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These are excerpts and elaborations from my book "The Nature of Consciousness"
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The Implicate Order In
the 1950s the US physicist David Bohmextended his ideas about the "implicate
order" to the conscious mind. Quantum and Relativity
theories may be very different, but they agree in denying the existence of
single static particles, they agree in describing the world as an undivided
whole in constant flux (albeit in completely different ways) in which all parts
of the universe are constantly interacting; and those parts include the
observer, the "i". The
universe is characterized by a "flow" that integrates everything:
individual forms are the equivalent of the still frames of an object in motion.
It turns out that we
perceive the "flow" of reality through those static images, but those
still images are only a simplification of motion. By analogy, what goes on in our mind is a stream of
consciousness, from which we can abstract concepts, ideas, etc (forms of
thought) that are mere instances of that flow of thought. Thought is a kind of movement, and concepts
are kinds of objects. Bohmbelieved that there is just one
flow, in which both matter and mind flow, and that this flow can be known only
implicitly through the forms (the still frames) that we can grasp out of this
flow. Bohmrejected the distinction
between what we are thinking and what is going on, as well as the notion that
one part of reality (my conscious mind) can know another part of reality: it is
wrong to separate the thinker from the thought. The thinker is not separate
from the reality that he thinks about, the thinker and that reality are parts
of the same flow. The belief that thinker and the object of his thinking (between
thought and non-thought) are separate permeates our conscious life. This conviction is even built into the structure
of language itself: modern language is based on the pattern "subject-
verb- object", that clearly separates the subject and the object. But in
reality the key actor is the verb, not the subject, and the verb unites the
subject and the object in one, undivided action. At the level of the
implicate order, which is a sort of "higher dimension", there is no
difference between matter and mind. That difference arises within the
explicate order (the conventional space-time of Physics). As we travel inwards, we travel towards that
higher dimension, the implicate order, in which mind and matter are the same.
As we travel outwards, we travel towards the explicate order in which subject
and object are separate. There is an inherent
affinity between consciousness and implicate order. For example, when we listen to music we directly perceive the
implicate order, not just the explicate order of those sounds. Bohms quantum field contains "active in-formation" that
determines what happens to the particle (in-formation as in give form).
Bohm interpreted the "active in-formation" of the quantum field that,
in his view, accompanies each particle, as the mental (proto-conscious)
property of the particle. Every particle has a rudimentary mind-like quality.
Matter has mental properties, as well as physical properties. In-formation
turns out to be the bridge between the two worlds. The two sides cannot be
separated because they are entangled in the same quantum field. At the lower
level of reality, mental (conscious) and physical processes are essentially the
same. Back to the beginning of the chapter "A Physics Of Consciousness" | Back to the index of all chapters |
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