From mork!noring Mon Jun  8 17:17:23 PDT 1992

Hello,

I just received the following lecture given by Dr. David Bohm, hosted by
(who else?  :^) ), the Center for Frontier Sciences.  Dr. Bohm is well-
known in the field of Quantum Mechanics (e.g., Aharonov-Bohm effect).
Since several people have asked to see it, I post it to the above newsgroups.

Though I don't agree with everything Dr. Bohm asserts (nor with all of the
material from the Center itself that I have recently posted), I present
this in the spirit (oops, bad word for the anti-paranormalists) of open-
minded and uncensored scientific inquiry that is necessary for scientific
progress.  I know that many may find this a little too "new-agey", but let's
try to keep the responses "rational", such as Brian "Rev. P-K" Siano's recent
reply to past posts from the Center, which, though critical of the Center,
was well-thought out and rational.


Jon Noring


(p.s., please direct inquiries about the Center for Frontier Sciences
to:  v2058a@templevm.temple.edu (internet), or V2058A@TEMPLEVM (bitnet).

**********************************************************************


Date:         Mon, 08 Jun 92 18:38:23 EDT
From: Nancy Kolenda <V2058A%TEMPLEVM@VM.TEMPLE.EDU>
Subject:      Bohm Article
To: Jon Noring <noring@netcom.netcom.com>
Status: RO



Toward a New Theory of the Relationship of Mind and Matter

October 20, 1989 Colloquium Presentation

David Bohm, Professor Emeritus of Physics, Birkbeck College,
University of London, and Fellow of the Royal Society

(Reported by Beverly Rubik)

     The relationship of the mental and the physical has been a key
problem for a long time in Western philosophy.  Descartes saw no
basis for a relationship between them.  Materialism and idealism
aim to reduce one to nothing but a function of the other.  This
approach, which comes out of quantum theory, permits an
intelligible relationship between them without reductionism.

     In my earlier work in relativity and quantum theory, I
developed the idea of the enfolded or implicate order.  Its main
feature is that the whole universe is in some way enfolded into
everything and that each thing is enfolded in the whole.  But in
ordinary experience, things seem to be relatively independent.  The
wholeness is still compatible with relative independence as parts.
The enfoldment relationship is not merely passive, but active and
essential to what each thing is.  The external relationships are
revealed in the unfolded order, the explicate, in which everything
is seen as relatively separate.  The explicate cannot be understood
properly apart from its ground in the primary reality of  the
implicate order.  The implicate order is dynamic, and all explicit
things emerge from a holomovement, a total movement within the
implicate order, in which they are enfolded as potentialities and
ultimately fall back.   This gives rise to the relatively stable
and independent forms we know.   This was my view in attempting to
grasp the wholeness of the universe based on the meaning of quantum
theory.

     A similar description applies to mind, in which there is a
constant flow of thoughts, feelings, desires, and impulses that
flow into and out of each other, and to an extent, enfold each
other.  Putting it differently, the implicate order is common to
both mind and matter.  This means that ultimately mind and matter
are not nearly so different as commonly assumed.  The implicate
order may serve as a way of expressing the relationship between
mind and matter without the Cartesian duality of the properties of
absolute distinction.  It is a general framework within which we
hope to develop a unified approach of how the mental and material
sides are related.   I will discuss an approach that in part
fulfills this requirement which is based on a causal interpretation
of quantum theory.

     Quantum theory implies a new kind of wholeness in which the
analysis of the world into separately existing constituents will
have at most a relative and limited kind of applicability.  This
wholeness is general and means that each element in the universe
participates in all the others to such an extent that it is not
possible to attribute what happens unambiguously to any one alone;
i.e., there is a universal participation.  In particular, this
participation is involved during an observation such that the
observing instrument and the observed object participate in each
other, giving rise to the Heisenberg uncertainty relationship.  My
interpretation of quantum theory which is causal or ontological
provides an account of how mind and matter may be related.

     According to this interpretation, not only are there electric
and magnetic fields for an electron, but there is a new kind of
field, the quantum field.   Its potential, the quantum potential,
depends only on the form and not on the intensity of the field.
Therefore, even a very weak quantum field can strongly affect the
particle.  Such a notion is fundamentally different from Newtonian
ideas, because it implies that distant features of the environment
can strongly affect the particle.   In the double slit experiment
with an incident beam of electrons allowed to pass only through the
slits, the wave-like property of the electron is responsible for
the interference pattern obtained.  Sent through one at a time, the
electrons behave as particles.   This is characteristic of the
wave-particle duality of matter.  Applying the causal
interpretation to this, the electron is actually a particle with a
wave at the same time.  The wave affects the particle, altering its
path so that it doesn't have to hit the slit edge to be deflected;
it can follow a complicated path even if it goes straight through.
Calculations of the quantum potential for this system explain how
the electron can be a particle and yet show wave-like properties
statistically.   What is new here is the feature of non-locality,
the ability for remote parts of the environment such as the slit
system to affect the motion of the particle through the quantum
field.  We can better understand this feature by proposing a new
notion, active information.  One may regard the electron as moving
under its own energy, the quantum potential acts to put form into
that motion, and the form is related to the form of the wave from
which the quantum potential is derived.  By analogy, consider a
ship on automatic pilot guided by radar waves.  The ship is not
pushed and pulled mechanically by these waves, rather, the form of
the waves is sensed and a certain form of motion is given to the
ship under its own power.   Extending this idea of active
information to the quantum level, the information is potentially
active everywhere, but actually active only where the particle is.
This suggests that the electron may be much more complex than we
thought, having a structure of a complexity comparable to a simple
guidance system, indicating that a common assumption of small being
simple may actually be incorrect.

     The idea of active information implies the possibility of a
wholeness of the electron with distant features of its environment.

To understand this wholeness, consider several features arising in
many particle systems.  Firstly, two or more particles can affect
each other through the quantum potential even if they're separated
by long distances.  Non-local action at long distances has been
confirmed in experiments demonstrating that the Bell inequality is
satisfied.  Secondly, in a many particle system, the particles may
be thought of as depending on a common pool of information
belonging to the system as a whole that cannot be analyzed in terms
of component parts.   A more detailed analysis shows that the
quantum potential for the whole system is a non-local connection
that brings about this organized behavior.   An analogy is a ballet
in which all the dancers move together in a similarly organized way
in response to the music.  In the domain of ordinary experience the
quantum potential takes the form of independent parts, and each
thing moves independently.   Whereas classical physics treats a
whole as a collection of independent parts in mechanical
interaction, the wholeness in the quantum domain has an objective
significance.

     The whole notion of active information suggests the
rudimentary mind-like behavior of matter.  This shows strongly at
the quantum level, but does not appear significantly at the
classical level.   From the mental side, specific thoughts may give
rise to a physical response, e.g., the fight-or-flight response,
accompanied by conscious or unconscious changes in heart rate,
hormones, physical tension, and movement.  With mind, information
is thus active physically, chemically, electrically, etc.  This
activity is similar to a radar guidance system of ships or the
quantum potential on electrons.  It may appear quite different,
because in the subjective case, action can be mediated by
reflection in conscious thought, whereas in the examples of
objective information, action is immediate.  However, the
difference is not as great as may appear.  Reflection follows on
suspending physical action which gives rise to a train of thought.
But both the suspension of physical action and the resulting train
of thought follow immediately from a further kind of active
information which implies the need to do all this.  For thought
processes, there's a kind of active information that is
simultaneously physical and mental in nature.  Active information
can therefore serve as a link or bridge between the two sides of
reality as a whole.  The two sides are inseparable in that the
information contained in thought is at the same time a related
neurophysiological chemical and physical activity occuring on the
material side.  Thoughts themselves may contain a whole range of
information of different kinds and may be surveyed by a higher
level of mental activity as if they were material objects which one
was observing.   Out of this may emerge a yet more subtle level of
information whose meaning is an activity to organize the original
items of information, and that could lead to even more subtle
thoughts which are surveying these.  So, each level may be seen
from the material or mental side.  From the mental side it is the
potentially active information content, but from the material side
it is an actual activity to organize the less subtle levels, and
the latter serve as the "material" on which the operation takes
place.   The bridge between each level is information.   I propose
that a similar relation holds at indefinitely great levels of
subtlety.

     The Latin root of the word "subtle" means "finely woven".
This suggests a metaphor for thought as a series of more and more
closely woven nets, each of which can catch a corresponding content
of a certain fineness.  The implicit meaning of what is caught in
the coarser net can be grasped by the finer nets.  This has led me
to extend the notion of the implicate to a series of interwoven
levels of implicate order in which the more subtle, i.e., the more
finely woven, enfold those that are less subtle, i.e., more
coarsely woven.

     How does quantum theory relate to this?  There's a basic
similarity between the quantum behavior of a system of electrons
and that of mind.  If we wish to relate mental processes to quantum
theory, this similarity has to be extended.  Suppose that physical
processes could also be extended toward indefinitely greater levels
of subtlety.  For example, just as the quantum potential
constitutes active information that guides the electron, there's a
super quantum potential, more subtle, that can give form to the
unfoldment of the first quantum potential.  One could go on to
suppose a series of orders of super quantum potentials with each
order constituting information that gives form to the activity of
the next lower order.  In this way, one could arrive at a process
that would be similar to what I've been discussing for the
relationship of various levels of the subtlety of mind.

     So, what is the relationship of the mental and the physical?
The answer I propose is that they're essentially the same process
without an unbridgeable barrier between them.  Whatever we
experience as mind in its movement through various levels of
subtlety will in a natural way ultimately reach the movement of the
quantum potential and the movement of particles.  A rudimentary
mind-like process is present even at the level of particle physics.

As we go to subtler levels, this mind-like quality becomes more and
more strongly developed.  Each kind and level of mind may have a
relative autonomy and stability.

     The essential mode of relationship of all these is a
participation which is not mechanical.  Through enfoldment each
relatively autonomous thing partakes of the whole.  Through this,
it partakes of all the others in gathering its information, and
through the activity of this information it similarly takes part in
the whole and in every part.  In this sort of activity the content
of the more subtle and implicate levels is unfolded, as the
movement of the particle unfolds the meaning of the information
content and the quantum potential.  The movement of our body
unfolds what is implicit in the subtler levels of mind as pertain
to the state of the body.  For the human being, all of this implies
a wholeness in which the mental and physical sides participate very
closely in each other.  Thus, there's no real division between mind
and matter, or psyche and soma.

     To extend this view, consider that each human being similarly
participates in society and in the planet as a whole.  The
individual takes his whole being by participating in the society.
He himself enfolds the whole society in some way, and he takes part
in it.  This suggests a level of collective mind as well.

     The mental and the physical realms are related as are the
poles of a magnet.  For a bar magnet, there's a whole field going
through it, and you see a north and south pole, but they are really
abstractions.  They are not separable poles.  What you actually
have is an unbroken magnetic field that is present over the whole
space.  Similarly, we may for the sake of thinking about the
subject, abstract any given level of subtlety out of the unbroken
whole of reality and focus our attention on it.   At each level
there will be a mental pole and a physical pole.  But the deeper
reality, I suggest, is something beyond either mind or matter, both
of which are aspects that serve as terms of analysis.  These can
contribute to our understanding of what is happening but are not
separate substances in interaction.
___________________
References:
Bohm, David (1980). Wholeness and the Implicate Order.  London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Bohm, David (1985).  Unfolding Meaning.  New York:  Routledge &
Kegan Paul.

***************************************************************
(end of lecture)


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