Implicate order
Explanation
David Bohm, one of the most original physicists of the twentieth century, was not satisfied with calculating: he wanted to understand what kind of reality quantum mechanics describes. In his work Wholeness and the Implicate Order (1980) he proposed that what we perceive as a world of separate objects in space and time is only an explicate or unfolded order, and that behind it operates an implicate or enfolded order, where everything is enfolded in everything, more like a hologram than a collection of things.
The hologram image is key: if you break a holographic plate, each fragment contains the complete image, though more diffuse. Bohm proposes the universe is like that. Each region of space would contain, in some way, information about the whole. The explicate order (separate trees, planets, brains) would be a partial projection; the implicate order, a flow of totality where separations are derived, not fundamental. Bohm called that generative process the holomovement.
This cosmology has radical consequences for consciousness. Mind and matter are not two substances or two levels, but two aspects of the same implicate order. Explicit matter and explicit experience emerge together from a common ground that precedes them. Mind would access the implicate order more directly than instruments do: thought, attention and deep meditation would be modes of being in contact with that enfolded totality.
Bohm developed this vision in close collaboration with neurophysiologist Karl Pribram, author of the holonomic brain theory, and held long dialogues with the spiritual teacher Krishnamurti. From those exchanges arose a philosophy where thought, language and perception are analysed as processes of the holomovement, and where the fragmentation we experience as separation between self and world is treated as a cognitive habit unmoored from real structure.
In parallel, Bohm developed so-called Bohmian mechanics, a deterministic but non-local interpretation of quantum mechanics, where particles have real trajectories guided by a pilot wave. That fundamental non-locality (all particles instantaneously connected through the quantum potential) translates into his metaphysical view: if everything is connected in the implicate order, quantum non-locality is not an anomaly, but a trace of the underlying totality.
Bohm's work has had an enormous cross-disciplinary impact, more in philosophy, consciousness studies and certain spiritual traditions than in professional physics, where his interpretation remains minoritarian. Critics see it as poetic metaphysics resting on analogies; defenders, as one of the few serious attempts to think a cosmology that integrates physics, mind and life from a single root. Its main value, even for the sceptical, is to have shown that pictures of the world other than the inherited atomistic-mechanistic one are conceivable.
Strengths
- A unified, holistic cosmology without reductionism.
- Rich articulation between physics and philosophy.
- Cross-disciplinary influence (Pribram, Krishnamurti).
- Dialogue with contemplative traditions.
Main critiques
- Largely outside the physical consensus.
- Difficult empirical verification of the 'implicate order'.
- Accused of philosophical mysticism.
- Some consider it metaphor rather than theory.