Sophia, Vol. 44, No. 1, May 2005. Copyright 9 2005 Ashgate Publishing Limited.
Review Discussion
THE ESSENTIAL DAVID BOHM The E s s e n t i a l D a v i d B o h m , EDITED AND INTRODUCED BY LEE NICHOL, FOREWORD BY THE DALAI LAMA New York/London: Routledge,2003, 348 pages with index and bibliography Review by James Clement van Pelt, Research Fellow, Yale Divinity School Module Leader, Yale Centerfor International and Area Studies james, vanpelt@yale,edu
One of the most powerful intellectual stimulants of the past few decades has been the contemplation of the metaphysical implications of quantum physics - the latest expression of the deep, widespread longing to find the unifying ground of physics, ontology, epistemology, cognitive science, and human relationships. The connection is not surprising, since metaphysics seeks the implicit order underlying the world of appearances, and quantum physics deals directly with explicit reality at its most fundamental level. The two opposing positions on that connection are evoked by the names Bohr and Bohm. Niels Bohr (1887-1951), the primary originator of quantum mechanics, wrote: Evidence obtained under different experimental conditions cannot be comprehended within a single picture, but must be regarded as complementary in the sense that only the totality of the phenomena exhausts the possible information about the objects. Yet he held that the attempt to specify the unifying field of that totality could not possibly yield meaningful results. The canonical version of quantum mechanics that developed from this position - generally called the Copenhagen interpretation - emphasizes the epistemic limitations of science, maintaining that no ontological implications are to be drawn beyond the 'what it is' of statistical probabilities and experimental results. David Bohm (1917-1992), who conversed with Bohr in his early career, was a significant contributor to the development of quantum physics and author of the classic textbook Quantum Theory ( 1951). Leading the second generation of quantum physicists, his discoveries - including Bohm-diffusion movements and the Aharonov-Bohm effect, and his augmentation of the famous Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen experiment- presented him with what seemed glaring evidence of an implicate order." a level of reality beyond the reach of physics, on which the otherwise bewildering interactions at
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the quantum level must depend. He and Einstein spent hours at Princeton discussing that theoretical nexus, which promised to unite the incompatible descriptions of reality provided by relativity and quantum theory. In contrast to Bohr, Bohm became convinced that quantum theory should mean something beyond its functional power to represent interactions statistically- that there must be an ontological, causal significance to the functions of quantum mechanics. The 'ontological interpretation' he subsequently developed stands as a principal alternative to the Copenhagen interpretation - still held at a distance by most physicists, yet increasingly interesting to those who expect physics to provide a comprehensive account of the structure of the universe we live in. At age thirty-two, the career of this promising successor to Einstein and Bohr was derailed when Princeton summarily fired him for refusing to cooperate with the McCarthy crusade against communists in American academia. Acquitted of contempt of Congress, he nonetheless found himself blacklisted by U.S. universities and effectively exiled. After stints in Brazil and Israel he settled in England, where he eventually became a Fellow of the Royal Academy. Until his death in 1992, he explored fundamental quantum and relativity theories and their relevance to individual and social experience. In addition to Quantum Theory, his major publications include The Special Theory of Relativity (1966), Wholeness and the Implicate Order (1980), Causality and Chance in Modern Physics, and Science, Order and Creativity (1987, with David Peat), and The Undivided Universe (1995, posthumous, with Bryan Hiley). He was a friend of the Dalai Lama and held numerous public dialogues with the Indian spiritual teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti. Bohm's work inspired popular works about the metaphysical implications of physics such as The Tao of Physics (FritjofCapra, 1975) and The Holographic Universe (Michael Talbot, 1991). The resistance he encountered from his fellow physicists he ascribed to the attachment of the public in general and scientists in particular to the atomistic worldview inherited from Newton, now contradicted by both quantum and relativity experiments. That 'classical' view had triumphed over ancient holistic cosmologies with a highly productive account of the universe as the space in which distinct, invariant components interact mechanically but do not constitute a unitary system. To Bohm, the breakthroughs of 20th century physics meant that the Newtonian account had to be subsumed to a view in which universe was best understood as a unified field - a fluid, dynamic, holistic, monistic, and even organic process in which the distinctions of part to part and part to whole are useful but arbitrary conceptual artifacts. He understood that any possible worldview is likewise arbitrary and necessarily incomplete. One makes tacit choices about what to leave out
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'things to be worked out later' conditioned by one's inherited prejudices and tacit assumptions - and those choices can be influenced by utilitarian considerations. 'We're doing so well now, why should we change?' is how Bohm once characterized the tacit agenda of scientists that blocks progress toward a more holistic paradigm. His ideas about how such unconscious assumptions determine how people perceive and treat the world were influenced powerfully by Eastern perspectives on the relativity of concepts and desires, further alienating him from the hard-science mainstream. Bohm offers a triplex cosmology. 'Classical' (Newtonian) physics is a special case, a subsystem of the more comprehensive, coherent system that includes relativity's universal field and quantum theory's interactions of variable waves and particles. Yet some features of that quantum/relativity system imply a transcendent 'supersystem' that is not otherwise accountable within the known aspects of that system. Chief among those features are certain defining outcomes of quantum theory, which despite their apparent absurdity have been demonstrated experimentally. Whereas 'classical' physics deals with space, time, waves, particles, and forces as discrete and ontologically primary entities, the quantum reality is all-encompassing, undifferentiated, indivisible process. What appear to be separate bits from a specific perspective are really views of the .whole, each containing the whole in a way analogous to a hologram; the process manifests in ways determined entirely by the context in which it functions and is observed. Light waves can pour as streams of particles, atomic particles can flow as waves, and so on. Nor is the observer abstracted from the whole; observation is an essential element of the process, causing it to resolve into one determinate form or the other. Most perplexingly, mechanical causality ('billiard ball causality') gets renamed as 'local' causality - another special case - in contrast to the more general phenomenon of 'nonlocality'. In the former, one particle is related causally to another only on account of specifiable physical forces within the closed causal system. In the latter, the destinies of particles can be 'entangled,' somehow interacting even though they may be any distance apart, with no apparent causal connection. It is to account for this 'causeless causality' that Bohm posits hidden variables participating in the supersystern that cannot be detected directly by physical means. More precisely than John Eccles and Karl Popper, Bohm asserts that information is passed between particles instantaneously via an underlying quantum field, in which space and time do not intervene and the strength of the signal does not determine its reach or effects. Other quantum effects similarly point toward an 'implicate' (hidden) order, such as the behavior of electrons in plasmatic and superconductive states, which cohere holisticaily, forming and re-form-
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ing regardless of obstacles, in ways that seem to Bohm more analogous to a ballet than a mob of discrete particles. In 'classical' physics, the whole emerges from the parts, which are fundamental. On Bohm's account, it is the whole that is fundamental; 'parts' explicate, operate, and merge back into implication, unfolding and enfolding according to the observational context. Bohm saw the result as not only more comprehensive and coherent than the old worldview, but also more helpful in treating the 'real world' of civilization and the ecosystem. He saw the old atomistic worldview, in which the arbitrarily defined fragments are cut off from their holistic sources, as the context in which the planetary environment could ~ fractured, exploited, and devastated for the benefit of whoever is in control, without any implications in reference to the global community. He found some hope that a more coherent, comprehensive civilization could emerge from a broader worldview that would relate Western and Eastern perspectives within science, just as the implicate order binds together the otherwise incompatible views of relativity and quantum mechanics. In his last years, that hope led him to travel and speak extensively, challenging the reigning obsession with fragmentary, intransigent selfidentification (me, family, group, nation, species...) as symptomatic of the same incoherent, inefficient behavior manifest in Newtonian interactions of seemingly independent and invariable particles. In public presentations with Krishnamurti and others, he demonstrated a kind of coherent human interaction he simply called Dialogue, in which prejudices and presuppositions are set aside so that participants operate more like superconducting current - each a special expression of the whole rather than a discrete part in conflict with it. For Bohm this work did not amount to an intention or plan to save the world; he left this life profoundly doubtful that his fellow parts-of-the-whole could perceive the implicate order in time to overcome their destructive incoherence. Although Bohm is cited in mystical settings with increasing frequency, he was not religious in the usual sense. Having started out as a materialist, even a Marxist, his implicate order is an integral part of a monistic universe that also includes consciousness and experience, united with matter through the medium of information. Further, he rejected the neo-anthropocentric idea picked up in mystical treatments of modern physics that the conscious human observer is somehow crucial to the determination of quantum interactions. In his view, consciousness is a manifestation of 'in-form-ation,' connoting something like Platonic forms dynamically impressed upon and flowing through the underlying substance of all things - atomic particles and human minds alike. Yet he allowed for a transcendent, organizing order
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that is dynamic - not a personal Creator, but an Ultimate, active ground of being. Does it manifest as benevolent, even compassionate? 'Well, we can propose that.' Although he can be called a process philosopher, finally Bohm offers a kind of neoplatonic metaphysics. 'Classical' physics constitutes the shadow-like explicate order of everyday appearances. Underlying that is the true reality, encompassing the everyday order within the bizarre phenomena of relativity and the quantum foundation of reality. Beyond that, the implicate order potentially resolves all contradictions. Yet beyond even that 'supersystem', Bohm was willing to point toward something ultimate, some jewel in the lotus, of which it can only be said that all else proceeds somehow from it. Bohm named this One 'the true profundity'. Lee Nichol, who also edited Bohm's posthumous works Thought as a System (1994) and On Dialogue (1996), has produced in The Essential David Bohm the first systematic presentation of Bohm's original writing. Nichol has arranged significant excerpts from Bohm's writings chronologically within three parts, so that the three aspects of Bohm's thought - the universal, individual, and collective (social) orders - unfold progressively in ways that reinforce our sense of what former U.S. Poet Laureate James Dickey called 'the strength of fields.' Generally philosophical in tone, exemplary in expressive clarity, and intended for the non-scientist, the book rightly concentrates on the philosophical implications of Bohm's application of quantum mechanics to the nature of meaning and causation. Several weighty presentations of foundational ideas are punctuated by shorter pieces and interview transcripts that help the reader move along; and along with his eloquent introduction, Nichol has prefaced each of the twelve chapters with a short introduction to frame each presentation. Three previously unpublished chapters, drawn from personal letters, an interview, and a seminar are especially accessible and attest to the editor's close relation to his subject. Significantly, the book's longest treatment squarely addresses the place of consciousness in the universe. Since consciousness is the most ephemeral phenomenon one can encounter, and quantum theory describes the level where Newtonian laws melt into suspicions and surprises, Bohm's interest in the mind-world interface is understandable. Yet there is an even more compelling reason why cognitive science is turning increasingly toward quantum theory, and thence to David Bohm. Cognitive science faces a conundrum that seems to rule out consciousness itself. If one accepts that the physical world is causally closed, then how can the interactions between the brain and the self-evidently non-physical operations of mind and experience be accounted for? And if consciousness
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itself is a kind of mirage arising from neural activity, as some strict physicalists assert, then who is experiencing the illusion, and how? With few exceptions it is not nuclear physicists - practitioners of the hardest of the sciences - who seek to link their field to anything as fuzzysoft as consciousness. But recent work by cognitive scientists such as Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff seems to demonstrate experimentally that quantum mechanical interactions do have a function in producing consciousness. At the same time, as Bohm emphasizes, quantum interactions clearly involve the transmission of information via a process called 'entanglement' that defies known principles of causation. To connect the dots, the transmission" of information between the physical and non-physical processes that produce consciousness may somehow be accounted for partly in quantum mechanical terms. That possibility has created intense and growing interest in quantum theory in connection with consciousness, and along the way in the physicistexile who made his case for such a connection decades ahead of the time of its fair hearing. It is a post-Newtonian woridview relevant to the 'real world' that merges observer and observed within the bounds of science, yet points beyond to the unbounded truth - to Bohm this was an idea so potent, so essential, that a general understanding of its implications might even increase marginally the dwindling probability of planetary survival.
