The following is from a lecture of David Bohm. David Bohm looks at what relativity theory and quantum theory have in common, namely, wholeness. This raises the question of order, which has profound implications for the whole of our lives. Communication of metaphysics at this level is an art. It essentially escapes verbalization. My emphasis in italics.
0:44 The ordinary view of physics which reached its apex during the late 19th century is what we call mechanism… We say everything is like a great machine, the universe is a great machine made of elementary parts…
2:19 It is a view of universal order, and every view of universal order has profound implications for the whole of our lives…
2:38 We reduce the world as far as possible to a set of basic elements… These basic elements are external to each other… The elements…interact only mechanically. We may contrast this with an organism in which the very nature of each part is profoundly affected by the whole state of the organism: In fact, we could say in the organism the parts are organized “by” the whole. And in the machine the parts are organized “into a” whole, that is the parts are made separately and organized into a whole whereas in an organism the whole organizes the parts.
5:40 It would be almost impossible to imagine a state of affairs in which people would be compelled by evidence alone to abandon any worldview…
6:55 This mechanistic program is really a kind of faith… it permeates the motivation of most modern scientific enterprise, just as religious faith permeated a great many enterprises in the past.
17:10 [The] dual [wave-particle] nature…is literally a contradiction… We don’t know what it is… We can’t say we have a way of calculating what it does, but we have no really clear notion of what it is. Now, well, that’s not an unusual state of affairs…
18:12 Now, in quantum mechanics one found that there’s a very peculiar kind of non-local connection. Under certain conditions it’s possible, in some sense, for a particle “a” to be connected to “b” without any visible mediation of some force between them… This was further discussed by [John Stewart] Bell, and by many others… A whole series of experiments…have generally confirmed this thing quite well now.
19:01 The state of the whole, insofar as there are parts, the state of the whole organizes the parts. For example, …you cannot consider a molecule be made of various parts which are just put together to make up a whole, but there is a way of treating it mathematically which says you’ve got to start with the state of the whole and this organizes the parts to make up the molecule. Or, to make up a superconducting set of electrons, which will sort of flow around any obstacle like as if they were in a ballet dance, rather than be deflected by it and so on…
19:41 Now, all of this leads to a certain kind of wholeness here, because we find that energy is quantized in definite amounts, and every connection between one thing and another therefore is by a link of a definite amount. If it were divided it would then be another kind of link… So everything is sort of linked indivisibly. All of us are observer and observed… It seems that there’s no principle available to determine exactly what’s going to happen, only in some statistical sense… But also we find that the nature of this thing…depends on how it’s treated. When we put up slit systems, we bring out its wave like nature, and when we put in something like a particle detector, we bring out its particle nature. It’s rather like an organism which can show different qualities according to the context, but as there’s a tremendous context dependence of the quality of each thing, on the whole. And, of course, there is this direct notion of a non-local connection on the whole organizing the parts… One can, however, understand why the mechanistic view still works in classical physics, because under certain conditions this whole factorizes, we say mathematically, …so that there are sub-wholes that…are relatively independent. So, depending on the conditions, say especially at high temperature, this whole tends to break up into sub-wholes that are relatively independent. But as you lower the temperature…this wholeness tends to assert itself more and more. Fundamentally, [it] is always a whole, because it is the whole which determines the sub-wholes that it is going to break up into…
22:00 Now, in relativity you have the basic concepts…: strict causality, strict continuity, and strict locality. Right these are the three basic concepts of relativity. If you want to find the basic concepts of quantum mechanics you just put “non” in front of each of those. That is to say, the basic concepts [in relativity theory and quantum mechanics] contradict each other absolutely, and we we don’t really have any [way] that put them together yet properly. As yet, there are formal mathematical ways of doing it, but I don’t think we have it as yet a clear concept, which could be intuitively grasped, and I think it is important. The concept which can be intuitively grasped is going to become the effective world view.
22:58 In fact, it is very hard to get it, because I myself feel that quantum mechanics is in development… Our ideas also are in process of constant development, unfolding… And it’s time for quantum mechanics to unfold into something more now. The question is how are we to deal with this… I want to make the suggestion… Instead of looking at all the differences relativity and quantum theory, … let’s look at what they have in common. What they have in common is unbroken wholeness. They each started in a different way, but they still have that in common. So, therefore, …if we begin there we will perhaps begin to see some new view, which holds both of those views in it as sub-views, and some approximation. Now, this raises the question of order…
25:18 Is there another order that is suitable for thinking about unbroken wholeness? … Once you’re committed to this order… you’re also committed to a mechanism in some way. That is, the order in which you say everything is, is a crucial part of your thought now. Now, what do I mean by order? Well, we know all sorts of orders, like, the order of numbers, the order of words in the language, …the order [in] music, the order…in which we try to build up society, the order [of a] functioning machine, and say the order of thought. And the world order conveys a vast range of meanings. And in fact, it would be impossible for me to define it without tacitly using order, because as I talk, and as you think, so the order is taking place. Therefore we say that order is already there, and we are, we can really hope to unfold some of its meaning, rather than try to define it right now. There would be no way to to define order, because…anything you do presuppose that you already knew something about order. And it’s like the dictionary, that every word goes defined in terms of other words, but finally the dictionary as a whole doesn’t define anything really…
26:53 Certain scientific instruments have had a big effect on our notions of order [Bohm discusses how the optical lens has had a tremendous effect on making us think of mechanical order and contrasts this will the holography]…
32:31 There [is] almost an unlimited number of examples I could give if I had time… Our experience of enfoldment and unfoldment – I’m going to make a strong statement – is much more common than is our mechanistic experience. But we have been trained to ignore it, [we have] regarded [it] as unimportant, or not non-existent. That is, we don’t pay attention to it… Our whole structure of our thought has led us to pay attention to the mechanical aspect…
33:17 Now, I’m going to propose this was quite all right in 19th century, because there was no evidence that it was not so right. But now, with relativity and quantum theory, it is really very hard to maintain this point of view. I mean it’s easy to maintain it, but hard to justify it. Now, …what I’m proposing is that the fundamental reality is enfolding and unfolding… So, the key point I’m making is that the mathematical laws of the quantum theory say that enfoldment and unfoldment is the fundamental movement…
35:00 So, what I’ll say now is that underlying the universe…is the universal activity of…unfoldment, which i call the whole holomovement, which may contain, not only all kinds of enfoldments known, but vast numbers that are as yet unknown and so on… And…this is an unbroken whole. Now, the basic order of this movement is an enfoldment and unfoldment, and we’ll call this the unfolded order or, if you like use the latin word, implicate order… Among the orders there is one which is explicate. It is not sharply distinguished from the implicate, but it has a property that the basic elements that are of interest to you are seen as separate. … More generally we’ll say unfoldment…is the very nature of the movement. Now… I say, in the implicate order everything is folded into everything, and it’s unfolded actively. … You can see this clearly in your own experience. That [is], as you unfold what’s going on in the room, for example, what I’m talking…may actively affect you…
37:28 This may give you a much better intuitive notion. Quantum mechanics may ultimately be much more graspable intuitively than classical mechanics, because it really takes a terribly long training for you to get used to classical mechanics. I mean, you have to work quite hard at it… Of course you have a certain amount of experience that backs it up, but you have a lot of other experience that backs up unfoldment, which we’re just simply ignoring because of the tradition right now.
40:53 In some sense, each implicate order has two aspects: One…material side and a mind like side. The mind like side is called information… What I want to say is that in the implicate order… there are two poles… a physical…pull and a mental…pull.
42:11 Every process has a physical pull and a mental pull. You may say that actually they’re right on top of each other, and that these are words by which we are trying to draw attention to something which is more subtle… And that in the implicate order, since the whole, as in quantum mechanics, the whole organizes the parts. I would say that what is now called the wave function is a bit like what [is] called the mental pole. It organizes but that’s a sort of a side remark… The implicate order can be extended to life. You can say, if you have a seed containing information in the form of DNA… what happens is there’s very little energy or matter in that. It merely sets all the matter around in motion and all the energy around in motion to make a plant, whereas from the point of view of the implicated order the only change was it was just constantly remaking itself as inorganic matter. And with this bit of information…it has started to make something organic like a plant, or an animal instead. That is to say, life is inherently implicit, or implicated, or unfolded, in all matter. And it doesn’t suddenly emerge at a some sudden place, saying “here is just this degree of organization you’ve got life”, but rather it unfolds. It is enfolded in all matter right now. And then, if we come to thought, you can see the very word implicate imply it’s the same thing. One thought unfolds another. A large part of your thinking process is to unfold an implication of your thought, which leads to another one, and another. One logical implication is only a very special case of this. Most implication isn’t strictly logical. Now, there’s a tremendous number of other things, a tremendous number of ways in which one can see unfoldment… If you go into this, you will see you’ll get a tremendous amount of experience of enfoldment and unfoldment. And it’s by far the most intimate and direct experience you get. And the explicate experience is a construction on top of this, which we are learned to make so habitually that it looks to be pretty basic now…
45:15 [Michael] Polyani talked about the tacit knowledge which comes when you ride a bicycle. You can’t tell exactly this tremendous range of movements involved in riding a bicycle. What it means to learn how to ride you could never put a formula to it or anything. I’m saying then that we now see that in…non-living matter, and in mind, we have one order. The implicate order is the fundamental order, and the one movement implication-explication. So it means that this order enables us to unite what had been separated [since Descartes].
46:32 The intuitive feeling for what that means will be that there’s something mind-like in all matter, and something matter-like in all mind. However it may be much more subtle as we go to the higher levels of mind of thought, feeling, and eventually awareness, and consciousness, and so on. It gets immensely more subtle and so on. Now, …with this background I think I’ve tried to justify the notion of unfoldment, showing that it is really strongly indicated by the best knowledge available in physics… And also by a tremendous amount of our common experience… If you go into your experience carefully, you will see it everywhere. If you pay some attention to it now. So, in fact, therefore it would not be surprising to this discover that time also is included in this…
47:35 Time is one of…our most fundamental experiences… We feel a certain moment in consciousness now. This moment cannot be defined, the sort of slipping into the past in the very moment which we’re trying to focus on it. And, therefore, it has a certain inherent ambiguity or uncertainty… which quantum mechanics has too. There’s that incomplete determinism in consciousness we experience that incomplete determinism. But the word ambiguity is a much better word in my view than indeterminism, or uncertainty, because it really means that the meaning of it cannot be definitely related to particular context. You’ve seen that its meaning is not quite defined and that allows for creativity… When, if, everything is totally determined, there is no room for creativity.
49:27 You have unfoldment of enfoldment of unfoldment… That is the nature of time and consciousness. Now, also a sense of becoming…also is…part of consciousness… This moment, not only is unfolding the past, but you have a sense of becoming now, it’s becoming other, it has become other…
52:27 The current mechanistic view, [and] it’s quite different physics, produces a world that is unrecognizable to our experience…
55:14 Relativity not only introduced this feature of wholeness, which I described previously, but it introduced the notion that time is not an absolute. … Now,in relativity you have the fact that what constitutes the same time, that is simultaneity, depends on the context of the speed with which the system is moving… Every system has a kind of time context…
56:48 It suggests a context dependence of time. There are many kinds of time. We don’t ordinarily notice this, because this becomes important only when the speed gets close to that of light. At ordinary speeds this ambiguity of context is so tiny… And therefore it’s only [at] very high speeds where it matters. And if you got to the speed of light you would get to the interesting result that between the beginning and the end of the movement at the speed of light, in its own natural context, you will find there would be no time.
59:09 Time has a certain ambiguity. The uncertainty principle says that you cannot define time exactly. Anyway, according to quantum mechanics…you would need an infinite uncertainty of energy in order to define the time perfectly. And since only finite energies are available, no moments of time in physics can be defined perfectly. Anyway, that is time has the same kind of inherent ambiguity…according to quantum mechanics that it has in consciousness…
1:00:15 So, with the implicate order, as I said, we can now understand all of this. We say each moment is analogous to this moment of consciousness unfolding from the whole. Each moment unfolds its past and in turn unfolds its past, and now this the ambiguity is there inherently. We don’t have this picture of all time present at all. This is all gone. We have time as a process of involvement.
1:01:57 Wholeness…means an unbroken whole, and internal relationship of the elements or sub-wholes within this whole. It does not mean we know everything, but there’s a constant process of being able to know more, yes. And I think that this question of wholeness is very important psychologically, socially, in every way. That’s because of the internal relationship of everything to everything. When we think in terms of parts…we are fragmenting everything. …to say that…the parts are basic eventually leads us to treat the world in a fragmentary way. And since the way we think is unfolded within us actively, therefore we ourselves become fragmentary in our action and start to smash the world to pieces… as which is in fact happening, as you may have noticed… And therefore… to think in terms of wholeness… I wanted to put it as a principle… There are two principles… We need both principles to work in life, but we have to say what is the ultimate principle. So, …the ultimate wholeness of the whole in the parts [is] the dominant principle. And…the secondary principle, mechanism, starts with the ultimate partiality of the parts in the whole, and says the wholeness of the whole of the parts is a secondary affair. So it’s a matter of where you put the dominant theme… In music, if you have two themes, one is dominant, one is not, and in this sense communication at this level of metaphysics communication is an art. I want to emphasize it cannot be put precisely as a science… We have to communicate something that essentially escapes verbalization. If you were thinking [of] music again, it’s in the notes, but the meaning is not the notes. And the way the player plays and interprets it is crucial, because the player who plays it mechanically will produce one piece of music, and the fellow who interprets it…will produce something entirely different. So, in that sense, I wanted to say that this is the way we do it and this includes time as well.
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