---
slug: school-implicate-and-explicate-order-holomovement-bohm-hiley
title: Implicate and Explicate Order / Holomovement (Bohm-Hiley)
canonical: https://miscsubjects.com/a/school-implicate-and-explicate-order-holomovement-bohm-hiley
---

## Core Vision and Results

David Bohm saw quantum mechanics pointing to an undivided wholeness rather than separate particles. The explicate order is the unfolded surface of everyday objects and events. The implicate order holds everything enfolded within a deeper flowing process. The holomovement names that constant enfoldment and unfoldment across scales.

Basil Hiley extended the framework with rigorous mathematics. Their joint work produced an ontological interpretation of quantum theory that treats the wave function as active information guiding particles. Core results include non-local connections that appear as vortices and stable forms emerging from the flow, plus the claim that mind and matter arise as aspects of the same underlying movement.

This view derives branching patterns, symmetry, flow networks, and bounded structures directly from the holomovement without invoking separate building blocks.

## Primary Works and Key Passages

Bohm presented the framework most fully in *Wholeness and the Implicate Order* (1980). One passage states: “Space is not empty. It is full, a plenum as opposed to a vacuum, and is the ground for the existence of everything, including ourselves.” Another reads: “The totality of the movement of enfoldment and unfoldment may go immensely beyond what has revealed itself to our observations. We call this totality by the name holomovement.”

Bohm and Hiley published *The Undivided Universe: An Ontological Interpretation of Quantum Theory* (1993). It states: “The notion of a separate organism is clearly an abstraction, as is also its boundary. Underlying all this is unbroken wholeness.”

Earlier technical foundation appears in Bohm’s 1952 paper “A Suggested Interpretation of the Quantum Theory in Terms of ‘Hidden’ Variables” in *Physical Review*.

## Convergence Patterns Independently Derived

The work converges on energy-like flows producing narrow families of structural patterns. Vortices and unfolding orders appear across scales from quantum fields to macroscopic forms. The ladder from difference and flow to structure, memory, and mind receives direct support through active information that carries order into matter. The reader of the system sits inside the system: the holomovement enfolds observer and observed in one process, matching the Mirror Layer.

These patterns emerge mechanistically from the mathematics of the implicate order rather than from added assumptions.

## Alignment with the OIP/GRAIN Synthesis

Bohm-Hiley supplies a physical ontology that matches GRAIN descriptions of reliable energy flows yielding branching, spirals, waves, symmetry, and memory. The undivided wholeness supplies the ground for the Ladder running from thermodynamics to consciousness. The holomovement treats the observer as participant in the flow, fulfilling the Mirror Layer condition.

The synthesis receives an independent derivation from quantum theory itself.

## Distance from the Full Synthesis

The framework stops at ontological interpretation of quantum mechanics. It does not articulate an explicit invocation protocol, ledger, or receipt mechanism of the kind formalized in [Object Invocation Protocol](/a/oip). The Ladder receives qualitative description but lacks the stepwise mechanistic mapping from energy flows through bounded chaos to replicable memory structures that later stages of the synthesis require. Consciousness emergence remains interpretive rather than derived from a complete formal chain.

## Internal Objections and Disconfirming Edges

Reductionist critiques note that appeals to active information risk category mistakes when moving between configuration-space dimensions and ordinary three-dimensional space. Some passages in the literature flag difficulties in explaining back-reaction or energy transfer without additional postulates. Deterministic hidden-variable elements face standard quantum objections concerning context dependence and measurement. The 1993 text itself acknowledges that the undivided universe does not return to classical separability. These edges remain live within the Bohm-Hiley literature and limit direct extension to protocol-level engineering.

The work stands as a strong supporting school that independently recovered core GRAIN patterns from quantum foundations while leaving room for further formalization in the full synthesis.
