Consciousness and the Implicate Order
I believe that most network members are familiar with the work of the late David Bohm, if not at the level of quantum physics itself, then almost certainly at the level of his attempts to unfold some of its more difficult, subtle and often misunderstood meanings about the nature of matter, mind and society in general. His vision was that the seeming paradoxes of the quantum realm ought to be understandable at the level of human intuition since it is about the very stuff that we and all else is made of. Proposals such as the implicate order, the holomovement, along with soma-significance, non-local connections and active information aim at providing an ontological rather then just an epistemological or statistical sense of what is going on within and beyond us.

Many of these suggestions have been picked up and referred to by others in many fields beyond physics, often in ways that have not been well understood. But what holds these ideas together is a metaphysical overview, if you will, that gives an ontological, that is, an actual meaning, to its picture of ‘universal, unbroken wholeness in flowing movement.’ The difficulty has been that the meanings and consequences of this actuality only begins to become apparent when the subtleties of Bohm’s ideas are looked at in depth and in context.

In this book Pylkannen, a philosopher himself, attempts to treat Bohm’s work as a whole taking as his premise that it comprises a metaphysical or ontological overview that can be used as a lens through which to see the interrelatedness of many different aspects of human experience as they relate to important questions in science and philosophy. However, Bohm also pointed out that his work should really be treated as proposals for further inquiry, not as statements of the way things are.

Bohm was not what might in any conventional sense be called a systematic philosopher. Pylkkanen, though, succeeds here in bringing much of his philosophical thought together in to a meaningful whole using Bohm’s own descriptions to develop his thesis in a step-by-step process, and then examines them in the light of other current ideas on the subjects covered. The book includes considerations and explanations of Bohm’s ideas including pre-space, soma-significance, and the equivalence of meaning and being in the holomovement. Although, this might sound a bit over-reaching, the logic of it all falls together in Pylkkanen's close analysis.

One aspect of Bohm’s life work that becomes increasingly clear when looked at in this manner is the centrality of the question of consciousness and its relationship to our understanding of quantum theory, The importance of this was a constant for Bohm dating as far back as his first book, Quantum Theory (1951), and was developed further in every other one of his published works up to and including his final work, The Undivided Universe (1993) written with Basil HiIey, and was a central concern in all of his work from physics right through to and including his group dialogue project.

Although, as Pylkkanen points out, Bohm never attacked the so-called hard problem of consciousness as such, but he also did not deny the reality of conscious experience, even though there is nothing in the ‘explicate’ order to account for it. In this context Pylkkanen focuses on Bohm's notion of ‘the implicate order’ or what Bohm also referred to as ‘the enfolded order’ as a possible new way to approach these questions. But what makes this study especially interesting is that Bohm did not appear to claim that he had the answer to these questions, but rather, as mentioned above, that his model was intended as providing a new way of approaching them.

This book, I must admit, is not an easy read, It deals with matters that are subtle and that to a large extent require the reader to consider topics in a way that does not always conform to conventional wisdom. As a result Pylkkanen has been careful, and sometimes can feel too careful as he takes the reader step by step through these ideas in order to display their meanings with clarity. In this regard it made me want to dive back into Bohm’s earlier work in order to think again about these, often, strange, but compelling notions.
Donald Factor worked closely with David Bohm as part of the team that developed his proposals concerning group dialogue.
Co-authored, Dialogue - A Proposal and edited Unfolding Meaning, a Weekend of Dialogue with David Bohm