Holomovement - Formal Presentation

Formal Presentation

The formal presentation of the concept comes late in the book, under the general framework of new notions of order is physics. After discussing the concepts of undivided wholeness and the implicate and explicate orders, he presents the formal definition under the subheading "The Holomovement and its Aspects". Consistent with his own earlier Causal Interpretation, and more generally with the de Broglie-Schroedinger approach, he posits that a new kind of description would be appropriate for giving primary relevance to the implicate order. Using the hologram as a model, Bohm argues that the implicate order is enfolded within a more generalized wave structure of the universe-in-motion, or what he calls the holomovement:

Generalizing, so as to emphasize undivided wholeness, we can say that the holomovement, which is an unbroken and undivided totality, ‘carries’ implicate order. In certain cases, we can abstract particular aspects of the holomovement (e.g. light, electrons, sound, etc.), but more generally, all forms of the holomovement merge and are inseparable. Thus in its totality, the holomovement is not limited in any specifiable way at all. It is not required to conform to any particular order, or to be bounded by any particular measure. Thus, the holomovement is undefinable and immeasurable." (151).

As the interconnected totality of all there is, the holomovement is potentially of an infinite order, and so cannot be pinned down to any one notion of order. It is important to note that Bohm's concepts of the implicate order and the holomovement are significant departures from the earlier "Hidden Variables" interpretation, and the conceptual framework is somewhat different from that articulated in the Bohm-Vigier interpretation, sometimes called the Causal-Stochastic Interpretation, and the interpretations of the proponents of "Bohmian Mechanics", where the general assumption is of an underlying Dirac ether (see F. David Peat's Introduction to Quantum Implications). While the concept of the holomovement has been criticized as being "metaphysical", it is actually subtler, while at the same time encompassing the whole range of interconnected physical phenomena.