QUANTUM METAPHYSICS - E-thesis

would require a rational broadening of the earlier way of thinking. According to Pauli, Bohm’s
hypothesis was ”old goods which had been dealt with long ago” 670 . For a long period, Bohm
abandoned development of the hidden-variable theory and at the beginning of the 1960s he
started developing a new ontological conceptual frame of reference for physics founded on the
concept of implicate order. According to the implicate order model, the world is a multidimensional
indivisible whole whose parts have internal relationships with each other. Noncausal
connections between particles can be explained by what we see as separately influenced
particles being three-dimensional projections of the same events in multi-dimensional space. The
implicate frame of reference is a better fit than Bohm’s earlier ideas with Copenhagen thinking
when dealing with, for example, questions concerning electronic trajectories.
In the 1980s, Bohm returned to the hidden-variable theory, and working with Basil Hiley,
developed an ”ontological interpretation” in which the central concepts were ”objective
wholeness” and the already-mentioned ”active information”. In this multi-level framework, in
which form informed matter in a specific way, biological and psychological phenomena and the
question of the relationship between mind and matter could be approached in a new way. Mental
processes no longer had to be reduced to the quantum level, since Bohm suggests that in certain
ways, the activity of information at the quantum level is similar to the activity of information in
ordinary human subjective experience. He uses the similarity as a basis for his mind-matter
theory which is discussed in more detail in the following section 4.3.5.
Even though Bohm’s theory of hidden variables is almost classical and mechanical at the
microscopic level, his ontological interpretation differs radically from classical physics,
something that Bohm himself emphasised. In its entirety, the model does not lead to complete
predictability or observability, nor is it possible, even in principle, for people to either know the
whole of multi-dimensional and multi-layered reality in the way that Laplace’s demon did, or
have the ability to predict all its events. Some of Bohm’s successors appear to make a clearer
attempt at classical metaphysics and realism than Bohm himself. In recent years, one of the
alternatives that has arisen in the discussion concerning the interpretation of quantum theory has
been so-called ”Bohmian mechanics”, in whose circles Bohm’s 1952 ”hidden variables”
interpretation is being further developed.
670 Pauli refers to de Broglie’s matter-wave-hypothesis. Pauli’s earlier criticism played a part here in the fact that de
Broglie abandoned the theory and only returned to it following Bohm’s satisfactory response. The reaction of the
Copenhagen Group can also be seen from the viewpoint provided by the sociology of science. ’The ruling elite’ did
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