I suspect I am the photocopy of a larger fold (or Spinoza against Bohm's Implicate Order)

Topics I like to read about and understand nothing about.

The Pilot Wave Interpretation and the Implicate Order (David Bohm)

David Bohm, one of the most brilliant theoretical physicists of the 20th century and a collaborator of Einstein, developed a radical alternative to standard quantum physics:

•    The premise: There is an "Implicate Order" in the universe where the entire cosmos is fundamentally interconnected in a non-local and instantaneous way. The matter we see is merely the "Explicate Order" (the foam on the surface). In this model, free will and the separation between individual objects are illusions created by our macroscopic perception.

The de Broglie–Bohm interpretation (pilot wave) and David Bohm's Implicate Order are related but not identical ideas. Bohm developed them at different stages of his work.

Pilot Wave Interpretation (de Broglie–Bohm)
It is a realistic, deterministic, and non-local interpretation of quantum mechanics.

•    Particles have definite trajectories at all times (they have real position and momentum).
•    They are guided by a “pilot wave” (the wave function $\Psi$), which evolves according to the Schrödinger equation.
•    The velocity of each particle is given by Bohm's guidance equation (proportional to the gradient of the phase of $\Psi$).
•    Non-locality appears explicitly: the quantum potential acting on a particle depends instantaneously on the configuration of the entire system. This allows it to reproduce the results of Bell's experiments and quantum non-locality without the collapse of the wave function.

It is a hidden-variables theory (the particle's position is the hidden variable) that is empirically equivalent to standard quantum mechanics in ordinary regimes, but ontologically very different: there is no fundamental indeterminism and no “collapse.”

Implicate Order and Explicate Order
Later, Bohm elaborated a broader and more philosophical vision (especially in Wholeness and the Implicate Order, 1980):

•    The Implicate Order is a deeper level of reality in which everything is “folded” or entangled in a holistic way. Each region contains, in an enfolded manner, information about the whole (a frequent analogy: the hologram).
•    The Explicate Order is the world we perceive: the unfolding of that deeper order into separate, localized, and seemingly independent forms (particles, objects, ordinary space-time).
•    The matter and space-time we see are, in this picture, like the “foam” or the surface of a more fundamental process of continuous enfolding and unfolding.
•    Quantum non-locality and entanglement are understood as manifestations of this deeper interconnection, not as mysterious “actions at a distance” against a backdrop of separate objects.

In this framework, the separation between individual objects and the sensation of free will as something radically independent from the rest of the cosmos are presented as illusions or valid approximations only at the level of the Explicate Order (our macroscopic perception and Cartesian analysis of separate parts). Bohm does not deny the subjective experience of choice, but places it within a broader process of wholeness in motion (holomovement).

Relationship Between Both Ideas
The pilot wave theory already contains non-locality and a real guiding field that connects the entire system. The Implicate Order is a conceptual and philosophical generalization that Bohm elaborated from those ideas (and from conversations with other thinkers) to contemplate the totality of the universe, not just laboratory experiments. It is not strictly necessary for the de Broglie–Bohm interpretation, but Bohm used it to provide a broader framework for quantum physics and his vision of reality.

In summary: the pilot wave offers a concrete, mathematical ontology for quantum mechanics; the Implicate Order is the broader cosmological and philosophical vision in which Bohm situated that ontology (and reality in general).

Spinoza, the Determinist Who Had Already Ruined Your Illusion of Choice

While Bohm needed guidance equations, quantum potentials, and all the mathematics of wave mechanics to arrive at the conclusion that the separation between things is an appearance, there was a lens grinder in Amsterdam who reached the exact same place three centuries earlier—without a collider, without a wave function, armed solely with Euclidean geometry and a stubbornness that cost him excommunication from his own community.
Baruch Spinoza, in his Ethics, Demonstrated in Geometrical Order, proposes something that today sounds directly copied from the Implicate Order: separate things—you, your neighbor, the milanesa you "chose" to order, the table where you eat it—do not exist as independent substances interacting with each other from the outside. There is a single, infinite substance, which Spinoza calls interchangeably God or Nature, and everything else—every object, every thought, every person who believes themselves to be the protagonist of their own decision—is merely a "mode" of that substance, a partial and limited way in which totality manifests itself at a particular point and time.
It is not a pious metaphor: for Spinoza, as for Bohm, what we perceive as separate parts of the world is literally an incomplete way of looking at something that, at its deepest level, is a single continuous process. Bohm's Explicate Order—the surface foam of discrete particles, objects, and people—is, in Spinozan terms, the way we perceive "modes" without seeing the single substance that supports them all underneath. And right there, exactly there, is where Spinoza delivers the blow that hurts most to anyone who thinks they are "deciding" anything: if everything is a single substance unfolding according to its own internal necessity, there is no room for freedom as we imagine it. What we call "choosing" is nothing more than being ignorant of the causes that pushed us to do exactly what we did. Spinoza doesn't say the milanesa doesn't exist. He says you didn't choose to order it: the entire chain of causes that you are—your history, your appetite, your body, the weather that night—had already ordered it for you, long before the waiter arrived.
The difference, once again, is not foundational but instrumental. Bohm needed to mathematically describe a "quantum potential" that instantaneously connects every particle with the complete configuration of the system to argue that separation is illusory. Spinoza, with one definition and one axiom, had already concluded that no finite thing can truly be understood by itself, isolated from the whole of which it is merely a passing mode. One used guidance equations; the other, a geometric method of propositions chained like theorems. Both arrived at the same uncomfortable spot: the freedom you think you have when choosing your own dinner is, at best, the freedom of not knowing why, in reality, you had already chosen it.

The Family Exorcism Committee (or Why Nobody Believes You That "Everything Is Connected")

The first reaction this idea received, back in the 1950s, was the kind that ruins a New Year’s Eve dinner: it was called silly, a story for children, a youthful deviation of someone who had strayed from the serious path. It’s the equivalent of coming home thrilled to tell your family you’ve discovered everyone is connected at a deeper level of reality, only for your older uncle, without looking up from the asado, to reply that it's "very clever, but basically useless." No matter how right you are: if the family's first reaction is laughter, you spend the next three decades trying to get anyone to take you seriously again.
Then came the most awkward problem of all, the speed of gossip: if something happens to a particle here, another particle on the other side of the universe knows about it instantly, without any messenger, mail carrier, or signal traveling at the speed of light. It's the ultimate family WhatsApp group: no one needs to type a thing, everyone already knows what happened as soon as it happened, in any corner of the planet, with no "I didn't get the notification" excuse. The problem is that for that instantaneous gossip to work, you have to assume a single, universal clock exists, valid for the whole family at the same time—something that relativity, with its relative time zones and its "depends on where you're looking from," flatly refuses to grant. It's like trying to host a family video call across different time zones and expecting it to be "right now" for everyone at once: nice goal, but the logistics don't add up.
Even more uncomfortable was the issue of "empty waves": according to this view, there are possible paths, entire branches of what could have happened, that were never traveled but still hover around, exerting a subtle influence, like ghosts of unmade decisions. It’s the relative who keeps dropping hints about the career you "could have studied" or the partner you "could have chosen"—paths you never took, yet somehow still weigh heavy at the family table without ever having been real. Someone put it bluntly: it’s like living in permanent denial that entire universes of unfulfilled possibilities exist, while those very possibilities keep throwing shade at you from the other room.
To top it all off, when someone tried to neatly draw "where each particle actually went" in certain experiments involving mirrors and lenses, the resulting trajectories were so weird, so counterintuitive, that not even the theory’s defenders could explain them without saying, "Well, classical intuition doesn't apply here." It’s the perfect excuse for any chaotic family gathering: "Don't ask why it happened like that, it just did—stop trying to make it make sense with everyday logic." Not to mention the reproach of Occam's Razor, that relative obsessed with simplicity who asks the same question every Christmas: "Why add particles AND pilot waves AND a thousand-dimensional configuration space, if in the end the math yields the exact same results without all that apparatus?" Telling your family you are part of an Implicate, holographic Order where every fragment contains the whole makes for beautiful after-dinner talk. The hard part is explaining to the committee of physicists why all that conceptual bluster was needed just to end up, in practice, predicting the exact same thing traditional physics already predicted.

Plotinus's Defense

 The family exorcism committee was already closing its folders, satisfied with having pointed out that all that conceptual bluster ended up predicting, in practice, the exact same thing as plain old physics. Spinoza, with the infinite patience of someone who has spent three centuries explaining the same thing without anyone fully understanding it, was polishing a lens while waiting for the right moment to slip away. And Bohm, in some corner, was still trying to sketch on a napkin how a quantum potential could instantaneously connect every corner of the universe, without anyone quite believing him that it wasn't, once again, "a physical bedtime story for children."
It was then that the light in the room—dim as it already was—seemed to fold back in on itself, as if something had decided to reveal itself without taking up space at all. Plotinus, his gaze fixed on a point that wasn't strictly in the room but a little beyond it, took the floor without raising his voice, because he never needed to:
—"You seek predictions. Numbers that can be measured, confirmed, refuted. And I ask you: with what instrument do you intend to measure the One?"
The committee, still holding Occam's Razor, tried to object:
—"If there is no new prediction, there is no science. It is ontological excess—too many particles, too many waves, too many dimensions."
—"Too many, you say," Plotinus offered what, on another face, might have been a smile. "As if the One could have 'too much' or 'too little.' Everything that exists emanates from a single, indivisible source that is never depleted by unfolding: first the Intellect, then the Soul, then this foam you call matter, world, separate particles. Each level is an ever-fainter reflection of the previous one, not because the source weakens, but because what is reflected can never fully contain that which reflects it. Bohm," he said, turning toward him with an almost fraternal gesture, "didn't invent the Implicate Order. He remembered it. Eighteen hundred years ago, I described how the sensible world you measure so zealously is merely the unfolding, the final deployment of something that was originally folded in perfect unity."
Spinoza, without pausing his lens polishing, chimed in, drier than Plotinus but pointing in the same direction:
—"I called it Substance. He calls it the One. The names change, the intuition remains: nothing that exists holds up in isolation. You," he said, looking at the committee, "want to fragment what was never fragmented, and then you demand that totality give you a fragmented accounting."
—"Precisely," Plotinus resumed, with a calm that was beginning to feel more unsettling than any shout. "You demand a number, a falsifiable prediction, an experiment to distinguish this vision from standard physics. But the One is not for that. It is not a hypothesis competing with other hypotheses within the Explicate Order. It is the very condition for there being, in the first place, something to measure, something to fragment, something to argue about this very afternoon. You demand that totality prove itself using the tools of a single one of its parts. It is like asking the ocean to prove itself using only the glass of water you just raised to your lips."
The committee, uneasy, found nothing to counter with. Because there was no way to refute someone who never intended to play the same game: Plotinus didn't come to offer a better prediction. He came to say that the demand for a prediction, in itself, already assumed the very fragmentation that totality comes precisely to disprove. And perhaps there, at that exact point where physics demands a number and contemplation asks only for silence, is where neither Bohr, nor Oppenheimer, nor Einstein—with his "too cheap"—ever quite managed to touch what Bohm, without even fully knowing it himself, was trying to remember.

And so the cosmos—between the patient polishing of an excommunicated heretic, the quantum potential of a physicist nobody quite wanted to believe, and the luminous silence of one who no longer needed to prove a thing—continues folding and unfolding, with you, without you quite knowing it, right inside that very same movement.

Transparency note: Original idea with AI-generated text, revised by me. Used Gemini, Claude, and Grok.