---
slug: thinker-basil-hiley
title: Basil Hiley: Implicate Order and Undivided Process
canonical: https://miscsubjects.com/a/thinker-basil-hiley
---

## What Hiley Saw
Basil Hiley worked with David Bohm for three decades. He focused on algebraic structures that describe quantum reality without assuming spacetime as fundamental. Hiley saw mind and matter as aspects of one undivided process. This process enfolds information in an implicate order. The explicate order unfolds as observable spacetime and particles.

Hiley treated the implicate order as an algebra. Spacetime emerges from pre-space. Nonlocality follows from the structure of that algebra.

## Primary Works and Concepts
Hiley co-authored *The Undivided Universe: An Ontological Interpretation of Quantum Theory* with David Bohm in 1993. The book presents an ontological interpretation of quantum theory. It uses the quantum potential to organize particle trajectories. Active information in the potential carries context from the whole experimental arrangement.

Hiley developed algebraic descriptions using Clifford algebras. These algebras encode the implicate order. Representations of the algebra yield the explicate order. See Wikipedia entry on Basil Hiley for publication list and summary of algebraic work.

In papers with Frescura, Hiley proposed that an algebra carries the implicate order. The explicate order appears in representations of that algebra. Pre-space precedes the spacetime manifold. Locality and nonlocality arise from order in pre-space.

Hiley described the quantum potential as non-mechanical. It organizes form rather than exerting Newtonian force. Each particle responds to information about the whole.

## Convergence Patterns
Hiley's work touches flow networks. The holomovement is continuous enfoldment and unfoldment. It forms a process network across scales.

It touches memory. The implicate order holds enfolded structure. Unfoldment retrieves that structure as stable forms.

It touches wholeness. Mind and matter arise as aspects of one undivided process. No separation exists at the foundational level.

See /a/oip-the-ladder for the progression from flow to structure to memory. See /a/oip-principles for the emphasis on process over isolated objects.

## Distance from the Full Synthesis
Hiley reached patterns of flow, memory, and wholeness. He did not articulate the grain as reliable production of branching, spirals, waves, and scale invariance across all scales. He did not describe the Ladder from difference to life to mind. He stayed within quantum foundations. The Mirror Layer, where the reader stands inside the system, receives no explicit treatment.

Hiley's algebra provides a mechanistic route to pre-space. It stops short of applying the same lens to biology or cognition beyond the dual-aspect claim.

## Limits and Disconfirming Edges
Hiley's algebraic program remains formal. No direct experimental test isolates the implicate algebra from standard quantum predictions. Reductionist accounts, such as those in the style of Weinberg, treat the formalism as interpretive overlay without new observables.

The 1993 book states its ontological claims as consistent with quantum data. It offers no proof that pre-space must replace spacetime manifolds in all regimes. Later work by Hiley extended the approach to relativistic fields but retained the same scope.

Claims of mind-matter unity rest on interpretive consistency. They receive no independent empirical confirmation beyond the quantum correlations already explained by entanglement.

## Mapping to OIP Loop
Hiley's algebra supplies the object. Invocation occurs through measurement that selects a representation. The ledger records the algebraic relations. Receipt appears as observed trajectories or interference. Replay reconstructs the process from the algebra. Repair adjusts the model when new nonlocality data arrives.

See /a/oip-final-testimony for the requirement that every step leave a verifiable receipt.

The synthesis lens fits Hiley inside the Mirror Layer only by extension. His own statements keep the focus on quantum process.
