Reply #62: It's worse than that

[GliderGuider]

As mentioned in the other thread on this topic, the concept of "knowledge" is much slipperier than most people assume. So are the concepts of "reality" and "truth". All of these go quite fuzzy around the edges when they are examined rigorously. It's easy to toss such words around on the internet and pretend that they are absolutes, but it's another thing entirely to try and get this messy objective/subjective/Newtonian/quantum/discrete/holistic/independent/interdependent whatever-it-is we're living in to stay inside those nice neat lines.

Luckily there's lots of room for different interpretations. Take theoretical physicist David Bohm, for example:

"In the enfolded order, space and time are no longer the dominant factors determining the relationships of dependence or independence of different elements. Rather, an entirely different sort of basic connection of elements is possible, from which our ordinary notions of space and time, along with those of separately existent material particles, are abstracted as forms derived from the deeper order. These ordinary notions in fact appear in what is called the "explicate" or "unfolded" order, which is a special and distinguished form contained within the general totality of all the implicate orders."

"The new form of insight can perhaps best be called Undivided Wholeness in Flowing Movement. This view implies that flow is, in some sense, prior to that of the ‘things’ that can be seen to form and dissolve in this flow". According to Bohm, a vivid image of this sense of analysis of the whole is afforded by vortex structures in a flowing stream. Such vortices can be relatively stable patterns within a continuous flow, but such an analysis does not imply that the flow patterns have any sharp division, or that they are literally separate and independently existent entities; rather, they are most fundamentally undivided. Thus, according to Bohm’s view, the whole is in continuous flux, and hence is referred to as the holomovement (movement of the whole)."

As far as I can tell, "the unity of observer, observed and observation" is, to torture a phrase, an obvious implication of the concept of implicate order. Is the "implicate order" knowledge? Well, Bohm thought so.