Example of how Bohm's "Implicate Order" can be shown visually

Whilst in New York I spotted this image outside the HQ of the Pfizer Corporation. I am hoping that me using this image is okay with them (if it is not please could a representative of that company contact me and i will take it down).

The image is of a Pfizer employee called Joe who works in the Bioinnovation Center in Massachusetts. If you look closely you will see that the image is made up of pictures of all his co-workers in this unit.

A couple of nights ago I was awake in the middle of the night and I started thinking about ways in which David Bohm's concept of "Enfoldment" could be explained in a simple and graphic way. This image suddenly appeared in my mind. I argue that when we are in these semi-awake states (Hypnogogia) our Daemons can communicate more effectively. It is as if the "Doors of Perception" are slightly ajar and ideas can filter through to the semi-conscious eidolonic personality.

My Daemon had given me the answer.

Imagine a picture similar to this of yourself. This picture is composed of micro-images of every human being on the planet. When looked at from a distance it is just a very detailed image of you. However, and this is the important point that I suspect the Pfizer image designer has not done, is that contained within the micro-images will be an image identical to the larger one .... in every respect. As such this image of yourself will, again, contain images of everybody else on the planet. But it gets even more interesting. Imagine that each of all the other images were designed in the same way (containing the micro-images of everybody else).

This is exactly what David Bohm was trying to get across in his dual concepts of "Enfoldment" and the "Implicate Order" - the idea that the whole contained the parts and that each part contains the whole. He used the analogy of a holographic image (smash a holographic image then look at the parts of the image under laser light and it will be seen that each part contains a denuded version of the original image not, as would be expected, the part).


I need to give this idea more thought but I did present it to the audience at my lecture yesterday and it was received very well. I may acquire the software that generates these images and see what can be done.

On Saturday 21st of November 2009 I will be attending an "Open Dialogue" meeting at Queen Mary College in London. This has been arranged by the Scientific and Medical Network (SMN). Under the title of Infinite Potential: The Legacy of David Bohm such lumimaries as Prof. Basil Hiley and Dr. F David Peat will be discussing the scientific philosophy of this great man (the person I try to honour in my term The Bohmian IMAX. I am hoping to discuss this analogy with David and, hopefully, Prof. Hiley.

Many Worlds Interpretation & Copenhagen Interpretation - Incompatibility?

I have recently swapped a couple of emails with Dr Christian de Quincey, Professor of Consciousness Studies at John F Kennedy University in California. Christian has not read ITLAD but he has read the article I had published in the Journal of Near-Death Studies a few years back. (for those of you who have not read this a downloadable pdf is available from my website). I was introduced to Christian's work by Dr. Alan Roberts. Christian is interested in my work and on his next visit to the UK we intend to try and meet up. However in his email to me he asked a very interesting - and challenging - question with regard to my using Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation and Bohr's Copenhagen Interpretation in support of CTF. Christian argues, quite rightly, to imply that these are somehow complementary by using them in this way is incorrect; MWI was suggested by Everett as an alternative to, not in support of, Copenhagen.

Copenhagen suggests that an act of observation by a conscious mind 'collapses the wave function' and changes a 'probability wave' into a particle with precise location in time and space. MWI suggests the total opposite - that the probability wave does not collapse because each possible location of the particle occurs in one of trillions of alternative universes. In this way the act of observation is taken out of the equation. In other words MWI does not need consciousness to work whereas for Copenhagen it is crucial.

Those of you who have attended my Quantum Physics talks will know that I acknowledge this difference when presenting the Schrodinger's Cat section. I am therefore very aware of the conflict with regard to these two theories and in the first draft of ITLAD I only focused in on Copenhagen. MWI was introduced later almost an alternative to explain one of the most widely criticised implications of CTF.

The philosopher Heinrich Heine made the following observation:

'Time is infinite, but the things in time, the concrete bodies, are finite. They may indeed disperse into the smallest particles; but these particles, the atoms, have their determinate numbers, and the numbers of the configurations which, all of themselves, are formed out of them is also determinate. Now, however long a time may pass, according to the eternal laws governing the combinations of this eternal play of repetition, all configurations which have previously existed on this earth must yet meet, attract, repulse, kiss, and corrupt each other again.'

When Friedrich Nietzsche came across this quotation he was both horrified and beguiled. He wrote in his book The Gay Science the following famous few lines:

What, if at some day or night a demon were to steal after you in your loneliest loneliness and say to you "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more" ... would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him "You are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine."

In the original draft of CTF this is exactly what the evidence seemed to suggest - that we live our lives over and over again in the Bohmian IMAX. This is a recording and as such can never be changed. You live the same life without any opportunity to change it. You live a literal 'eternal reccurence' . The same life over and over again. This I found both terrifying and morally repugnant. I suppose that I have a certain belief in teleology - that things and circumstances have to have a reason behind them - such repetition seems pointless. This is not what happens to Conner's in Groundhog Day - he can change things. But there was something even more horrible about this suggestion and that is that if everybody only has one life which is then repeated what about those poor people who have terrible infirmities, babies born severely retarded. Children that die as infants. Do they just go round and round as well? I know I was being non-scientific in that this is what the evidence implied but I simply did not want to accept this as the only option. I then came across Everett's Many-Worlds. Here was a theory that proposed that all possibilities that can happen will happen in one of the multiverses. This was what I needed. A more hopeful and, dare I say it, teleological, proposition. Each 'return' can be different, subtly or massively (as suggested in the movie The Butterfly Effect). I hoped that this may imply that in their universes people avoid suffering and, by some mechanism I don't pretend to understand, are born without deformities or illnesses - they only have them in our 'observer based' universe. But I still needed Copenhagen to explain the uniqueness of each personal Everett Universe. On reflection maybe I don't. Maybe MWI itself can explain the uniqueness of each phaneron without resorting to any observer instigated 'collapse of the wave function'.

Indeed the reason I then introduced Bohm's Implicate Order was to avoid the accusation of solipsism. Simply if this is my universe then for whom am I writing this posting? You guys out there are simply illusions of my brain - nothing more. But for sanity - and cruelty - to not occur we have to accept that those beings we encounter are real, self motivated, conscious beings. To assume otherwise is a very dangerous step to make. The solution to this existential nightmare is that we are all part of the same collective consciousness that functions within Bohm's Implicate Order. We all interact within all our individual universes.

However maybe MWI (or more accurately MMI - the Many Minds Interpretation Dieter Zeh, David Albert and B. Loewer) may also accommodate the problem of 'other minds'. As such maybe in a refined version of CTF all I really need is MMI.

In fact is this not exactly what Max Tegmark suggests in his paper on quantum suicide?
(see http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9709032/ or pages 20 to 47 of The Universe Next Door by Marcus Chown (isbn 0-7472-3528-7)

If you wish to check out Christian and his work follow the following link:

http://www.deepspirit.com/