David Peat

68 From Certainty to Uncertaintydeveloped in the nineteenth century by William Kingdon Clifford, WilliamRowan Hamilton, and Hermann Günther Grassmann. Of particularinterest to Bohm and Hiley was the discovery, on looking backinto Grassmann’s notebooks, that this algebra had been developed asan “algebra of thought.” It was a mathematician’s attempt to explainthe way thoughts emerge out of each other and flow in a dynamicalway. The two physicists were struck by the similarities between quantumideas and those of the processes of human consciousness. In essenceit is via a mathematics of process that time enters into physics ina truly dynamical way.A true scientific theory of the implicate order, one that could, forexample, replace quantum theory, does not yet exist, although researchin this field has continued after Bohm’s death. In the last years of hislife, Bohm was also investigating the notion of information as an actualactivity within the universe. He called this “active information”and believed that a truly deep theory of nature should not fragmentmind from matter.Bohm’s ideas were congenial to the neuroscientist Karl Pribram,who had been thinking along similar lines. Pribram believes that thebrain is structured in ways similar to that of a holograph. One of thepuzzles about brain anatomy had been the search for the “engram,” thebasic units whereby memories are stored in precise physical locationsin the brain. On a computer’s hard disc each unit of data is stored at aparticular address or location. If damaged areas appear on the disc’ssurface, then information specifically stored in that region is lost forever.Yet when a person suffers brain damage—through a stroke, bulletwound, head injury, or the like—specific memories are not lost. Ratherit is as if memory is distributed nonlocally across the entire brain.This idea of distributed memory, along with his study of nerveconnections, led Pribram to believe that the brain works analogouslyto a hologram, by enfolding, storing, and retrieving information fromacross the whole brain. This means that Bohm’s implicate order universeis being perceived from within a holographic mind. Primary reality,from the atom to the brain, is of an implicate order but, for reasonsof survival, we create, or project out, an explicate order world