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These are excerpts and elaborations from my book "The Nature of Consciousness"
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Implicate Order The field that
Bohmintroduced in the equations to fix Heisenbergs indeterminism represents a
sub-quantum reality. Bohm's quantum potential does not act
within the four-dimensional geometry of spacetime; it acts beyond it. In a
sense, it defines a common pool of information, a way to connect everything
together, just like dancers can use the music to move together in harmony. Bohmthought that this field must be fluctuating rapidly and what
Quantum Theory observes is merely an average over time (just like Newton's physics reads a value for
quantities that are actually due to the Brownian motion of many particles).
Quantum physics deals with mean values of an underlying reality just like
Newton's physics deals with mean values of thermodynamic quantities. At this
sub-quantum level, quantum effects all but disappear: a particles position
and momentum are well-determined. The mystery of the collapse of the wave
function, of the discontinuity in the transition from the quantum world to the
classical world, occurs only at the quantum level, whereas Bohmbelieves there is a deeper level at which the apparent
discontinuity of the collapse disappears. After all, the
study of "elementary" particles has shown that even elementary
particles can be destroyed and created, which means that they are not the
ultimate components of the universe, that there must be an underlying reality,
or, in Bohm's terms, an
underlying "flux". Bohm
thought that the basic problem lay in an obsolete notion of "order". Thus, Bohmdistinguished between the "explicate" order (the world
of isolated spacetime thing-events that our senses experience) and the
"implicate" order (all thing-events are part of a whole, the "holomovement").
The explicate order emerges from the holomovement. The holomovement contains
all instances of explicate order as potentialities. Cartesian order
(the "grid" of space-time events) is appropriate for Newtonian
physics in which the universe is divided in separate objects, but inadequate
for Quantum and Relativity theories to reflect their idiosyncrasies and in
particular the undivided wholeness of the universe that Bohmhas been focusing on. Bohm's solution was to contrast the
"explicate order" that we perceive and that Physics describes (the
Cartesian order of isolated space-time thing-events) with the "implicate
order", which is an underlying, hidden layer of relationships. The explicate order is but a manifestation
of the implicate order. Space and time, for example, are "forms" of
the explicate order that are derived from the implicate order. The implicate
order is similar to the order within a hologram: the implicate order of a
hologram gives rise to the explicate order of an image, but the implicate order
is not simply a one-to-one representation of the image. In fact, each region of
the hologram contains a representation of the entire image. The implicate order and the explicate order
are fundamentally different. The main
difference is that in the explicate order each point is separate from the
others. In the intricate order, the
whole universe is "enfolded" in everything, and everything is
enfolded in the whole. In the explicate order "things" become
(relatively) independent. In the implicate order, all thing-events are part of a whole, the
"holomovement". The explicate order emerges from the holomovement.
The holomovement contains all instances of explicate order as potentialities. Bohmsuggested that the implicate order could be defined by the quantum potential, the field consisting of an infinite number of pilot waves. The overlapping of the waves generates the explicate order of particles and forces, and ultimately space and time. Since Bohms quantum field is affected by all particles (the pilot-wave that
guides all particles is affected by all particles), nonlocality is a feature of
reality: a particle can depend strongly on distant features of the environment.
Bohm's universe is one indivisible whole. Everything in the universe
is entangled in everything else, and ultimately in the whole. It does not make
sense to analyze particles of subsets of the world as independent and separate
parts. Back to the beginning of the chapter "The New Physics" | Back to the index of all chapters |
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