Unfolding Meaning: A Weekend of Dialogue with David Bohm [Paperback]

These dialogues proceed through a series of unstructured, often meandering Socratic-like Q&A sessions that spanned several days of an open ended Conference. The main entrée being nothing less than to develop a new holistic paradigm of the universe that could refine the Newtonian Cartesian duality and take properly into account the latest findings in both Quantum Mechanics and Relativity theory -- and to do so without advance mathematics.

Prior to tackling this larger problem, the author had to pave the way for resolving the long-standing "mind-body" problem. This involved nailing down the understanding of how the reality of these two opposite ends of the old Cartesian duality could be conceived of as parts of a connected and seamlessly integrated whole.

Professor Bohm solved this problem in three basic steps:

Without the mathematics and greatly summarized here, he first, showed that the old fragmented clockwork paradigm remains true in main stream physics but breaks down on the margins. That is to say, it works fine so long as neither the very large-scale or very small-scale aspects of reality are being considered. But in fact, it is precisely at these very polar opposite conceptual ends, where both Relativity Theory and Quantum Mechanics show respectively that the old paradigm does not hold all the way down, and that reality is much more unified and holistic than it appears to be in the middle ranges where fragmented Newtonian Physics works just fine.

Second, he establishes the conceptual machinery to offer ways of refining (if not overthrowing altogether) the old duality-based (and very much fragmented) paradigm. And here his analysis gets into heavy weather because one has to accept "on faith" his conceptual inventions and then not inspect them too closely, because when one does inspect them, they began to look suspiciously like very contorted semantic fixes, allowing very little conceptual wiggle room between their true meanings and the edges of a tautology.

But that aside, Bohm somehow manages to pull it all off and in the end gets to the crowning achievement of this work -- which oddly and surprisingly can stand alone without most of his new conceptual machinery. Bohm's crowning achievement is to show how both mental and physical objects, that is both mind and matter, through parallel attributions of "meaning," may be conceived of as having consciousness. This is the achievement that deserves the most attention in both this book and the earlier one, of which this book is intended to provide further exploration and explanation.

To reach this conclusion, Bohm builds on Niels Bohr's quantum experiments, which rather curiously and unaccountably, showed that even matter is "context-dependent," which if understood correctly is another way of saying that "meaning," like everything else, came along with, and necessarily grew out of the Big Bang. Or put somewhat differently, it means that there was no "meaning" prior to the Big Bang and that meaning was created along with the Big Bang and that nature itself is self-reflective in that it derives all its meaning from relationships with itself. These two conditions, in addition to being independent of man, are the ones needed to establish "meaning" as a universal aspect of reality.

And thus at certain times (as is the case with Bohm's beautiful example of the vortex of an eddy rising and falling from a stream of water) some things are referred to as "content" while at other time they may be referred to as "context." Whether physical or mental, meanings grow out of nested relationships of processes that are always in motion, moving between "content" at one level and "context" at another, and thus constantly moving from complex and subtle, to latent and manifest.

Thus "meaning," and the package that accompanies it: intentions, intuition, ect., in all its grand complexity, and in all its aspects, is viewed as the true unit of a universal reality, one that provides the conceptual link between mind, matter, and energy. These are of course all components of reality formally seen in the old Newtonian paradigm as separate and distinct. In sum, through the triangular interplay between meaning, mind and matter, each can be seen as being conscious, and their respective meanings interact as part of the larger fabric of a universal whole.

Although the dialogues leave a lot to be desired, the main outlines of Bohm's theory does get through. I highly recommend the book for those tying to get through "The Implicate Order," otherwise it might be very confusing for just the casual reader. Five stars for the theory, three Stars for the randomness of the dialogues.

This gentle and delightful book is an edited transcript of a weekend seminar where David Bohm was joined by a group of open-minded souls to have a true dialogue about the nature or meaning and how we might explore it. The result is an engaging and challenging dance of ideas that describe and unfold a little of the origami of unknowable complexity that is Bohm's implicate order world view. It's a book that inspires you to think about it long after you reach its deliberately inconclusive end.