![]() Whitehead’s actual occasions feel, relate to, and take up one another directly (horizontal causality), rather than relating only through the mediation of the implicate order. Bohm and Whitehead view novel forms as entering or ingressing into the actual world from an enfolded or unactualized domain of possibilities.īut there are also some important divergences in their respective approaches. There is a deeper layer of reality, a creative process or holomovement, from which both derive. Bohm, like Whitehead, rejects the separation of mind and matter. Bohm, like Whitehead, views each microcosmic moment or event as including the whole cosmos in enfolded or concresced form. ![]() There is no “Nature at an instant.” This implies that space-time measurement is only ever “close enough” and can never be absolutely precise. Bohm, like Whitehead, advocates for a shift away from point-instants to moments or events as the primary facts of physical reality. Both Bohm and Whitehead want to understand quantum physics as more than just a calculus, but as having profound worldview implications for our civilization. Both Bohm and Whitehead agreed on what the faulty presuppositions were: 1) the notion of “Nature at an instant” 2) the notion of “simple location and 3) the notion of the “bifurcation of Nature.” The old mechanistic worldview of 17th century science was based on certain key presuppositions that the new quantum and relativistic paradigms showed to be inadequate. While both made important contributions to the mathematical physics of their day, they also set to work re-imagining the metaphysics of materialism in search of a more coherent explanation of our cosmological situation. They were among the first to recognize that the early 20th century quantum and relativistic revolutions in physics demanded a new metaphysics. Both men emphasized the need to out grow the reductive mechanistic account of the universe that was ushered in by the first wave of scientific geniuses in the 17th century. We’ll lead a discussion on the relationship between David Bohm’s and Alfred North Whitehead’s cosmological visions. I’m sharing some notes below.įirst, the obvious: there is a deep congruence in their thinking. On Tuesday, I’ll be doing another event for friends of the Cobb Institute, this time joined by plasma physicist Tim Eastman. It moulds our type of civilization.” Whitehead ( Modes of Thought, 1938) ![]() This is why the assemblage of philosophic ideas is more than a specialist study. The sort of ideas we attend to, and the sort of ideas which we push into the negligible background, govern our hopes, our fears, our control of behavior. “A philosophic outlook is the very foundation of thought and of life. “There is very little left on the earth that has not been effected by our thinking.” Bohm (on a panel with the Dalai Lama and others, 1990) What we call ‘mind’ may be this deeper ground of movement, but if we think of the particular thoughts as the basic reality, we miss this.” David Bohm (from a chapter in Cobb and Griffin’s edited volume Mind in Nature: the Interface of Science and Philosophy, 1977) Particular ideas or thoughts coming to the mind may similarly be perceived as being like particular objects that arise from an unspecifiable ground of deeper movement. “When we look into the depths of the clear sky, what we actually see is an unspecifiable total ground of movement, from which objects emerge. In the darkness beyond there ever looms the vague mass which is the universe begetting us.” Alfred North Whitehead ( Science and Philosophy, 1948) We are not enjoying a limited dolls’ house of clear and distinct things, secluded from all ambiguity. “In our experience there is always the dim background from which we derive and to which we return.
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