The Implicate Order: A New Order for Physics

David Böhm

Laurence Bettany

David Bohm (1917-93) was a highly original and individual physicist. His novel ideas and profound intuition extended not only to the physical world but also to the nature of consciousness and society. Bohm regarded science as having become essentially fragmented in its approach to understanding physical reality and sought a more holistic physics based on order, transformation and flowing movement. His notion of an implicate order provides an unusual and exciting challenge for both teachers and students alike.

Tadashi Okamura

Paavo Pylkkänen

It is my proposal that future cognitive science needs to be developed in the context of a general scientific world-view that is based upon contemporary physics. It is within such a general world-view that the special sciences studying the mind (psychology, AI, neuroscience etc.) need to find their proper place, and will hopefully find new avenues for progress when doing so. One research programme that has attempted to articulate such a new world-view is due to the physicists David Bohm and Basil Hiley. They have developed both a general “implicate order” framework as well as a more specific “ontological interpretation” of quantum theory. Both schemes involve radically new ideas and concepts, which also promise to open up new possibilities for understanding the place of cognition and consciousness in nature. Within philosophy, a particularly intense attempt to develop a new world-view based on contemporary physics has recently been made by James Ladyman and Don Ross. In this article I will briefly describe some key features of these research programmes and sketch tentatively how they might change our picture of cognition in the future.

Paavo Pylkkänen