Bohm-Hiley’s implicate-explicate order and consciousness

Dall e image created by author. This is intended to show mind and matter emerging from the same underlying order. Mind is represented by the cloud and matter by the rock. The stream below is the holomovement. In the Bohm-Hiley version of dual aspect monism mind and matter are not two separate things, just manifestations of particularities arising from the foundation that is the implicate order and mediated by active information.

The fourth post based on David Bohm and Basil Hiley’s 1993 book The Undivided Universe. Mind and matter are aspects arising from the implicate order discussed in the earlier posts.

The key to understanding how Bohm and Hiley treat consciousness is to realize that they are neither dualistic nor monistic. The Cartesian dualism where mind and matter are separated as two largely incompatible and very distinct entities is answered by idealists who believe that mind or consciousness is the only reality, and by physicalists who say that matter is the only thing real. In this monistic view consciousness is an epiphenomenon of the operation of matter which in itself is deterministically set by the random patterns of the fundamental constituents of matter.

Dual aspect monists say that mind and matter are both manifestations of an underlying unity. There is only one thing, but it is a layer beneath both mind and matter.

The focus of Bohm and Hiley is not on consciousness. Instead, they show that the idea of consciousness as the key factor in bringing reality into existence from the quantum cloud of possibilities is not necessary in their view. This idea, attributed often to John von Neumann, Eugene Wigner, and Henry Stapp is also reflected in the views of a number of others including John Wheeler as we saw…