Abstract: Provides an analysis of Ken Wilber's published critiques of David Bohm's ideas, with particular regard to the latter's ontological interpretation of quantum theory and its application to the "holographic" paradigm and elsewhere.
In Ken Wilber's The Eye of Spirit (1998), prefacing his criticism of Jenny Wade's (1996) appropriation of Bohm's "implicate order"-related ideas for her "holonomic" theory of consciousness, we find the following assertion:
Bohm himself tended to realize the indefensible nature of his position, and for a while he went through an awkward period of adding implicate levels. There was the implicate level, then the super-implicate level, then at one point, a super-super-implicate level. And all of this, of course, was claiming to be based on empirical findings in physics!
I published a strong criticism of Bohm's position, which has never been answered by him or any of [his] followers....
Until this critique is even vaguely answered, I believe we must consider Bohm's theory to be refuted. And, anyway, over the last decade and a half it has generally fallen into widespread disrepute (and it has no support whatsoever from recent physics).
We may give Wilber the benefit of the doubt when he suggests that we "consider Bohm's theory to be refuted" and assume, in spite of the voiced opinion that it "has no support whatsoever from recent physics," that he was referring there, not to any imagined convincing refutation of Bohm's physics itself, but merely to the attempts to ground "holographic paradigms" in Bohm's implicate and explicate orders. Such reductionistic associations of mind, consciousness or Spirit with the physical implicate order itself (as opposed to those attributes simply being present in that order, as Spirit itself is) are indeed not easily defensible.
Even with that allowance, however, we will find much to be concerned about in what Wilber has asserted above.
To begin, we note that the primary points in Bohm's fully-developed ontological/causal/deterministic formulation of quantum theory, in terms of its relation to "holographic paradigms" and for distinguishing it from the orthodox indeterministic theory in that context, are the following:
We shall examine each of those components in turn. In doing so we shall find, simply by comparing "what Wilber said" to "what Bohm said," that Wilber has misrepresented each of the three points above.
We are probably all familiar with Bohm's colloquial "ink-drop in glycerine" analogy, utilized toward his explanation of the implicate order in his formulation of quantum theory. If not, the relevant device consists of two concentric glass cylinders, with glycerine between them, and drops of insoluble ink being placed into the glycerine as the outer cylinder is turned. With that turning,
the droplet is drawn out [or "implicated" into the glycerine] into a fine thread-like form that eventually becomes invisible. When the cylinder is turned in the opposite direction the thread-form draws back and suddenly becomes visible [or "explicated"] as a droplet, essentially the same as the one that was there originally (Bohm, 1980).
The relation of the often-misunderstood implicate order to the explicate order could also be summarized as follows:
The explicate order, crudely stated, is analogous to successive projected "frames" in a movie, rather than being something "separate" from the implicate order. That implicate order, then, would itself be analogous to the entire length of movie film, particularly if the pigment from each frame were spread out through the entire length of the film, simply being most concentrated in the particular frame where its objects are "explicated" or visible to the audience when projected. That is, a black object existing at a given position in one single frame of the movie would also exist with its center in the same position in every other frame, but with its shape spreading out and its color fading from dark gray down to clear/white as one traversed the strip of film in both directions away from that single "explicated" frame. The visible "movement" of that continuously re-created object/particle then simply corresponds to the same black-to-white phenomena occurring in slightly different positions in each frame, with each different position also being "explicated" or "black" in a different frame than any of its other positions.
Even if each frame itself is "static," then, the overall motion picture is "dynamic," with at least the illusion of motion, even though any projected "object" in motion is again not the "same" object from one frame to the next. Such a first approximation to the core mechanism of the manifesting Tao, then, is structurally "both static and dynamic."
Bohm explains that same implicate/explicate structure in this way:
[Imagine] a wave that comes to focus in a small region of space and then disperses. This is followed by another similar wave that focuses in a slightly different position, then by another and another and so on indefinitely until a "track" is formed that resembles the path of a particle. Indeed the particles of physics are more like these dynamic structures, which are always grounded in the whole from which they unfold and into which they enfold, than like little billiard balls that are grounded only in their own localized forms (Bohm and Peat, 1987).
If we were to take a movie of this focusing/dispersing process, it would yield precisely the static/dynamic structure explained previously.
This contraction/unfoldment and subsequent dispersion/enfoldment, with the particle being visible/explicated only when its wave-energy is highly concentrated at the transition between those two processes, is exactly the process by which the implicate order manifests as the explicate order. The explicate order is thus a subset of the implicate order. That is, the two orders are not mutually exclusive, as Bohm himself confirms:
[T]he explicate order itself may be obtainable from the implicate order as a special and determinate sub-order [i.e., subset] that is contained within it (Bohm, in [Hiley and Peat, 1987]).
Up till now we have contrasted implicate and explicate orders, treating them as separate and distinct, but ... the explicate order can be regarded as a particular or distinguished case [i.e., subset] of a more general set of implicate orders from which latter it can be derived [italics added]. What distinguishes the explicate order is that what is thus derived is a set of recurrent and relatively stable elements that are outside of each other (Bohm, 1980).
Wilber (1982), however, has offered a different, and incorrect, interpretation of what Bohm has so clearly stated above:
Some writers use the implicate order as a metaphor ... of transcendence. That is, the implicate realm is used as a metaphor of higher-order wholeness or unity, referring, presumably, to such levels as the subtle or causal.... The difficulty is that, as originally explained by Bohm for the realm of physis, the explicate and implicate "entities" are mutually exclusive [italics added]. The "ink-drop" particle is either unfolded and manifest (explicate) or it is enfolded and unmanifest (implicate). It cannot be both at the same time....
All of which is fine for the dimension of physis. But truly higher levels are not mutually exclusive with lower ones—the higher, as we said, transcend but include the lower.
Of course, "disproving the [ink-drop] analogy" would obviously not necessarily say anything about the actual implicate and explicate orders of quantum theory. Even aside from that, however, it is not clear where the assertion that Bohm had "originally explained" that the implicate and explicate entities (and thus orders) were "mutually exclusive" could have come from, other than a disturbing lack of understanding, on Wilber's part, of both the analogy and the actual quantum orders themselves. For, we note that Bohm, by 1980, well prior to Wilber's 1982 statement immediately above, had already published his explicit statement, quoted earlier, that the explicate order is a subset of the implicate, i.e., that they are not mutually exclusive. Bohm's (1980) work, where that statement can be found, is actually included in the bibliography of (Wilber, 1998), where Wilber's assertion of "unanswered refutation" is given.
Much of Wilber's (1982) critique, including the block quote immediately above, was actually written in 1979. (Other interview-related parts pertaining to that critique have their original copyright from 1981.) That, however, still does not explain (or provide any excuse for) why Wilber did not correct those significant misstatements prior to their collected 1982 publication. Nor does it account for why he has not issued relevant written statements of correction in any of his many publications in the decades since then.
The idea of the enfolding and unfolding of the implicate and explicate orders in physics has its mathematical basis in the "Green's function" of quantum wave mechanics (or via the "unitary transformation" in Heisenberg's matrix formulation):
When I thought of the mathematical form of the quantum theory (with its matrix operations and Green's functions), I perceived that this too described just a movement of enfoldment and unfoldment of the wave function. So the thought occurred to me: perhaps the movement of enfoldment and unfoldment is universal, while the extended and separate forms that we commonly see in experience are relatively stable and independent patterns, maintained by a constant underlying movement of enfoldment and unfoldment. This latter I called the holomovement (Hiley and Peat, 1987).
In the usual way of thinking, something like an implicate order is tacitly acknowledged, but it is not regarded as having any fundamental significance. For example, processes of enfoldment, such as those described by the Green's function, are assumed to be just convenient ways of analyzing what is basically a movement in the explicate order, in which waves are transmitted continuously through a purely local contact of fields that are only infinitesimal distances from each other. In essence, however, the main point of the implicate order is to turn this approach upside down, and to regard the implicate order as fundamental, while the explicate order is then understood as having unfolded from the implicate order (Bohm and Peat, 1987).
The implicate order thus falls straightforward out of a "physical interpretation" of the mathematics governing the propagation of the quantum wave function. That is, it follows from the taking of that propagation as referring to a real process, rather than as a mere mathematical figment or means of calculation without a physical referent.
Even in the orthodox, Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory, we have this alternating contraction and dispersion. For, every time the quantum wave function is "collapsed" (by observation or whatnot) this is its sudden contraction, after which the wave function again begins to spread or disperse (in "probability space" here, but still propagating via Green's function), until its next collapse/contraction. As such, the existence of that basic, cyclic collapse/dispersion process in quantum theory is not at all arguable. (Of course, the linear nature of Schrödinger's equation does not actually allow for such "discontinuous" behavior as would be required in order for its wave-solutions to "collapse" instantaneously [Bohm and Peat, 1987]. That, however, is a separate point/inconsistency in the accepted view.) Likewise, a discontinuous (e.g., motion picture-like) nature of matter is implied even by the idea of "quantum leaps," where an electron or other subatomic particle jumps instantaneously from one atomic orbit to another, without passing through any intervening energy states.
[B]asically all the laws of movement in quantum mechanics do correspond to enfoldment and unfoldment. In particular, the relation between the wave function at one time ... and its form at another [later] time ... is determined by the propagator or the Green's function.... A simple picture of the movement is that waves from the whole space enfold into each region and that waves from each region unfold back into the whole space....
Since all matter is now analyzed in terms of quantum fields, and since the movements of all these fields are expressed in terms of propagators, it is implied by current physics that the implicate order is universal (Bohm and Hiley, 1993]).
If one wishes instead to pragmatically view any aspects of Newtonian/classical or quantum physics whose physical meaning is not immediately evident as being "mathematical artifacts," that is done at one's own peril:
[C]lassical physics denies the reality of the vector potential, claiming that it is no more than a mathematical device used to aid calculations. Aharonov and Bohm proved otherwise (Peat, 1997).
The "Aharonov-Bohm" effect referred to there has been conclusively demonstrated experimentally—proving that it is not merely a "figment" of the mathematics involved—and received Nobel Prize consideration.
In any case, the observable motions of particles in both Newtonian and quantum physics are part of the same explicate order, so that any attempt to associate quantum physics only with the "more wholistic" implicate order would be woefully misled:
Clearly the manifest world of common sense experience refined where necessary with the aid of the concepts and laws of classical physics is basically in an explicate order. But the motion of particles at the quantum level is evidently also in an explicate order (Bohm and Hiley, 1993).
Regarding the existence of the super-implicate order, David Bohm, in (Weber, 1986), gives the following information:
In talking of a super-implicate order, I am not making any further assumptions beyond what is implied in physics today. Once we extend this model of de Broglie to the quantum mechanical field rather than just to the particle, that picture immediately is the super-implicate order. So this is not speculation, it is the picture which is implied by present quantum mechanics if you look at it imaginatively.
Obviously, that solid basis cannot be reduced to the idea that Bohm might have just been "making up new levels" as he went along, even if the super-implicate order is itself reasonably regarded as being merely part of a still-greater order, to not be "the last word" in that. (The dialogue from which the above quote is drawn was first published in ReVision in 1983, at a time when Wilber himself was editing that journal.) There is thus precisely nothing "awkward" about the chronological development of Bohm's ideas, in him "adding" those levels, as he himself explains:
[T]he original [holographic quantum mechanical particle theory] model was one in which the whole was constantly enfolded into and unfolded from each region of an electromagnetic field, through dynamical movement and development of the field according to the laws of classical field theory. But now [i.e., in extending this model to the quantum mechanical field], this whole field is no longer a self-contained totality; it depends crucially on the super-quantum potential. As we have seen, however, this in turn depends on the "wave function of the universe" in a way that is a generalization of how the quantum potential for particles depends on the wave function of a system of particles. But all such wave functions are forms of the implicate order (whether they refer to particles or to fields). Thus, the super-quantum potential expresses the activity of a new kind of implicate order [i.e., the super-implicate order]. This implicate order is immensely more subtle than that of the original field, as well as more inclusive, in the sense that not only is the actual activity of the whole field enfolded in it, but also all its potentialities, along with the principles determining which of these shall become actual....
It should be clear that this notion now incorporates both of my earlier perceptions—the implicate order as a movement of outgoing and incoming waves, and of the causal [i.e., ontological] interpretation of the quantum theory (Hiley and Peat, 1987).
The super-implicate order is thus a field which determines the behavior of the particles of the implicate and explicate orders. Although it is "the source from which the forms of the first implicate order are generated" (Bohm and Peat, 1987), then, it is not simply "another level of enfolding/unfolding particles," akin to another link in the perennial philosophy's "Great Chain of Being."
The super-implicate order makes the implicate order non-linear and organizes it into relatively stable forms with complex structures (Bohm, in [Weber, 1986]).
The essential flow [of explicated matter through time] is not from one place to another but a movement within the implicate and super-implicate ... orders. At every moment, the totality of these orders is present and enfolded throughout all space so ... they all interpenetrate (Bohm and Peat, 1987).
For the sake of completeness, and because Wilber (1982) has mentioned its existence, Bohm had this to say about the super-super-implicate order:
[A] little reflection shows that the whole idea of implicate order could be extended in a natural way. For if there are two levels of implicate order, why should there not be more? Thus if we regard the super-implicate order as the second level, then we might consider a third level which was related to the second as the second is to the first. That is to say, the third implicate order would organize the second which would thereby become non-linear. (For example there might be a tendency for the whole quantum state to collapse into something more definite.) (Bohm and Hiley, 1993).
One would reasonably regard the keeping-open of these possibilities as more of a logical and open-minded position than an "awkward" one. In any case, the super-implicate order itself, as Bohm himself noted, does not require "any further assumptions beyond what is implied in physics today," i.e., it most certainly is "based on empirical findings in physics."
When we talk of the "implicate order" in the text following, it is implied that we are referring to Bohm's first implicate order. (Bohm sometimes used the term "implicate order" to refer to the indefinable totality of implicate orders present within manifestation, not merely to the first level of those.)
As Bohm noted in Wilber (1982):
[A]ny form of movement could constitute a hologram, movements known or unknown [i.e., even beyond mere physical vibrations] and we will consider an undefined totality of movement, called the holomovement and say: the holomovement is the ground of what is manifest.
All such, Bohm's holomovement includes all possible implicate orders, not only his first implicate order.
This enfoldment and unfoldment takes place not only in the movement of the electromagnetic field but also in that of other fields, such as the electronic, protonic, sound waves, etc. There is already a whole host of such fields that are known, and any number of additional ones, as yet unknown, that may be discovered later. Moreover, the movement is only approximated by the classical concept of fields (which is generally used for the explanation of how the hologram works). More accurately, these fields obey quantum-mechanical laws, implying the properties of discontinuity and non-locality (Bohm, 1980).
Whether or not one accepts Bohm's idea of a holographic nature to physical reality, the physical meaning of Green's function in both orthodox and ontological quantum theory is, as Bohm noted, of the enfoldment and unfoldment of the quantum wave function. As such, that behavior—the basis of the "holographic" nature of the implicate order—most certainly is itself "based on empirical findings in physics." That is, in no way was it merely an appealing metaphor "grafted" onto quantum theory by Bohm.
Even aside from that, the overall idea of there being a holographic nature to reality is most certainly supported by recent physics, in particular in the realm of superstring or M-theory—the physicists' best hope for a "Theory of Everything":
[Dr. Juan] Maldacena's work ... supports a hot new theory that the universe is holographic. In laser holography, a three-dimensional object is projected onto a two-dimensional plane, retaining the richness of the original image. In the Maldacena model, the four-dimensional field theory can be thought of as a holographic projection of the five-dimensional string theory (remember that the other five dimensions are rolled up and tucked away). In a holographic universe, the information about everything in a volume of space would be displayed somehow on its surface (Johnson, 1998).
[I]n certain cases, string theory embodies the holographic principle (Greene, 1999).
Maldacena's work regarding the holographic structure of quantum gravity in superstring theory is by now "a firmly established gravity/gauge theory" (Halbersma, 2002). Between that and Bohm's ideas, then, it would be difficult for anyone to confidently assert that the physical universe is not holographic in its structure. That constraint is so whether or not one includes the results of "recent physics"—which M-theory has been at the forefront of for more than a decade.
Whenever we are considering the nature of holograms in general, however, the following misunderstanding seems to inevitably come up:
In the hologram, the sum total of the parts is contained in each part (Wilber, 1982).
That idea, however is not accurate, as Bohm explains earlier in the same book:
[I]t is characteristic of the hologram that if you illuminate a part of the hologram you will get the information about the whole picture but it will be less detailed and from less angles, so the more of the hologram you take, the more detailed and the more ample the information is always going to be.
Wilber (2003b), too, has recently come to understand that basic principle.
It is therefore incorrect to say that every piece or part of a holographic plate contains all (i.e., the "sum total") of the information about the entire scene. The same goes for Bohm's implicate order. Indeed, the need to illuminate the entire hologram in order to get back all of the information enfolded into it follows from elementary laws of wave behavior, regardless of the type of waves (sound, light, etc.) which are being used to create and then display the hologram.
Physical holograms could, of course, be produced "virtually" as well, via computer computation/simulation, and just rendered to film from there. All that we need to do in such creation is to reproduce the pattern of spheres of light that would be reflected from the object, and interfered with by the reference beam, if the object were "real," via the laws of Newtonian optics.
We have thus seen that Wilber's claim that the implicate and explicate orders are mutually exclusive is not valid; that, contrary to Wilber's assertions, Bohm's super-implicate order was not merely an arbitrary addition to his earlier work; and that we have good reason to regard reality as having a holographic structure, with that structure in no way deriving merely from "green-meme belief systems uncomfortable with hierarchies" (Wilber, 2003b). All of those distinguishing characteristics of Bohm's work, further, are indeed "based on empirical findings in physics."
[O]ver the last decade and a half [Bohm's work] has generally fallen into widespread disrepute (and it has no support whatsoever from recent physics).We will consider this statement in two parts: first in terms of the evolving reputation of Bohm's ideas, and then in terms of its support from recent physics. In doing so, we shall see that Wilber has unabashedly misrepresented the realities of both of those. REPUTATION
It is not clear from the ambiguities in Wilber's writing whether the "disrepute" he is attributing to Bohm's ideas refers merely to its relation to fuzzy "holographic paradigms" in general, or to serious physics. If the latter, consider the following:
Due largely to a 1994 Scientific American cover story and F. David Peat's Infinite Potential—The Life and Times of David Bohm (1997), the means by which Bohm's alternative quantum theory had been effectively suppressed came to light, and the general outlines of this alternative were finally presented to a substantial reading public. This theory, developed in collaboration with Prof. Basil Hiley and known in its mature form as the "ontological interpretation" of quantum mechanics, is now widely viewed as a serious critique of the Copenhagen interpretation [italics added], and proffers a revisioning of quantum theory in which objective reality is restored and undivided wholeness is fundamental. —Lee Nichol (Bohm, 2003)
The aforementioned lack of "objective reality" in the orthodox interpretation was indeed one of Einstein's primary objections to it, even above its "dice-playing," indeterministic nature.
From a more hard-nosed perspective, consider that Martin Gardner, as one of the world's more prominent skeptics, would accept nothing mystical without extraordinary proof under properly-controlled laboratory conditions. (Gardner wrote the "Mathematical Games" column for Scientific American for more than twenty-five years, and was largely responsible for bringing knowledge of fractals to the masses via that medium in 1978.) Indeed, Gardner's efforts at debunking "New Age" ideas have earned him the praise of both Stephen Jay Gould and Noam Chomsky. Yet he had this to say about Bohm's ontological formulation of quantum theory:
[T]his theory, long ignored by physicists, is now gaining increasing support. It deserves to be better known (Gardner, 2000; italics added).
Gardner here is endorsing the quantum potential aspect of Bohm's ideas, not the implicate and explicate orders which Bohm found to exist in the mathematics of both the orthodox formulation and in his own. Nevertheless, as far as "support from recent physics" for Bohm's ideas goes, in Gardner's wholly non-mystical regard that very support is increasing.
While reactions to the dissidents, Bohm in particular, had been almost maniacal in the past, to the point that it was considered impolite by many even to mention the name of this Nobel-caliber physicist in such a connection, the last two decades have brought major changes. Bohm is now part of the pantheon, when before prominent physicists had asserted that it is impossible even to formulate an alternative to the orthodox "Copenhagen" interpretation of quantum mechanics. Indeed, there now seems to be increasing support among physicists for exorcising the notion of observer-created reality from the foundations of physical science (Dennis, 2001; italics added).
Of course, if Wilber's asserted "widespread disrepute" of Bohm's ideas was referring simply to the fading hopes of the "holographic paradigm" within transpersonal psychology, he may well be right about the increasing (and valid) disrepute of that endeavor. For, those attempts by his fellow transpersonal/integral psychologists (not by Bohm) to split psychological stages or states of consciousness between the implicate and explicate orders are indeed not valid. (Even there, however, the last chapter on the "holographic nature of consciousness" has not yet been written, as we shall see.)
In any case, even widespread "ill repute" (whether in serious physics, in transpersonal/integral psychology, or both) would at most show the temporary unpopularity of the theory, not say anything about its truth-value. That is, given a "community of intersubjective interpreters" who have not bothered to properly understand the theory in the first place, as has been the case with Bohm's ideas in both physics (Peat, 1997) and transpersonal/integral psychology, its degree of repute or disrepute is wholly irrelevant. That, indeed, is even aside from the separate problem that, as Max Planck noted three-quarters of a century ago, new theories and paradigms gain acceptance not via any force of logical persuasion in their arguments. Rather, they eventually become accepted simply via the "old generation" of intersubjective interpreters dying out (Wilber, 1998).
Having said all that, though, we cannot help but note that both J. S. Bell and Richard Feynman contributed papers, in explicit honor, celebration and good repute of Bohm and his work in serious physics, to Hiley and Peat (1987)—as did Geoffrey Chew, Henry Stapp, Roger Penrose, Ilya Prigogine and David Finkelstein. (Bell was the creator of Bell's Inequality, which he developed on the basis of Bohm's work. Feynman was a Nobel Prize winner, and heir to Einstein's mantle of being regarded as "perhaps the smartest man in the world." He had little interest in the fundamental issues of physics or philosophy, yet considered Bohm to be a "great" physicist [Peat, 1997].) That (1987) "book of good repute" was, of course, published well within "the last decade and a half" of Wilber's (1998) initial quote, above.
In terms of Wilber's suggestion that Bohm's ontological formulation, with its implicate and explicate orders, has "no support whatsoever from recent physics," we can be even more categorical. For, there it is very clear that he is referring to hard science, not to transpersonal/integral psychology's appropriation of Bohm's ideas.
To begin, we note that Bohm's ontological formulation of quantum theory, by the very manner of its derivation, will always be compatible with the orthodox theory. That is, any experimental results which are compatible with the (non-relativistic) orthodox theory will also be compatible with Bohm's reformulation. As such, there is no experiment for which the orthodox theory could be "right," and Bohm's explanations "wrong."
It is possible in our approach to extend the theory in new ways implying new experimental consequences that go beyond the current quantum theory. Such new theories could be tested only if we could find some domain in which the quantum theory actually breaks down....
Because our interpretation and the many others that have been proposed lead, at least for the present, to the same predictions for the experimental results, there is no way experimentally to decide between them (Bohm and Hiley, 1993).
Conversely, any experiment which "supports" orthodox quantum theory—as every existing one has—will perforce also support Bohm's causal/ontological formulation. Therefore, Bohm's view has just as much "support from recent physics" in that regard as does the orthodox quantum theory.
Alternatively, if the alleged "absence of support from recent physics" derives from that idea that attempts to unify quantum theory and general relativity via superstring or M-theory have thus far not included the implicate/explicate order concepts, that position need hardly be taken seriously. For, if the theorists working on M-theory are only hoping to integrate the orthodox quantum theory, not Bohm's more detailed formulation, into that "Theory of Everything," then of course the implicate/explicate order structure will not be openly brought over into it, and thus not mentioned in relevant scholarly or popularized literature! (Even in that case, though, Green's function and the cyclic expansion/contraction of quantum wave functions—the basis of the implicate/explicate orders—would still apply.) Integrating Bohm's ontological formulation into superstring theory would automatically integrate the orthodox theory—since the ontological formulation mathematically "simplifies" to the orthodox view—but not vice versa.
In any case, with or without that integration,
physicists have not as yet been able to make predictions [from superstring theory] with the precision necessary to confront experimental data....
Nevertheless ... with a bit of luck, one central feature of string theory could receive experimental verification within the next decade. And with a good deal more luck, indirect fingerprints of the theory could be confirmed at any moment (Greene, 1999).
Greene himself is not merely a popularizer of superstring theory, but a professional physicist and significant contributor to it.
As to the state of "recent physics" outside of superstring theory, Nobel Prize-winner Sheldon Glashow—the "archrival of string theory through the 1980s"—has admitted (Greene, 1999) that, as of 1997,
non-string theorists [in conventional quantum field theory] have not made any progress whatsoever in the last decade.
In terms of looking for "support from recent physics," then, we evidently have one half of physics which had not progressed in the decade prior to Wilber's (1998) denigration of Bohm—and thus has nothing to say about "recent" developments in the field. On the other hand, the superstring half of the profession has a theory which may, "with a bit of luck," be testable in one aspect of its core within a decade or so after that denigration!
Clearly, then, there is nothing in the "recent developments" in physics to in any way gainsay Bohm's ideas.
And how does orthodox quantum theory fare in the superstring theorists' "recent physics" view?
[M]any string theorists foresee a reformulation of how quantum principles are incorporated into our theoretical description of the universe as the next major upheaval in our understanding (Greene, 1999; italics added).
After all that, we should now consider the relevance of Bohm's ideas to the deep understanding of fundamental issues in physics:
[D]espite the empirical equivalence between Bohmian mechanics and orthodox quantum theory, there are a variety of experiments and experimental issues that don't fit comfortably within the standard quantum formalism but are easily handled by Bohmian mechanics [i.e., by his ontological formulation of quantum theory]. Among these are dwell and tunneling times, escape times and escape positions, scattering theory, and quantum chaos (Goldstein, 2001).
According to Richard Feynman, the two-slit experiment for electrons [the "key piece of evidence of the wave-particle duality of quantum particles" (Bohm and Peat, 1987)] is "a phenomenon which is impossible, absolutely impossible, to explain in any classical way, and which has in it the heart of quantum mechanics. In reality it contains the only mystery." This experiment "has been designed to contain all of the mystery of quantum mechanics, to put you up against the paradoxes and mysteries and peculiarities of nature one hundred per cent." As to the question, "How does it really work? What machinery is actually producing this thing? Nobody knows any machinery. Nobody can give you a deeper explanation of this phenomenon than I have given; that is, a description of it."
But Bohmian mechanics is just such a deeper explanation (Goldstein, 2001).
Compare Feynman's above presentation, from within the perspective of the orthodox quantum theory, with J. S. Bell's explanation of the same experimental context, based on Bohm's formulation (which originated as an extension of an idea first proposed independently by de Broglie in the late 1920s) of quantum theory:
De Broglie showed in detail how the motion of a particle, passing through just one of two holes in screen, could be influenced by waves propagating through both holes. And so influenced that the particle does not go where the waves cancel out, but is attracted to where they cooperate. This idea seems to me so natural and simple, to resolve the wave-particle dilemma in such a clear and ordinary way, that it is a great mystery to me that it was so generally ignored (Bell, 1987).
If one is truly interested in understanding what is going on "beneath phenomenological appearances" in the physical universe, then, one has no choice but to give an audience to formulations such as Bohm's. As such, whatever degree of "support" may be given or withheld from Bohm's ideas by "recent physics," his ideas—and the questions as to the basic nature of reality which he courageously and insightfully asked—are absolutely relevant. Without such questioning, there is no hope of understanding how the universe really works, in ways beyond the severe ontological limitations of the Copenhagen interpretation.
Taking all of that into account, the best that one can say about the assertion that Bohm's ontological interpretation "has no support whatsoever from recent physics" is that that idea itself is wholly unsupportable.
One might hope that Wilber's perspective on this subject had improved in the twenty years since his initial critique of Bohm. Unfortunately, however, such is not the case, as we can see from his most recent (2003) writings, posted online:
[T]he simplistic and dualistic notion that there is, for example, an implicate order (which is spiritual and quantum) and an explicate order (which is material and Newtonian) has caused enormous confusion, and is still doing so. But even David Bohm, who introduced that notion, eventually ended up tacking so many epicycles on it that it became unrecognizable....
[I]f you absolutize physics ... then you will collapse the entire Great Chain into merely one implicate and one explicate order....
Bohm vaguely realized this—and realized that his "implicate order," precisely because it was set apart from the explicate order, could not actually represent any sort of genuine or nondual spiritual reality. He therefore invented a third realm, the "super-implicate order," which was supposed to be the nondual spiritual realm. He then had three levels of reality: explicate, implicate, super-implicate. But because he was unfamiliar with the subtleties of Shunyata ... he was still caught in dualistic notions (because he was still trying to qualify the unqualifiable). He therefore added yet another epicycle: "beyond the superimplicate," to give him four levels of reality....
This is not the union of science and spirituality, but the union of bad physics with bad mysticism.
At the risk of being overly repetitive, we again note the following:
At no point, going back to pre-1980, did Bohm ever regard the implicate order as being "spiritual and quantum," and the explicate order as being "material and Newtonian." It is Wilber (and numerous other transpersonal/integral psychologists) who have misread those orders as being mutually exclusive. For Bohm himself, on the other hand, the explicate order was always a subset of the implicate order.
The localized explicate order is indeed "more like" the "separate particles" of Newtonian physics, with the diffused implicate order being "more like" the nonlocal interconnectedness of quantum theory. That fact, however, does not in any way mean that one could ever equate the explicate order with Newtonian physics, or the implicate order with quantum theory.
By the "correspondence principle" in quantum theory, quantum physics must reduce to classical, Newtonian physics, when appropriate limits are taken. Thus, Newtonian mechanics is a subset of quantum theory, not something mutually exclusive to it. Therefore, one could never coherently associate quantum physics with the implicate order, and Newtonian physics with the explicate, while simultaneously claiming that those two orders are mutually exclusive. Were Wilber to drop his misconception that the implicate and explicate orders are mutually exclusive, and then attempt to map the Great Chain of Being, not to levels within the totality of implicate orders, but rather to a spectrum of frequencies of consciousness within an implicate order which is not limited to the realm of physics but includes subtle matter as well, he would find that it works quite nicely. Indeed, within that context we can even have a mathematically-expressible highest state of consciousness which both transcends and includes everything, as has been demonstrated in (Falk, 2004).
Bohm's super-implicate order is fully implied by current physics, as is the implicate order conceptually below it. As such, in no way was the former ever merely an arbitrary "epicycle"-like addition for the purpose of correcting inaccuracies in the first level of the implicate order, as Wilber wrongly suggests. The super-implicate order was thus "invented" by Bohm only in a praiseworthy way of discovery, not a derogatory one. Further, none of those levels of implicate order were ever equated with non-dual Spirit in Bohm's view. Rather, Spirit as the highest state of consciousness was always beyond all levels of the (relatively unmanifest, but not transcendent Unmanifest) implicate order:
Obviously, the nonmanifest that we talk about [i.e., the hierarchy of implicate orders] is a relative nonmanifest. It is still a thing, although a subtle thing.... [W]hatever we would mean by what is beyond matter [e.g., Spirit] we cannot grasp in thought....
However subtle matter becomes, it is not true ground of all being (Bohm, in [Wilber, 1982]).
Note again that this statement comes from the very same book which Wilber both edited and re-printed his own critique of Bohm in. Bohm reasonably included consciousness, thought and emotion within his own view of "matter," and as such placed them all within the implicate order(s). Non-dual Spirit, however, was always something beyond all such qualifiable orders. That is, it was never merely the highest of Bohm's implicate orders, even if he occasionally spoke of those implicate orders "shading off" into Unqualifiable Spirit.
Wilber's suggestion that Bohm's development of gradations/levels in the implicate order had anything to do with Bohm trying to "qualify the unqualifiable" is wholly without validity. More specifically, the idea that Bohm's ideas arose from him being "unfamiliar with the subtleties of Shunyata" is completely misplaced. Rather, Bohm's understanding of the limitations of human "dualistic" thought was every bit as sophisticated as is Wilber's:
[Y]ou may try to get a view of spirit as the notion of God as immanent. But both immanent [i.e., Spirit-as-Ground] and transcendent God [Spirit-as-Source, i.e., the Unqualifiable] would have to be beyond thought [and thus beyond mathematical expression in any implicate order] (Bohm, in [Wilber, 1982]—again, the same book containing Wilber's original critique—italics added).
When Bohm says that "the holomovement is the ground of what is manifest" (Wilber, 1982), he is not identifying it with the Unmanifest Ground, beyond manifestation, of the perennial philosophy. Rather, he is simply viewing that movement as containing everything within manifestation. Equally, when Bohm (in [Weber, 1986]) says that
a consistent view is to maintain that something like the nonmanifest matter is playing a role similar to [i.e., by analogy to] what we thought of as [S]pirit [i.e., as That which creates and moves matter]. It's moving manifest matter, but they are both matter, matter subtle and matter gross,"
by "nonmanifest" he is obviously referring to the "relative nonmanifest," as quoted above. In neither case is Bohm equating the implicate order or the holomovement with Spirit. Thus, he cannot be validly accused of "qualifying the unqualifiable" (which nevertheless manifests as everything) there. Wilber (1982) has actually explicitly acknowledged that Bohm "speaks of the 'source' as being beyond both the explicate and implicate spheres," and is thus not equating the implicate sea/order with the infinite Ground of mysticism. As to what may have caused his opinion of Bohm's understanding of Shunyata to so radically change since then, that again is not clear.
Wilber himself has gone through numerous "phases" in his thought, which are by now widely known as Wilber-I through Wilber-IV, with Wilber-V already on the way. Bohm's thought, too, advanced through comparable phases, even though it has never been categorized as "Bohm-I," etc. Wilber-II was not merely a derogatory "epicycle" tacked onto Wilber-I, and so on. The same tolerance should obviously apply to the sequential development of Bohm's levels of implicate order.
Wilber's improvements to his model of consciousness are based on empirical research in psychology. Bohm's levels of implicate order, likewise, are certainly "based on empirical research in physics." Indeed, they are grounded in measurement to a far greater degree of precision than one will find in any field outside of physics and mathematics, certainly including Wilber's own synthetic work.
Bohm is thus guilty of neither "bad physics" nor of "bad mysticism." Wilber, however, is embarrassingly culpable, if not for both of those, then for the worse repeated violence against a mere "straw man" misrepresentation, created by no one but himself, of Bohm's ideas.
Amazingly, none of the points discussed in this paper require an advanced understanding of physics or mathematics in order for one to sort fact from fiction. Rather, all that they ever required was for one to read Bohm's self-popularized ideas carefully, and thus to properly understand them.
Note further that, through all of this, no "interpretation" of Bohm's ideas is involved. Rather, all that one has to do is to look at what Bohm actually said in print, and compare that with Wilber's presentation of the same ideas—often in the same (1982) book, no less—to see the glaring distortions in the latter. Nor can those gross factual misrepresentations be explained away as deriving merely from a "green meme inability to take multiple perspectives," on either Bohm's or Wilber's part. (That meme-blaming position is, of course, the one most often taken against critiques of Wilber's own work, by himself and his advocates.)
Wilber (2001) himself has voiced the following concerns regarding the tendency toward misrepresentation of professional work in consciousness studies:
As students of my work have been quick to point out, misrepresentation of my work is quite common.... [O]ver 80% of the published and posted criticisms of my work are based on misrepresentations of it.
There is an old saying, "Scholars spend their time maximizing their minimal differences," and it strikes me that [a rival in consciousness studies] is trying to make room for his contributions by attempting to aggressively muscle me out of the picture in the areas that reflect his own special interests and concerns.
Sadly, as we have seen, radical misrepresentation of Bohm's work is equally common, in Wilber's own writings and elsewhere. Recall, further, Wilber's previous denigration of Bohm's awe-inspiring but misunderstood ideas as being mere "simplistic notions" or "epicycles," etc. Such insults could well cause one to consider whether the "muscling" half of the quotation above might not apply to Wilber himself as much as it applies to his rivals. After all, Wilber is "too smart" to get so much wrong about such simple and explicitly-stated points in anyone else's philosophy, in the manner which we have seen herein, without there being a Very Good Reason for those misunderstandings.
Regardless, the fight against misrepresentation carries bravely on, via the "Wilber Watch" area in Wilber's domain of the Shambhala Web site:
Most [examples of misrepresentation involve] egregious misreadings of Wilber's work, some of [sic] so studied in their mistaken conclusions that it was hard not to attribute bad faith to their promulgators. By the way, not a single one of said "misrepresentations" was simply a matter of the writer reaching different interpretations than Wilber (Keith Thompson, in [Wilber, 2001]).
One can indeed sympathize and tentatively agree with such a conclusion, regarding the claimed "bad faith" of the aforementioned misleading presentations of Wilber's ideas. However, the above arguments as to motivations, interpretations and misrepresentations apply just as well when it is Wilber himself who is guilty of "egregious misreadings" of Bohm's work. They also apply to the demonstrated fact that none of those misreadings have anything to do with mere alternative "interpretations" on Wilber's part.
In writing this defense, the present author has been given pause to wonder why Bohm himself never responded to Wilber's original (and relatively well-tempered, compared to the unkindness in [1998] and [2003]) critique, given that nearly everything quoted throughout this paper was already present in Bohm's own published writings. Indeed, anything which wasn't already in print two decades ago could easily have been produced in writing "over a weekend."
Bohm of course passed away in 1992, after having suffered aperiodic crippling depressions throughout his life, notably in the final decade of that. Yet through all that, he continued working on both his physics and his own thrillingly original ideas in metaphysics.
The answer most likely lies in Bohm's overall attitude toward productive dialog:
On occasion, if someone disagreed with his ideas, the shouting from Bohm's office could be heard all the way down the corridor. Then one day his whole approach changed. After Bohm had given a lecture ... a physicist in the audience had kept questioning him. The two argued for a time, and the atmosphere became more belligerent until Bohm suddenly observed, "The problem is that we are not communicating. What are we going to do about it?" He then sat in complete silence. The other physicist simply did not know what to do. Bohm appears to have hoped that they could discover a nonadversarial way of working together.
From that point on Bohm adopted the new tactic. In the long run, he told [his colleague Basil] Hiley, arguing with people assertively is not profitable. Sometimes, to be sure, he would still try to convince others, but increasingly he realized that there was little value in persisting. Later he would say that to get his point across, he would have to talk to that person for several days, explaining his whole philosophy and metaphysics. His approach had moved so far away from the mainstream that it was increasingly rare for him to meet a physicist who was both open-minded and possessed of the philosophical and scientific background that Bohm required for a satisfying communication (Peat, 1997).
One might then very reasonably relate Bohm's non-responsiveness to Wilber's demonstrated misunderstandings and non-physics background to these same ideas, and indeed could do so almost point by point. Bohm would, after all, have had to write (if not talk) for at least several days, in explaining how Wilber had misunderstood his work. And in doing so, unlike other writing in which he passionately indulged, Bohm would have discovered few if any new ideas for himself. Instead, that time would have necessarily been spent just re-hashing what he had already explicitly and implicitly put into print, and which was thus already available for anyone who cared to read his books and interviews with even a minimally attentive eye.
Ironically, Wilber himself has recently come to the same conclusions as Bohm, regarding the futility of repeatedly explaining/defending his ideas to persons who have not taken the time, up front, to understand them:
I'm sure if [Hans-Willi] Weis would read my work in this area [of authoritarian control, etc., in New Age movements] that he could find something to hate about it, too, and we are all eagerly looking forward to his next round of criticism, although I'm sure that I will be forgiven if I don't respond, since I might have more important things to do, like feed my goldfish (Wilber, 2003a).
Wilber has arrived at this position after significantly fewer years of frustration, and much less rejection of his own relatively conservative ideas, than Bohm suffered for his unique, truly Einsteinian genius. (For good reason did Albert Einstein himself consider Bohm to be his "intellectual successor" and "intellectual son" [Peat, 1997].) Indeed, however much Weis may or may not have misrepresented Wilber's ideas in his own writings, he could not have been wider off the mark than Wilber has been in criticizing Bohm's work. Nor could he have done so in more unnecessarily insulting ways than to uncomprehendingly dismiss another's work, inestimably more brilliant and precise than his own, as being "simplistic," etc.
In defending his own published polemics, Wilber has recently offered the following explanation:
Sex, Ecology, Spirituality is in some ways an angry book. Anger, or perhaps anguish, it's hard to say which. After three years immersed in postmodern cultural studies, where the common tone of discourse is rancorous, mean-spirited, arrogant, and aggressive ... after all of that, in anger and anguish, I wrote SES, and the tone of the book indelibly reflects that.
In many cases it is specific: I often mimicked the tone of the critic I was criticizing, matching toxic with toxic and snide with snide. Of course, in doing so I failed to turn the other cheek. But then, there are times to turn the other cheek, and there are times not to (Wilber, 2000).
As for the dozen or so theorists that I polemically criticized [in the first edition of Sex, Ecology, Spirituality], every single one of them, without exception [italics added], had engaged in "condemnatory rhetoric" of equal or usually much worse dimensions. Some of the venomous writing of these people made mine look like a Girl-Scout picnic. And frankly, I decided to give them a dose of their own medicine (Wilber, 2001).Bohm, however, is an exception to that self-absolution: he never stooped to any such nasty, snide behavior toward Wilber. Thus, the above rationalizations cannot be validly applied to justifying Wilber's unduly vexed comments about Bohm's consistently honest, humble and insightful work. Indeed, those rationalizations demonstrably apply at a precisely zero-percent level to Wilber's unprovoked attacks on the deceased (and thus defenseless) Bohm. One therefore can and should deeply question the idea that the same ostensible motivations could possibly apply at the claimed hundred-percent level to any other situation. Indeed, considering how little time Wilber spends on Bohm's ideas overall in his own life's work, the quantity of professed "for-their-spiritual-awakening" insults (re: "simplistic notions," etc.) directed by Wilber toward Bohm and his followers is not only inappropriate but totally disproportionate.
In any case, as far as the lack of response to Wilber's critiques over the decade since Bohm's death goes, few of Bohm's admirers, past or present, have had a background in both physics and metaphysics. And overall, such a background is necessary in order for one to understand Bohm's ideas well enough to realize how drastically Wilber has misrepresented them. Indeed, the present article could be greatly increased in length if we were to include in it a refutation of Wilber's misunderstandings of the "original meaning" of Bohm's quantum potential, physical energy-sea, and the detailed relation of the implicate order to life and Spirit. That particular critique, however, will have to wait for another day.
For the present purposes, as we have seen, all that one has to do in order to see the relevant misrepresentation is to "A-B" Bohm versus Wilber. In doing so, one will again readily recognize that where Bohm himself explicitly calls something "white," Wilber is claiming that Bohm has called it "black," and then deriding him for that, from no more than a "straw man" perspective of Bohm's work, which Wilber himself has solely created.
On a more positive and productive note, in a related forthcoming book (Falk, 2006), the present author will demonstrate that Wilber's Four-Quadrant perspective can be derived from a non-reductionistic metaphysical framework which is yet wholly structurally compatible with Bohm's holomovement and implicate order. Excessive criticism of Bohm's revolutionary ideas, then, by Wilber in particular, would qualify only as "cutting off one's nose to spite one's face."
If there is one overarching point which we can take from all this, then, it would be that ideas which have been "proved wrong" and "impossible" by logical argument today may well be shown to be not merely possible but unavoidable tomorrow. Conversely, arguing so persuasively in favor of wrong or misrepresented ideas that they seem to be inarguably correct can easily do more harm than good in the service of truth. In such a case, merely "doing one's best" to spread one's preferred gospel, whether integral or otherwise, is in no way "good enough." After all, in attempting to "clean up after the party," one does not want to carelessly leave a greater mess than one began with.
In any case, a "late" answer to a critique is better than none at all; and the interim absence of the same should never have been confidently taken as a sign that the bold misrepresentations of Bohm's work on Wilber's unapologetic part were unanswerable.
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