Thank you again, so very much!
Me, too. And also to Schrödinger; evidently to Bohm as well.
What is fascinating to me, even eerie, is that I cannot but think that what we nowadays refer to as quantum field theory had already been articulated in the ancient world — by two eminent pre-Socratic thinkers, Anaximander [c. 610 B.C. – 546 B.C.], and Heraclitus [c. 535 B.C. – 475 B.C.] — and also by Plato himself [c. 429 B.C. – 347 B.C.], who seems clearly familiar with the ideas of his pre-Socratic predecessors (see: Plato's creation myth in Timaeus).
Bohm specifically references Heraclitus (p. 61ff), but not Anaximander — though one expects that the former's thinking was substantially influenced by the latter's.
As Eric Voegelin put it [in Order and History, Vol. 4, p. 174],
Reality was experienced by Anaximander ... as a cosmic process in which things emerge from, and disappear into, the non-existence of the Apeiron. Things do not exist out of themselves, all at once and forever; they exist out of the ground to which they return. Hence, to exist means to participate in two modes of reality: (1) In the Apeiron as the timeless arche [lawful origin] of things and (2) in the ordered succession of things as the manifestation of the Apeiron in time.And Kenneth Keulman elaborates on Voegelin's insight, thusly:
Voegelin contends that the Anaximandrian Apeiron — which he calls the `Ionian truth of the process' — is 'present in the background of consciousness when the later thinkers explore specific structures for the case of societies in history.' ... The symbol of the Apeiron as the Boundless, the Depth, serves as a polarity both of the cosmos and the psyche. The opposite polarity, the One of Plato [a/k/a, the God "Beyond," or Epikeina], stands as the noetically discoverable antipode of the Apeiron. It is the height as the Apeiron is the depth."Anaximander's Apeiron is defined as "the unlimited, indefinite, unbounded; it is the 'unlimited' source of all particular things. Because it transcends all limits, it is in principle undefinable." (Sounds like a "quantum field" to me!)
Evidently picking up from there, it seems Heraclitus recognized that the essential nature of all existents in the natural world, including humans, was that of participation in a holonomic "flow" — holonomic from the Greek roots, holos, meaning "whole," and nomos, meaning "lawful" — as participants in an eternal process.
RE: Heraclitus, Bohm comments:
The notion that reality is to be understood as process is an ancient one, going back at least to Heraclitus, who said that everything flows....Revolutionary words, these. They put the fundamental claim of science — that it is possible to have "certain" knowledge of anything, thus to give human beings effective instrumental control over nature — to the severest test....
I regard the essence of the notion of process as given by the statement: Not only is everything changing, but all is flux. That is to say, what is is the process of becoming itself, while all objects, events, entities, conditions, structures, etc., are forms that can be abstracted from this process.
The best image of process is perhaps that of the flowing of a stream, whose substance [as Heraclitus averred] is never the same. On this stream, one may see an ever-changing pattern of vortices, ripples, waves, splashes, etc., which evidently have no independent existence as such. Rather, they are abstracted from the flowing movement, arising and vanishing in the total process of the flow. Such transitory subsistence as may be possessed by these abstracted forms implies only a relative independence or autonomy of behaviour, rather than absolutely independent existence as ultimate substances....
Of course, modern physics states that actual streams (e.g., of water) are composed of atoms, which are in turn composed of 'elementary particles,' such as electrons, protons, neutrons, etc. For a long time it was thought that these latter are the 'ultimate substance' of the whole of reality, and that all flowing movement, such as those of streams, must reduce to forms abstracted from the motions through space of collections of interacting particles. However, it has been found that even the 'elementary particles' can be created, annihilated, and transformed, and this indicates that not even these can be ultimate substances but, rather, that they too are relatively constant forms, abstracted from some deeper level of movement.
One may suppose that this deeper level of movement may be analysable into yet finer particles which will perhaps turn out to be the ultimate substance of the whole of reality. However, the notion that all is flux, into which we are inquiring here, denies such a supposition. Rather, it implies that any describable event, object, entity, etc., is an abstraction from an unknown and undefinable totality of flowing movement. This means that no matter how far our knowledge of the laws of physics may go, the content of these laws will still deal with such abstractions, having only a relative independence of existence and independence of behaviour. So one will not be led to suppose that all properties of collections of objects, events, etc., will have to be explainable in terms of some knowable set of ultimate substances. At any stage, further properties of such collections may arise, whose ultimate ground is to be regarded as the unknown totality of the universal flux.
Having discussed what the notion of process implies concerning the nature of reality, let us now consider how this notion should bear on the nature of knowledge. Clearly, to be consistent, one has to say that knowledge, too, is a process, an abstraction from the one total flux, which latter is therefore the ground both of reality and of knowledge of this reality. Of course, one may fairly readily verbalize such a notion, but in actual fact it is very difficult not to fall into the almost universal tendency to treat our knowledge as a set of basically fixed truths, and thus not of the nature of process (e.g., one may admit that knowledge is always changing but say that it is accumulative, thus implying that its basic elements are permanent truths which we have to discover). Indeed, even to assert any absolutely invariant element of knowledge (such as 'all is flux') is to establish in the field of knowledge something that is permanent; but if all is flux, then every part of knowledge must have its being as an abstracted form in the process of becoming, so that there can be no absolutely invariant elements of knowledge.
Anyhoot, I really like the book. :^) And hope you will too, dearest sister in Christ!