Bohm’s Physics for our Perception

Posted on March 10, 2008 
Filed Under Quantum Physics

In order to succeed in business, art, or whatever, you must be able to understand how the society you live in works. This includes being able to decipher the cultural tapestry that blurs across our TV screens, our favorite web pages, and other people’s lips. Part of what makes this all recognizable is our thinking system. In western lands, our mode of thinking is undoubtedly built upon the ancient Greek mode of thought. This way of thinking takes separate pieces of reality we perceive and tries to explain the individual pieces as parts of a whole. It also means that we have a desire to endlessly reduce what we see into its building blocks.

David Bohm took the opposite approach to reductionism. He went against the view that everything is separate and divided when he talked about implicate and explicate order.

“In the enfolded [or implicate] order, space and time are no longer the dominant factors determining the relationships of dependence or independence of different elements. Rather, an entirely different sort of basic connection of elements is possible, from which our ordinary notions of space and time, along with those of separately existent material particles, are abstracted as forms derived from the deeper order. These ordinary notions in fact appear in what is called the “explicate” or “unfolded” order, which is a special and distinguished form contained within the general totality of all the implicate orders” (Bohm, 1980, p. xv).

Now, this might take some research on your part to decipher, perhaps I’ll try interpreting it further on another occasion. What I find interesting in the context of our perception, is that Quantum Physics makes a case for us to change our thinking to a new kind of post-modern mode. When we accept that matter at its simplest, most basic state is energy, that everything is connected at a deep sub-atomic level, and that matter (anti-matter, anti-particles) routinely travels back in time to connect up with itself or precede itself, we might to see things differently. Any change in our perception is powerful. It can yield new inventions, systems, and methods.

-Thinkslice

[tags]bohm, implicate order, perception, physics, post-modernism, quantum, thinking[/tags]

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