, of course, the details are not highly refined. Optical and radio telescopes have much larger apertures, or "holographic plates," and consequently they are able to glean much greater detail and precision than the unaided eye. But the principle is clear, and it is extraordinary to contemplate.
Evidence for this kind of holographic structure in nature has emerged recently in the burgeoning field of chaos theory and its close cousin, fractal geometry. The term chaos theory is somewhat of a misnomer because the new discoveries are more about order than chaos. It has been found that most nonlinear systems embody a multitude of self-similar structures that are nested within one another at different scales. A well-known example is the Mandelbrot set, which is a fractal that appears in computer representations much like a black bug, with an infinity of similar "bugs" embedded at innumerable smaller scales. Each of these "bugs" replicates the whole, in a sense, and contains information about the entire nonlinear process.
Putting the holographic structure of reality together with its perpetual dynamism, we get the holomovement: an exceedingly rich and intricate flow in which, in some sense, every portion of the flow contains the entire flow. As Bohm puts it, the holomovement refers to "the unbroken wholeness of the totality of existence as an undivided flowing movement without borders" (Bohm 1980, 172). The physical evidence that forms the basis for postulating the holomovement comes primarily from Bohm's interpretation of physics, especially quantum theory, which I will examine further.
The Implicate Order
The holomovement is, admittedly, a rather subtle concept to grasp; indeed, it is generally invisible to us. Bohm proposes that the holomovement consists of two fundamental aspects: the explicate order and the implicate order. He illustrates the concept of the implicate order by analogy to a remarkable physical phenomenon. Consider a cylindrical jar with a smaller concentric cylinder (of the same height) inside it that has a crank attached, so that the inner cylinder can be rotated while the outer cylinder remains stationary. Now fill the annular volume between the two cylinders with a highly viscous fluid, such as glycerine, so that there is negligible diffusion. If a droplet of ink is placed in the fluid, and the inner cylinder is turned slowly, the ink drop will be stretched out into a fine, thread-like form that becomes increasingly thinner and fainter until it finally disappears altogether. At this point it is tempting to conclude that the ink drop has been thoroughly mixed into the glycerine, so that its order has been rendered chaotic and random. However, if the inner cylinder is now rotated slowly in the opposite direction, the thin ink form will reappear, retrace its steps, and eventually reconstruct itself into its original form of the drop again. Such devices have been constructed, and the effect is quite dramatic.
The lesson in this analogy is that a hidden order may be present in what appears to be simply chance or randomness. When the ink form disappears, its order is not destroyed but rather is enfolded in the glycerine. To develop this analogy further, imagine that a whole series of droplets is enfolded, as follows. The first drop is enfolded with n turns. Next, a second drop is placed in the glycerine, and it is enfolded after another n turns (the first drop is now enfolded 2n turns). Then a third drop is placed in the glycerine, which is enfolded after n turns (the first drop is now enfolded 3n turns, and the second drop 2n turns). Continuing in this way, a whole series of droplets is enfolded in the glycerine. When the direction of rotation is reversed, the drops unfold one at a time, and if this is done quickly enough, the effect is that of a stationary ink drop or "particle" subsisting for a time in the moving fluid. One can also imagine that each successive drop is placed at an adjacent position in the glycerine, so that when the inner cylinder is reversed, the appearance is that of a particle moving along a continuos path. In either case, the sequence of enfolded ink droplets in the glycerine constitutes the implicate order, and the visible droplet that is unfolded at any given moment is the explicate order.
Bohm views the nature of physical reality in analogous fashion to this example. An electron is understood to be a set of enfolded ensembles, which are generally not localized in space. At any given moment, one of these ensembles may be unfolded and localized, and the next moment, this one enfolds and is replaced by another that unfolds. If this process continues in a rapid and regular fashion in which each unfoldment is localized adjacent to the previous one, it gives the appearance of continuous motion of a particle, to which we humans have given the name electron. Yet there is no isolated particle, and its apparent continuous motion is an illusion generated by the rapid and regular sequence of unfoldings (much as a spinning airplane propeller gives the appearance of a solid disk). As Bohm puts it, ". . . fundamentally, the particle is only an abstraction that is manifest to our senses. What is, is always a totality of ensembles, all present together, in an orderly series of stages of enfoldment and unfoldment, which intermingle and inter-penetrate each other in principle throughout the whole of space" (Bohm 1980, 183-184).
Moreover, at any stage of this process, an ensemble may suddenly unfold that is very different from the previous one, which would give the appearance in the explicate order of the electron suddenly jumping discontinuously from one state to another. This offers a new way of understanding what lies behind the well-known quantum mechanical behavior of electrons as they jump discontinuously from one quantum state to another. Indeed, what we call matter is merely an apparent manifestation of the explicate order of the holomovement. This explicate order is the surface appearance of a much greater enfolded or implicate order, most of which is hidden. Contemporary physics and, indeed, most of science deals with explicate orders and structures only, which is why physics has encountered such great difficulty in explaining a variety of phenomena that Bohm would say arise from the implicate order.
The radical implications of Bohm's implicate order take some time to fully grasp, especially for Western minds that have been steeped in the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm of classical physics that still dominates contemporary science. For example, it might be tempting to assume that the implicate order refers to a subtle level of reality that is secondary and subordinate to the primary explicate order, which we see manifest all around us. However, for Bohm, precisely the opposite is the case: the implicate order is the fundamental and primary reality, albeit invisible. Meanwhile, the explicate order--the vast physical universe we experience--is but a set of "ripples" on the surface of the implicate order. The manifest objects that we regard as comprising ordinary reality are only the unfolded projections of the much deeper, higher dimensional implicate order, which is the fundamental reality. The implicate and explicate orders are interpenetrating in all regions of space-time, and each region enfolds all of existence, that is, everything is enfolded into everything. As Bohm (1980) explains, "[I]n the implicate order the totality of existence is enfolded within each region of space (and time). So, whatever part, element, or aspect we may abstract in thought, this still enfolds the whole and is therefore intrinsically related to the totality from which it has been abstracted. Thus, wholeness permeates all that is being discussed, from the very outset." (p. 172)
Fullness Of Empty Space
Bohm's understanding of physical reality turns the commonplace notion of "empty space" completely on its head. For Bohm, space is not some giant vacuum through which matter moves; space is every bit as real as the matter that moves through it. Space and matter are intimately interconnected. Indeed, calculations of the quantity known as the zero-point energy suggest that a single cubic centimetre of empty space contains more energy than all of the matter in the known universe! From this result, Bohm (1980, 191) concludes that "space, which has so much energy, is full rather than empty." For Bohm, this enormous energy inherent in "empty" space can be viewed as theoretical evidence for the existence of a vast, yet hidden realm such as the implicate order........
