David Bohm believed that true reality is different from appearance, or the reality we perceive. In his writings on the subject, Bohm distinguishes between actual and apparent reality with the terms Implicate and Explicate Order, respectively. The proposed Implicate Order is to be a metaphysical entity responsible for matter and energy as well as consciousness (which belong to different categories under his scheme). It is to be the fundamental underlying substructure of everything.
Particularly crucial to his scheme is the notion that objects which seem separated by great distances in the Explicate Order (such as a particular electron here on earth and an alpha particle in one of the stars in the Abell 1835 galaxy, the farthest galaxy from Earth known to humans) may actually be manifestations of a single object within the Implicate Order. It seems his motivation for this perspective is the room within quantum mechanics for the entanglement of such objects.
Bohm uses the term holomovement to denote occurrences within the Implicate Order, particularly those that manufacture the explicate order. He also uses the term unfoldment in this last respect. Bohm likens unfoldment to the decoding of a television signal to produce a sensible image on a screen. The signal, screen, and television electronics in this analogy represent the Implicate Order whilst the image produced represents the Explicate Order. Holomovement is the process taken as a whole.
In another analogy, Bohm asks us to consider a pattern produced by making small cuts in a folded piece of paper and then, literally, unfolding it. Widely separated elements of the pattern are, in actuality, produced by the same original cut in the folded piece of paper. Here the cuts in the folded paper represent the Implicate Order and the unfolded pattern represents the Explicate Order.
Many, along with Bohm himself, have seen strong connections between his ideas and ideas from the East. Some proponents of alternative religions (such as shamanism) claim a connection with their belief systems as well.
Bohm may have known that his idea is a striking analogy to "intensional and extensional aboutness" to which R. A. Fairthorne (1969) insightfully referred information scientists but few paid attention as evidenced by googling. John Searle treated aboutness and network in his Intentionality (1983), contemporarily with Bohm's Wholeness (1983)! Aboutness is as odd as wholeness in sharp contrast. As the former is to the content, so the latter is to the context to the last as the ultimate determiner of meaning. The holistic view of context, hence another striking analogy of wholeness, was first put forward in The Meaning of Meaning by C. K. Ogden & I. A. Richards (1923), including the literary, psychological, and external. These are respectively analogous to Karl Popper's world 3, 2, and 1 appearing in his Objective Knowledge (1972 and later ed.). Bohm's worldview of "undivided wholeness" is contrasted with Popper's three divided worlds. The direct causality among these and other authorships may be actually evident in the implicate order, though apparently not in the explicate order in spite of a great deal of reasonable doubt in terms of locality, ethnicity, ideology, academic tendency, and so on. Bohm and Popper favored Einstein above all.
Supposing that someone intends to convey a definite thought or story with the following word string:
- woman, street, crowd, traffic, noise, haste, thief, bag, loss, scream, police, .....
which looks almost non-sensical as a whole. Then, what will happen to us listeners? We have a dictionary, but we cannot simply sum up the meanings of individual words. That "a whole is more than the sum of the parts" is too plain a saying. There seems to be no grammar to which the speaker might have conformed. He merely suggests rather than tells the story, which in other words is implied or implicit in the word string. From this awkward symbology we can guess the story with varying accuracies, if we are ready to take risks. In this case, the meaning of such symbology may be said to be connotative, implicit, implicate or intensional, in contrast to denotative, explicit, explicate or extensional. Consult a dictionary for these words. And, note that the more context of explication, the less uncertainty of implication. Most importantly, note that this fashion of explicate in implicate order, that is, aboutness in context or wholeness is an outstanding analogy as well as the very principle of subject indexing as a prerequisite of information retrieval that has become everybody's everyday concern now! This principle's actual implication for and impact on a number of other disciplines should be unfolded if any. Why not unfold who on earth played an inspiring and leading role in shaping contextualism in the spotlight.
See also
External links
- Interview with David Bohm – An interview with Bohm concerning this particular subject matter conducted by F. David Peat.
- Excerpt from The Holographic Universe – Parallels some of the experiences of 18th century Swedish mystic, Emanuel Swedenborg, with David Bohm's ideas.