Locked down in the Whole

In this post I want to explore a bit the notion of wholeness and what meaning to give to the Whole. A friend introduced me to the works of the late physicist David Bohm. Bohm was one of the most eminent theoretical physicists of the 20th century. He was driven by a profound curiosity to understand the inner workings of the universe. The two main existing theories - general relativity and quantum mechanics - were fundamentally incompatible. This was deeply dissatisfying to Bohm. He therefore proposed a way along which the two could be unified by starting from what they had in common: both theories conceived of the universe as one indivisible whole. He suggested that the universe is in a constant movement of unfolding from and enfolding into the whole and the whole is enfolded in everything. This is hard to understand, but one can maybe accept the possibility of it by considering the rather magical and instantaneous interaction of the gravitational fields of objects far apart. An implication would be that things, even the smallest particles, are just practical abstractions, because they are always wound up in the whole and part of a continuous movement of unfolding (becoming manifest) and enfolding. Indeed, can we draw an exact boundary between you and me? Where was the me that I am today yesterday? Without referring to Bohm, Bruno Latour describes this very vividly in his latest book "Où suis-je ? Leçons du confinement à l'usage des Terrestres." Who am I without everything I depend on and that which depends on me? A physical theory of everything should be able to explain everything, including consciousness and thought. In such a theory, there can be no difference between the material and the spiritual. It must be one, and thus thought is a physical process, too. In different words, Latour suggests the same thing when he says that the opposite of body is not mind or spirit, but death. "We are all begotten and mortal bodies which owe their habitable environment to other begotten and mortal bodies of all sizes and lineages." Both Bohm and Latour ground us in the physical, which, according to Latour, modernity has tried to deny. Latour, though, is not concerned with a physical theory of everything, but with the wholeness of the living world, Gaïa, which he calls "the critical zone", a layer on the surface of planet Earth in which all life as we know it is confined. A layer that extends a few kilometers up and down from the surface of the planet in which life evolved and which evolved by life and that is one interconnected, dynamic whole. And an anomaly in the universe.

So, wholeness, what is it? I still don't really know, but I think that in the above (and the extended works of Bohm and Latour) we can recognize three kinds of it. Wholeness of the universe, wholeness of humanity and human consciousness, and wholeness of Gaïa, the living world.

1  Wholeness of the universe, what it is made of and which permeates everything that manifests within it. What gives rise to the laws of physics as we currently know them? What is it that contains the whole and from which the universe unfolds? This is about the scientific quest for a unifying theory of the cosmos. It is highly uncertain whether, if there were such a thing, we, from within it, can ever access that very source code of existence. It is an endeavor of imagination and experiment to better describe the universe.

2  Wholeness of humanity and human consciousness. This wholeness may require a leap of faith and can be more difficult to appreciate but it should follow from the previous if one accepts the possibility of a theory of everything. This is a kind of wholeness that David Bohm explored with Krishnamurti in many conversations. One can maybe go along with the idea that consciousness is not individual if one realizes that it is affected by memory and thus the influences undergone over one's lifetime. These include culture, social norms and so on, and interactions with physical environments, environments that are shared and produced by thoughts of people in the past. So, although we cannot say that one's consciousness equals human consciousness, we can say that it is largely shared with other people and that all those individual consciousnesses form one continuum. And we can see that one's consciousness is contingent and could be different and more like that of another person if one had been exposed to different experiences. This implies that collective consciousness exceeds individual consciousness. And if wider consciousness is capable of more intelligence, we can see the diversity in experiences and inclusion as a source of enhanced intelligence. And why, then, should we put a boundary around the human species? This is notion of wholeness that aspires to be descriptive but tends toward the normative and may be perceived as dogmatic (possibly because it comes into conflict with incumbent dogma).

3  Wholeness of the biosphere, Gaïa, the only known habitable place in the universe made habitable by its inhabitants. The dynamic product of itself, powered by heat from within and without, and to which its inhabitants are confined. In a series of books (Facing Gaïa, Down to Earth, and Where Am I?), Bruno Latour offers an convincing and demystified interpretation of the Gaïa hypothesis of James Lovelock. There are two interesting implications. The first is that to travel outside of it, we are forced to take habitable conditions with us. We can have no direct sensory experiences (except for sight) of what is outside of the habitable layer on Earth. For example, Neil Armstrong could not touch the surface of the Moon with his bare hands. His hands had to stay inside his suit within which habitable conditions were created. Similarly, we cannot venture freely into the crater of an active volcano. Second, we cannot divide Gaïa into parts without reducing its integrity. Links between parts - between species, say, or regions - cannot be fully broken. Methane emitted by a cow in the Amazon affects heat stress in India. Hence, we are locked in twofold - we are locked down in that thin layer of habitability on planet Earth but also in the interdependence between our actions and that habitability. Rather than limiting, this is a liberating realization, according to Latour, because it frees us from our destructive fancy with the unlimited, such as unlimited growth and escapism. Within our confinement, we can finally talk about creation and innovation again. This kind of wholeness is about the wholeness of a complex, purposeless system and seems the most immediately practical of the three. It starts descriptive but is by no means neutral in its implications.

But isn't making a distinction between the three kinds of wholeness contradictory? Each of them is a reaction to coherence-breaking fragmentation, the creation of arbitrary division and boundaries we then identify ourselves with. Indeed, David Bohm saw fragmentation as the source of conflict and of the many crises humanity got itself into. I guess all three notions want us to change our mental model of who we are, that we liberate ourselves from the cages of identity that we created and that we see ourselves as participating in and partaking of processes of sustenance and becoming.

Something like that.