David Bohm

 Religion and science meet at the edge of mystery.  Religion and science both look into the mystery of the all, which is beyond human understanding, and try to describe reality in a way which is understandable to them.  They each tell their own stories, trying to understand the common reality in which we live. Sometimes they meet each other while traveling that same path, looking directly into the same mystery, confirming that both are seeking the same thing, and neither has all the answers.

 How does science look at the mystery?   For, example do the parts determine the whole, or does the whole determine the parts?  If the whole determines the parts, is that not like the Divine determining the parts of the universe?  If the whole determines the parts, we are a step closer to a common world view for science and religion.

 Which came first, the whole or the parts.  In classical, deterministic physics, it has been assumed that the parts came first and are organized together to form the whole.  The whole was at least the sum of the parts, and if there was any more, it was due to the organization of the parts, which produced emergent attributes, that did not exist, except at that level of organization.  That the whole was more than the sum of the parts was only this emergent quality which was a direct result of organizing the parts a certain way.

 Determinism said that each object humans could touch or see was divisible into smaller parts.  Those parts were divisible into still smaller parts.  Finally one would get down to the smallest parts, which could not be divided further.  These would be the fundamental building blocks of the universe.  Physics looked first at the molecule, then at the smaller atom, then at nucleons (protons and neutrons) and electrons, then at smaller particles, then at quarks.  The "smallest particle" has not been found, but the small particles that have been described mathematically and some of whose properties have been confirmed experimentally, are so weird, that many strange new descriptions of what reality is have been advanced to explain this weirdness, preferably in one unified "Theory of Everything".  It may be this devotion to smaller and smaller particles is misplaced.

 David Bohm came along and said that we ought to think about other possibilities and then gave us one in which the whole occurs before the parts and the parts at any level are unfolded out of the universal whole.  He postulated a "quantum potential" in quantum physics to resolve certain problems.  He said in Quantum Implications: Essays In Honour Of David Bohm, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London & New York, 1987, p. 38:

" To sum up, then, the quantum potential is capable of constituting a non-local connection [a connection across the universe faster than the speed of light and in violation of Einstein's Theory of General Relativity, which says that nothing can go faster than the speed of light], depending directly on the state of the whole in a way that is not reducible to a preassigned relationship among the parts.  It not only determines an organized and co-ordinated activity of whole sets of particles, but it also determines which relatively independent sub-wholes, if any, there may be within a larger whole."

 Here the whole determines the parts (sub-wholes), rather than the other way around.

 Bohm remarked about the stultifying effect of the belief among most physicists that only the fundamental particle system was worth studying.  Other models, even if only educated guesses and speculation, were worth having to see what we could learn from them.

"To have some kind of intuitive model was better, in my view, than to have none at all, for, without such a model, research in the quantum theory will consist mainly of the working out of formulae and the comparison of these calculated results with those of experiment.  Even more important, the teaching of quantum mechanics will reduce (as it has in fact tended to do) to a kind of indoctrination, aimed  at fostering the belief that such a procedure is all that is possible in physics.  Thus new generations of students have grown up who are predisposed to consider such questions with rather closed minds", p. 40.

 Even Bohm was affected by these attitudes.  Later these ideas were rekindled when he decided that new concepts of order were needed in physics.  Through dormancy and insight, he revealed his creative process.

" Because the response to these ideas was so limited, and because I did not see clearly, at the time, how to proceed further, my interests began to turn in other directions.  During the 1960's, I began to direct my attention toward order, partly as a result of a long correspondence with an American artist, Charles Biederman, who was deeply concerned with this question.  And then, through working with a student, Donald Schumacher, I became strongly interested in language.  These two interests led to a paper on order in physics and on its description through language.  In this paper I compared and contrasted relativistic and quantum notions of order, leading to the conclusion that they contradicted each other and that new notions of order were needed", p. 40.

" Being thus alerted to the importance of order, I saw a programme on BBC television showing  a device in which an ink drop was spread out through a cylinder of glycerine and then brought back together again, to be reconstituted essentially as it was before.  This immediately struck me as very relevant to the question of order, since, when the ink drop was spread out, it still had a 'hidden' (i.e. non-manifest) order that was revealed when it was reconstituted.  On the other hand, in our usual language, we would say that the ink was in a state of 'disorder' when it was diffused through the glycerine.  This led me to see that new notions of order must be involved here.

" Shortly afterwards, I began to reflect on the hologram and to see that in it, the entire order of an object is contained in an interference pattern of light that does not appear to have such an order at all.  Suddenly, I was struck by the similarity of the hologram and the behaviour of the ink drop.  I saw that what they had in common was that an order was enfolded; that is, in any small region of space there may be 'information' which is the result of enfolding an extended order and which could then be unfolded into the original order ( as the points of contact made by the folds in a sheet of paper may contain the essential relationships of the total pattern displayed when the sheet is unfolded.

" Then when I thought of the mathematical form of the quantum theory (with its matrix operations and Green's functions), I perceived that this too described just a movement of enfoldment [folding in] and unfoldment [folding out] of the wave function.  So the thought occurred to me: perhaps the movement of enfoldment and unfoldment is universal, while  the extended and separate forms that we commonly see in experience are relatively stable and independent patterns, maintained by a constant underlying movement of enfoldment and unfoldment.  This latter I called the holomovement.  The proposal was thus a reversal of the usual idea [I have made much progress doing things backwards].  Instead of supposing that extended matter and its movement are fundamental, while enfoldment and unfoldment are explained as a particular case of this, we are saying that the inplicate order will have to contain within itself all possible features of the explicate order [the potential of the universe to come into existence at various levels of organization] as potentialities, along with the principles determining which of these features  shall become actual.  The explicate order will in this way flow out of the implicate order through unfoldment, while in turn it 'flows back' through enfoldment.  The implicate order thus plays a primary role, while the explicate order is secondary, in the sense that its main qualities and properties are ultimately derived in its relationship with the implicate order, of which it is indeed a special and distinguished case", p. 40,41.

"So the whole is, in a deep sense, internally related to the parts.  And since the whole enfolds all the parts, these latter are also internally related, though in a weaker way than they are related to the whole", p. 41.

" I shall not go into great detail about the implicate order here.  I shall assume that the reader is somewhat familiar with this.  What I want to emphasize is only  that the implicate order provided an image, a kind of metaphor, for intuitively understanding the implication of wholeness which is the most important new feature of the quantum theory.  Nevertheless it must be pointed out that the specific analogies of the ink drop and the hologram are limited, and do not fully convey all that is meant by the implicate order.  What is missing in these analogies is an inner principle of organization in the implicate order that determines which sub-wholes shall become actual and what will be their relatively independent and stable forms", p. 41.

 Bohm went from the quantum mechanical particle theory to the quantum mechanical field theory.

"This is accomplished by starting with the classical notion of a continuous field (e.g. the electromagnetic) that is spread out through all space.  One then applies the rules of quantum theory to this field.  The result is that the field will have discrete 'quantized' values for certain properties, such as energy, momentum and angular momentum.  Such a field will act in many ways like a collection of particles, while at the same time it still has wave-like manifestations such as interference, diffraction, etc.

" Of course, in the usual interpretation of the theory, there is no way to understand how this comes about.  One can only use the mathematical formalism to calculate statistically the distribution of phenomena through which such a field reveals itself in our observations and experiments.  But now one can extend this causal interpretation to the quantum field theory.  Here, the actuality will be the entire field over the whole universe.  Classically, this is determined as a continuous solution of some kind of field equation (e.g. Maxwell's equations for the electromagnetic field).  But when we extend the notion of the causal interpretation to the field theory, we find that these equations are modified by the action of what I called a super-quantum potential.  This is related to the activity of the entire field as the original quantum potential was to that of the particles.  As a result, the field equations are modified in a way that makes them, in technical language, non-local and non-linear.

" What this implies for the present context can be seen by considering that, classically, solutions of the field equations represent waves that spread out and diffuse independently.  Thus, as I indicated earlier in connection with the hologram, there is no way to explain the origination of the waves that converge to a region where a particle-like manifestation is actually detected, nor is there any factor that could explain the stability and sustained existence of such a particle-like manifestation.  However, this lack is just what is supplied by the super-quantum potential.  Indeed, as can be shown by a detailed analysis, the non-local features of this latter will introduce the required tendency of waves to converge at appropriate places, while the non-linearity will provide for the stability of recurrence of the whole process.  And thus we come to a theory in which not only the activity of particle-like manifestations, but even thier actualization, e.g. their creation, sustenance and annihilation, is organized by the super-quantum potential.

" The general picture that emerges out of this is of a wave that spreads out and converges again and again to show a kind of average particle-like behaviour, while the interference and diffraction properties are, of course, still maintained.  All this flows out of the super-quantum potential, which depends in principle on the state of the whole universe.  But if the 'wave function of the universe' falls into a set of independent factors, at least approximately, a corresponding set of relatively autonomous and independent sub-units of field function will emerge.  And, in fact, as in the case of the particle theory, the wave function will under normal conditions tend to factorize at the large-scale level in an entirely objective way that is not basically dependent on our knowledge or on our observations and measurements.  So now we see quite generally that the whole universe not only determines and organizes its sub-wholes, but also that it gives form to what has until now been called the elementary particles out of which everything is supposed to be constituted.  What we have here is a kind of universal process of constant creation and annihilation, determined through the super-quantum potential so as to give rise to  a world of form and structure in which all manifest features are only relatively constant, recurrent and stable aspects of this whole.
 
"To see how this is connected to the implicate order, we have only to note that the original holographic model was one in which the whole was constantly enfolded into and unfolded from each region of an electromagnetic field, through dynamical movement and development of the field according to the laws of classical field theory.  But now, this whole field is no longer a self-contained totality; it depends crucially on the super-quantum potential.  As we have seen, however, this in turn depends on the 'wave function of the universe' in a way that is a generalization of how the quantum potential for particles depends on the wave function of a system of particles.  But all such wave functions are forms of the implicate order (whether they refer to particles or to fields).  Thus, the super-quantum potential expresses the activity of a new kind of implicate order.  This implicate order is immensely more subtle than that of the original field, as well as more inclusive, in the sense that not only is the actual activity of the whole field enfolded in it, but also all its potentialities, along with the principles determining which of these shall become actual" [process of evolution], p. 42,43.

" It should be clear that this notion now incorporates both of my earlier perceptions - the implicate order as a movement of outgoing and incoming waves, and of the causal interpretation of the quantum theory.  So, although these two ideas seemed initially very different, they proved to be two aspects of one more comprehensive notion.  This can be described as an overall implicate order, which may extend to an infinite number of levels [levels in the rules of organization (category structure)] and which objectively and self-actively differentiates and organizes itself into independent sub-wholes, while determining how these are interrelated to make up the whole [defining the process of evolution and how it is possible for it to work]....

" All that has been discussed here opens up the possibility of considering the cosmos as an unbroken whole through an overall implicate order", p. 44.

 Bopp said on behalf of the consensus of working physicists, "We say that Bohm's theory cannot be refuted, adding however, that we don't believe it." p. 8.  Such are the occasional foibles of our most cherished contemporary standard for truth, a specialty's experts' consensus ( A theory is most likely true that has the most currently published papers supporting it. Charles Gettys, circa 1978).

 Hiley and Peat, in their general Introduction to the same book, describe Bohm's arguments as follows:

" Unlike a classical potential, the quantum potential appears to have no point-like source.  Moreover, since the field from which one derives the potential satisfies a homogeneous equation, the field is not radiated, as is for example, the electromagnetic field.  But there are two further important differences.

1. The quantum potential does not produce, in general, a vanishing interaction between two particles as the distance between those particles becomes very large.  Thus two distant systems may still be strongly and directly connected.  This is, of course, contrary to the implicit requirement of classical physics, where it is always assumed that where two systems are sufficiently far apart, they will behave independently.  This is a necessary condition if the notion of analysis of a system into separately and independent existent constituent parts is to be carried out.  Thus the quantum potential seriously calls into question the notion that all explanations of complexity must be understood by considering independent systems in interaction with each other.

2. What is even more striking is that the quantum potential cannot be expressed as a universally determined function of all the coordinates of the particles.  Rather it depends on the 'quantum state' .... of the system as a whole.  This means that even if at some time the positions and momenta of two sets of particles are the same, but they are in different quantum states, then their subsequent evolution can be very different [there goes Determinism!]

"All of this implies that the relationship between two particles depends on something that goes beyond what can be described in terms of the two particles alone.  In fact more generally, this relationship may depend on the quantum states of even larger systems, ultimately going on to the universe as a whole" [raising the possibility of divine intervention], p. 15.

" This is very different from the way we perceive the macroscopic world around us, where separation seems basic.  However, it is well known that when we go to low enough temperatures, bulk matter behaves very differently.  Currents flow without dissipation in superconductivity, superfluids flow without viscosity, etc., but as temperature rises, the distant correlations necessary for non-dissipation break up and the particles no longer flow without resistance."

 They conclude with "the hope that individuals may come together in a spirit of creative cooperation to build a world in which undivided wholeness and creative order are an essential ground." p. 29.

 Henry P. Stapp in the same book describes a process model of nature.

" The model to be proposed here is the embodiment of a process conception of nature [nature defined by the process of evolution, where the order in which things become fixed very much determines what successive generations will be like].  By process I mean nature conceived as a progressively growing set of things that are fixed and settled.  This growing body of accumulating facts is considered to increase in discrete steps; at each step some unsettled things become fixed and settled...if initially unsettled things can eventually become fixed and settled, then the order in which different things become fixed might have conceptual and dynamical significance.  To expand the structural possibilities we go beyond the pragmatic confines of Bohr's interpretation: we distinguish human knowledge from general existence, and base physical theory on the latter.

" As regards the relationship between order as defined by process (i.e. the order in which things become fixed and settled) and temporal order (as defined by space-time coordination) we are, ab initio, completely free.  The theory of relativity says nothing al all about the order in which things become fixed and settled, because it was set in a framework in which no such order occurred", p 259.

 Renee Weber, a philosopher, concluded the book with a discussion with David Bohm on meaning as being.  Some excerpts from that dialog follow.

Weber:  It [a computer] would be aware, but not aware of being aware.

Bohm:  Yes.

Weber:  That comes in at higher levels of organization [higher category levels in the mind].  One can see how this works by applying it to a human organism; there it's more clear-cut.  For every state of mind, there is a state of body and vice versa, like in Spinoza.
It's also very subtle levels of being, within the implicate order, which may not even be located in the body, in the sense that it may be affected, rather as Sheldrake is suggesting, by fields which are not local.

Weber:  These fields affect us and we affect them; it's a mutual interpenetration and exchange.

Bohm:  Yes.

Weber:  Are you proposing something like a meaning field?

Bohm:  Yes, that's exactly it.  You could say (and Sheldrake seems to agree with this) that the morphogenetic field is a field of active meaning - meaning in the signasomatic and somasignificant sense.

Weber:  It might sound naive, yet somebody might ask 'How did it get there?'

Bohm:  One theory is that it accumulates gradually.  In discussions with Sheldrake, for example, one idea that has come up is that meaning is constantly operative at different levels.  It works from the implicate to the explicate, but there is also a projection out of the implicate to the explicate and an introjection back into the implicate order.  If we keep introjecting similar content, it will build up a certain meaning.

Weber:  So the meaning field is the consequence both of an inner impulse which somehow it is, and of what it has undergone in history, and in human consciousness.

Bohm:  One can see that in human beings clearly; if nature is similar to us, then it should be happening there too.

Weber:  That is one of the beautiful aspects of this world view. It envisions a universal coherence and points to an all-encompassing principle that runs throughout the system; it doesn't just start at the human or organic level.  You are saying that it all exists on all levels.  Applied to the very large scale, what would you say, for example, of the constant making and unmaking of galaxies and stars?

Bohm:  We haven't gone into it sufficiently to see how it would work there.  The universe is supposed to have started from the big bang.  We might say that that is the formation of a certain meaning and a certain structure of meaning which unfolds.  There could be other universes, within this sea of infinite energy.  Let's look at basics - meaning, energy, matter and, ultimately, self-awareness.  meaning infuses and informs energy, giving it shape and form.  Now a certain form is matter, which is energy which has stabilized into a regular form, more or less stable, with some independence [how do you define this kind of independence of a physical object?].  But there must be a meaning that is behind it.  In terms of quantum mechanics I would say there will have to be some development of the wave function beyond the present theory, which is just what that is, i.e. it would be a formative cause, a field of meaning.

Weber:  The field of meaning would be displayed, to use your terminology, by the explicate or the material.

Bohm:  Yes, that is the display.

Weber:  This is the point on which people are going to have to shift in their thinking:  it doesn't only have meaning when it comes out of the enfolded order; meaning runs through the implicate order as well as the explicate order at all levels.

Bohm:  Yes.  In fact, you could think of a whole series in seeing one level of the implicate as the signasomatic consequence of the next level, which is less subtle, right?

Weber:  Yes.

Bohm:  There could be many levels, an indefinite set of levels of implication.

Weber:  Would the signasomatic principle function all the way through?

Bohm:  Yes, because something is somatic relative to something which is more subtle.

Weber:  So this would function in a non-human world [no observer necessary], the sub-atomic world, too, and would apply at all levels of implication, inner and outer.

Bohm:  Yes.

Weber:  It's dazzling and one can't help but draw the conclusion that you are saying : 'This is a universe that is alive (in its appropriate way) and somehow conscious at all the levels.'

Bohm:  Yes, in a way.

Weber:  That's what I take this to mean.

Bohm:  We don't know how far the self-awareness would go, but if you were religious, you would believe it is a sense of God, or as something that would be totally self-aware. p. 444-445.

Weber:  You mean, as a whole.  The question is: Is there a significance to the holomovement as a whole?

Bohm:  Yes, that is a question of what proposal we want to explore. People have, in effect, been exploring notions of that kind in religions.  One view is to say that the significance is similar to ourselves in a sense that Christians would say that God is a person.

Weber:  Or, anyhow, a being.

Bohm:  Well, they say three persons, the Trinity, which are one.  Anyway, it is something like a human being, or rather the other way around; that man is the image of God.  That implies that there is a total significance.  If you say Atman, in Hinduism, something similar is implied.

Weber:  Atman and Brahman, seen as identical; the micro- and the macrocosm.

Bohm:  Yes, and Atman is from the side of meaning.  You would say Atman is more like the meaning.  But then what is meant would be Brahman, I suppose; the identity of consciousness and cosmos.

Weber:  Looked at from the so-called subjective side it would be Atman.  And what is meant is the objective.

Bohm:  Meaning in this sense that somasignificant and signasomatic unite the two sides.  This claims that the meaning and what is meant are ultimately one, which is the phrase 'Atman equals Brahman' of classical Hindu philosophy.

Weber:  It's an identity-thesis claim.  To relate this again to what some of the great philosophers of the past have said: somatasignificant and signasomatic - aren't they your way of working out your own creative concepts for what Spinioza meant by mind and body, and what Hegel meant by subject and substance?

Bohm:  Yes, this is a way of understanding how these are related, extending the understanding, or extending the meaning.

Weber:  It has plagued philosophers through the ages that there are these two ways of apprehending reality.  You are proposing that signa [mind] and somatic [body] are somehow the very fabric of everything in the universe and that this gets expressed in appropriate ways at different levels of organization.

Bohm:  Yes [meaning is relevance in a knowledge unit for producing the change that results in the emergence of the prime attribute, and the larger context in which it causes change]. and the bridge is the energy that creates the soma and regulates it and so on.

Weber:  Let's pursue this idea of the bridge of energy.

Bohm:  The energy which is informed with meaning [potential relevance in this circumstance].
 ...
Weber:  Could one put into words the idea of a meaning or a purpose for all this?  You once suggested greater clarity of the universe about itself.

Bohm:  That could be part of its end.  Maybe an end of greater order, greater clarity, an end to create something.

Weber:  So that meaning and being become transparently clear to the organism at all levels of itself?

Bohm:  That would be part of the end.  I don't know how to put the end yet.  The end could be said to be love, it could be said to be order, harmony, but the end could also be said to be the process itself.

Weber:  Spinoza would have liked that.  He said that the universe doesn't have to have a reason, it is, and that's enough.  Although you start out from physics, your view seems to be similar to that.

Bohm:  Yes, because it's not to say that it has meaning, but that it is its meaning.  We are trying to be more clear as to what this meaning is, because then it will have changed our being. [Since this meaning is the only one we have, it is good.  Living in harmony with it is good.  Living in disharmony with it is evil. [7-27-98 jb]

Weber:  You are a physicist, yet so much of this sounds like what a mystic would say: that in the mystical experience there simply is profound and self-evident meaning, without utilitarian overtones.  Isn't that what you are saying?

Bohm:  Yes,. utility is only a small part of meaning.  Utility is a meaning, but its a rather restricted meaning.  The question is:  Useful for what?  It always occurs in some context - without the context we cannot discuss utility.
 ...
Weber:  So concerning the question raised earlier, 'Do we discover or do we create meaning?' it is as if in discovering it we create it or create it in us.

Bohm:  Not only that, but we enrich it; we create something which has not been there [but had the potential to be there, if organized properly].

Weber:  We add to it.

Bohm:  Yes, we are part of it and it is part of us.

Weber:  Since any meaning we grasp in it changes its being, this makes us partners in the evolution of the universe.

Bohm:  Yes, that's the proposal... p. 449.
 ...
Weber:  Well what does all this imply for the human world?  Looking at the universe in this way changes our lives in what way?

Bohm:  It's hard to say at first, but it will clearly imply something very different, a different attitude in the sense that we won't give that much primary weight to the external and the mechanistic side - the side of fragmentation and partiality [Slobadan Milosovich, us against them at all costs.  They do not matter, because we are different from them and distant from them with no interaction with them - determinism (separate and independent, fractured mentally (not integrated) and fractured socially (projecting out major parts of ourselves on to the "enemy"].  Also it encourages us much more toward a creative attitude, and fundamentally it opens the way to the transformation of the human being because a change of meaning is a change of being.  At present we say because of the confused fragmentary meanings we have confused fragmentary being, both individually and socially.  Therefore this opens the way to a whole being, in society and in the individual.
 ...
Weber:  To relate it to human psychology and transformation, the key seems to be the Socratic maxim 'Know yourself,' go inward, and also 'Observe'.

Bohm:  And also outward.  The outward and the inward are one part of one total meaning.

Weber:  You are really saying our being is meaning.  The whole world is meaning.

Bohm:  Yes.  The being of matter is its meaning; the being of ourselves is meaning; the being of society is meaning.  The mechanistic view has created a rather crude and gross meaning which has created a crude and confused society.

Weber:  This view, your view, would make humans beings feel rooted and have their dynamic place in the whole scheme of things.

Bohm:  At least they would have a chance to find it there.  It's a view within which it makes sense to observe to find out where your place is.

Weber:  Beautiful!