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NeuroQuantology

Mind, Matter and the Implicate Order by Paavo T.I. Pylkkänen

Gordon G. Globus

Published Sep 12, 2007• 3 citations
Publisher

Abstract

David Bohm (1917-1992) was a major figure in 20th century physics and one of its most original thinkers. From the time of his classic textbook Quantum theory (1951), through Causality and chance in modern physics (1957), The special theory of relativity (1965), to Wholeness and the implicate order (1980), Bohm was concerned with deep philosophical issues, even more than Niels Bohr. Bohm’s ontological emphasis was “holonomic,” that is, ontology under the law of the whole. The Bohmian program continues to be carried forward today in physics by Basil Hiley and in philosophy by Paavo Pylkkanen.

DOI
10.14704/nq.2007.5.4.148

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•Jun 23, 2026•0 citations
David Bohm (1917-1992) was a major figure in 20th century physics and one of its most original thinkers. From the time of his classic textbook Quantum theory (1951), through Causality and chance in modern physics (1957), The special theory of relativity (1965), to Wholeness and the implicate order (1980), Bohm was concerned with deep philosophical issues, even more than Niels Bohr. Bohm’s ontological emphasis was “holonomic,” that is, ontology under the law of the whole. The Bohmian program continues to be carried forward today in physics by Basil Hiley and in philosophy by Paavo Pylkkanen.
This chapter focuses on the work of David Bohm carried out together and then pursued and amplified by his collaborator Basil Hiley. Like the case studies in the other chapters, quantum physics played a key role in this approach too, especially the notion of non-local order. Bohm distinguishes between “implicate order” and “explicate order,” with the former constituting the psychophysically neutral realm similar to Pauli and Jung’s Unus Mundus from which both the mental and the physical emerge as explications. In this view, meaning is involved at the deep, implicate level through the notion of “active information”. When the implicate order (an undivided whole) is explicated into a multiplicity, this does naturally imply correlations that constitute the mind-matter connection. We also explore Hiley’s algebraic accounts linking back to Eddington’s ideas, as well as some of Bohm’s views of the relation between perception, language, and reality.
David Bohm was one of the foremost scientific thinkers and philosophers of our time. Although deeply influenced by Einstein, he was also, more unusually for a scientist, inspired by mysticism. Indeed, in the 1970s and 1980s he made contact with both J. Krishnamurti and the Dalai Lama whose teachings helped shape his work. In both science and philosophy, Bohm's main concern was with understanding the nature of reality in general and of consciousness in particular. In this classic work he develops a theory of quantum physics which treats the totality of existence as an unbroken whole. Writing clearly and without technical jargon, he makes complex ideas accessible to anyone interested in the nature of reality.
Abstract David Bohm’s notion of implicate order, while relatively well-known, is often said to be difficult to understand, and is almost completely absent in contemporary discussions in philosophy of quantum theory and relativity. Yet one can argue that it is a key part of Bohm’s and Basil Hiley’s research programme which anticipates currently fashionable topics, such as the idea of space-time as emergent. In this paper my aim is to briefly review the origin of Bohm’s focus on the notion of order, and the related notion that continuous space-time is an abstraction from a discrete structural process.
David Bohm was a major twentieth-century theoretical physicist. His scientific work concerned plasma and the foundations of quantum mechanics and, connected to his scientific work, Bohm was deeply interested in the philosophy of science and psychological studies. Bohm’s influence on psychology derived more from his philosophical writings than from his scientific works. This paper considers both of Bohm’s works while distinguishing them. This is further necessary because anyone intending to work on Bohm’s legacy needs to develop his un-consensual ideas further. This paper makes a brief and non-technical description of Bohm’s works in physics and his philosophical views, related to the idea of wholeness and the implicate order, which includes his incursions in psychology. It ends with some caveats about the better extension of his reflections.
This study offers a comprehensive analysis of David Bohm’s article “A New Theory of the Relationship of Mind and Matter” (Philosophical Psychology, 1990) — one of the most original attempts of the twentieth century to overcome Cartesian dualism on a physical foundation. The paper proceeds in sequence through the historical context of the mind–body problem, the physical basis of the causal interpretation of quantum mechanics, the central concept of active information, and the implicate order. Bohm’s framework is then compared with several major contemporary approaches: Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Hameroff & Penrose, 2014), the holographic brain model (Pribram, 1991), Integrated Information Theory (Tononi, 2004), and the Global Workspace model (Baars, 1988; Dehaene, 2014). A dedicated section examines the relationship between Bohm’s ideas and Rovelli’s Relational Quantum Mechanics (Rovelli, 1996), as well as Loop Quantum Gravity (Rovelli, 2004; Rovelli & Smolin, 1995), and Qbism, developed by Christopher Fuchs, Rüdiger Schack, and Carlton Caves (Fuchs, 2002; Fuchs et al., 2014). The concluding section evaluates the compatibility of Bohm’s ideas with quantum field theory and modern quantum information science. The principal conclusion is that Bohm’s 1990 article does not constitute a complete theory of consciousness, yet it anticipates with remarkable prescience the information-ontological tendencies of the twenty-first century and may best be understood as a philosophical-physical metatheory whose relevance has only grown since its publication.