David Bohm's Implicate order

My view on the processes in and by topological holons is very related to some ideas of David Bohm. I see the first holons as the first geometrical structures (enveloped membrane), and that is probably what Bohm called the implicate order.

On the Bohm Dialogue mailing list one of the organizer, Donald Factor, posted (Fri 14 Dec 2007) next text about "David Bohm in a nutshell". A very interesting nut in that shell. BTW, Don Factor worked together with Bohm, they started on number of Bohm Dialogue Groups.

Don Factor's short analysis:

Quote: "Someone asked the other day if someone could sum up Bohm's ideas in a nutshell? It got me thinking about whether there is a key or central core to all of his work. And this is what I have come up with. Its more than a nutshell, but it shouldn't require killing too many more trees.

For what its worth:

The central idea implicit in all of Bohm's work from Quantum physics right through to his psychology, sociology, dialogue, and metaphysics, has to do primarily with process. He saw, and tried to describe whatever interested him, in terms of process. For Bohm there are no "things"; that is, there are no fixed objects, not even fixed meanings. But it is not so much that all is flux but that all is in process. And even chaos is seen as an order of perhaps infinite complexity. So ideas such as "that which is" or "ultimate truth" when treated as final or fixed make no sense. "The whole" means the whole process. And his suggestion that "the whole organizes the parts" makes great sense when one see all the sub or dependent processes as parts of this whole process which, by definition, are controlled or organized by it. Whatever else that we care to consider has to, therefore, be treated as an abstraction. from this holomovement. This, of course, suggests that any abstraction must be understood in terms of its immediate context within the whole process. Terms that he used such as reason, lawful or coherent, mean simply that they do not break the laws of the "the holomovement" which is held together by "information". This, by the way, does not just mean, information for us, but information exchanged between the parts and the whole - or what Gregory Bateson called "a difference that makes a difference." And such ideas as reason and coherence enter in as the result of all of this.

Bohm's process is rather different from Whitehead's Process Philosophy which is similar but also very different. Bohm's is simpler, based primarily in the view that he described as unbroken wholeness in flowing movement. I think the difficulty that many have had with Bohm's philosophical vision is that they have paid more attention to the unbroken wholeness aspect than to the flowing movement aspect. But it is the movement or constantly unfolding - from our explicate point of view - process that gives evidence of unbroken wholeness as the underlying medium. It is the holomovement.

Around here there has been a lot of talk about self and self as the quintessence that is ultimately unknowable. But why should it be unknowable? Because it is a process that is constantly unfolding or enfolding from and into a deeper level which is also unfolding and enfolding and so on, possibly ad infinitum; we don't know. There is no ego, but rather an "egoic process". Thought, or TAS as it gets called, is an imaginary entity, a thing, or the result of "thing-thinking". Our language tends to reenforce this, but it is not language that does it, since the language too, like all else, is in process. TAS, as a fixed mechanical part of our mentation or thinking process does not exist as such but only as a part of a process that tends to capture our attention. And there are reasons for this, but mainly it is because for a few hundred years the model that has dominated western culture is one that presumes separate objects interacting in a cartesian space.

The idea that I am distinct from someone else, is only the case within a particular context. Of course it is the context where we spend most our waking lives, so it has its own significance. But that too is also in process. I am not identical with who I was a few hours ago and If I am distinct from the reader of these words, that distinction has already begun to change. As I write this little essay I can feel or sense changes which make me keep going back and rewriting sentences or parts of sentences in order to make them more coherent.

So I don't want to go much further here except to make note of Bohm's use of the word "thought" in its sense of the past participle of the verb "to think" to denote "the active response of memory".That is all that TAS is and what makes it worth attending to is the fact that it is active, that it actually effects the world beyond the skin of the rememberer. And this is all too often forgotten.

Anyway, this is as far as I can go for now. But tomorrow is another day.
don. End of Quote.