Part 5: The Television Broadcast Model of the Implicate Order

THE TELEVISION BROADCAST MODEL OF THE IMPLICATE ORDER

In an effort to try and create an idealized model that is closer to Bohm's theory of the implicate order let us consider the following example. During the filming of a television broadcast, the visual image is translated into weak electromagnetic radio signals that carry the form of the visual image. This visual image can be described as having been implicated or enfolded. These weak electromagnetic radio signals are then broadcasted from the television station where they are picked up by an antenna, satellite dish, or relayed via coaxial cable and transmitted by a receiver. Reaching a receiver (which is part of the televisions structural components), the weak electromagnetic radio signals are amplified by the energy from the power plug in the wall socket and projected through the receivers cathode-ray tube. This process transforms the amplified radio signals into a focused beam of electrons striking the television screen. From this random pattern of electrons being fired at the screen the electrons become visible light or photons that then enter via the retina of our eyes our cerebral cortex. It is within our cerebral cortex that this random pattern of electrons/photons are explicated, or unfolded, and translated into the contents of consciousness, cognitive awareness or memory. The seed of this idea began to germinate and take root hearing a lecture by Heinz R. Pagels (1984a) that was followed by a stimulating two-hour dinner conversation. During our conversation Pagels' provided the image of a 3-D movie as a way to describe our universe, which is an idea he developed in his book The Cosmic Code (1983).[4] Recalling this 1984b meeting with Pagels, I am reminded that he taught me a profound lesson about uncertainty. This reference to uncertainty should not be confused with Hisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, which is a concept we shall examine in a forthcoming essay titled Quantum Questions: Exploring Quantum Theory's Meaning. I am instead referring to a lesson about life that always comes to mind when thinking about Pagels work, which stems from a particularly ominous aside comment: I'd really like to take Bohm to task on his implicate order model of the universe. My colleagues at the AAAS have been trying to arrange a debate between Bohm and I, but he is suffering from heart problems you know, and some of them don't know if he's quite up to the strain of hashing out our differences during a public forum. If you want to know my views from an orthodox understanding of quantum mechanics, read my book The Cosmic Code (1983) (Pagels, 1984b). Ironically four years prior to Bohm's passing from a fatal heart attack Heinz Pagels died at the peak of his career in a tragic mountaineering accident in Colorado in 1988. An eerie almost pre-cognitive portent of this accident appears in the last few paragraphs of The Cosmic Code: I used to climb mountains in snow and ice, hanging onto the sides of great rocks. I was describing one of my adventures to an older friend once, and when I had finished he asked me, Why do you want to kill yourself? I protested. I told him that the rewards I wanted were of sight, of pleasure, of the thrill of pitting my body and my skills against nature. My friend replied, When you are as old as I am you will see that you are trying to kill yourself. I often dream about falling. Such dreams are commonplace to the ambitious or those who climb mountains. Lately I dreamed I was clutching at the face of a rock but it would not hold. Gravel gave way. I grasped for a shrub, but it pulled loose, and in cold terror I fell into the abyss (Pagels: 312-313, 1983). Even more poignant and in an uncanny way representative of the new abode of the implicate order that Ullman and Bohm are in search of is an insight that Pagels had to the meaning of his dream of falling while still in the dream. Suddenly I realized that my fall was relative; there was no bottom and no end. A feeling of pleasure overcame me. I realized that what I embody, the principle of life, cannot be destroyed. It is written in the cosmic code, the order of the universe. As I continued to fall in the dark void, embraced by the vault of the heavens, I sang to the beauty of the stars and made my peace with the darkness (Pagels: 313, 1983). Quoting Robinson Jeffers poem, Point Pinos and Point Lobos, Pagels offers us a transpersonal synthesis of the implicate order and ecopsychology. For the essence and the end Of his labor is beauty, for goodness and evil are two things and yet variant, but the quality of life as of death and of life As of darkness is one, one beauty, the rhythm of that Wheel, and who can behold it is happy and will praise it to the people (Pagels: 313: 1983). Pagels' insightful descriptions of modern physics and his contributions to our way of understanding humankind's place in the universe is greatly missed by all of us that knew him and those familiar with his work. Meanwhile there remains a problem with the television model of the implicate order. On the one hand our discussion of a television broadcast has extended Bohm's thought experiment to an actual sensorimotor occasion, whose discussion of movement in terms of weak electromagnetic radio signals eliminates the problem of objects located in a one-to-one correspondence in space, that is, the problem of division. This example of a television broadcast must, on the other hand, also be seen as limited because the frequency modulation of the weak electromagnetic wave signals transmitting the visual image are now translated in terms of time order constraints. This suggests that time (which implies the rules of relativity theory as they have been conceived as a measure of the physical transmission of light energy) is a factor in the operation of the implicate order. Bohm has since made it clear in subsequent publications that the implicate order is outside of time (Bohm, 1985; Bohm & Weber, 1982b, 1986a).[5]