🧠 Bohm’s Implicate Order (vs. Explicate Order)
Definition:
Bohm proposed that reality is fundamentally structured by an implicate order — a deeper, enfolded wholeness in which all things are internally related, and from which the explicate order (the manifest, separate world) unfolds.
“In the implicate order, each part contains the whole enfolded within it.”
— David Bohm
Core Ideas:
- Reality is holistic, non-local, and dynamically unfolding.
- The explicate world we perceive is like a projection or unfolding from the implicate order.
- Time and causality are not fundamental but emerge from deeper holomovement.
- Quantum entanglement and consciousness are best understood as expressions of this deeper implicate structure.
🔄 Our Framing of Co-Implication
Definition:
Co-implication is the mutual contextual interdependence of elements within an evolving system — where what becomes actual emerges from a dynamic field of possibilities shaped by their amplitudes of co-relevance. Key Points:
- Every outcome (in quantum, AI, or cognition) emerges from a field of weighted potentials.
- What becomes actual is selected through resonance with context.
- Actualization shapes, and is shaped by, the ongoing flow of relevance.
- Focus is on real-time emergence through relational fit, not just underlying wholeness.
📊 Comparison Table
| Conceptual Axis |
Bohm’s Implicate Order |
Co-Implication (Our Frame) |
| Primary Metaphor |
Enfolded wholeness → unfolding appearances |
Dynamic resonance of co-relevant potentials |
| Domain Origin |
Physics / Ontology |
Transdisciplinary: physics, AI, cognition |
| Mechanism of Emergence |
Holomovement (deep structure dynamically unfolding) |
Weighted co-activation in evolving context |
| Focus |
Ontological structure beneath appearances |
Functional dynamics of how things become meaningful or actualized |
| Role of Context |
Background enfolded in all parts |
Actively shaping what emerges via relative salience |
| Role of Observer |
Implicated in enfolding/unfolding |
Constitutes context that shapes co-relevance and collapse |
| Mathematical Formalism |
Inspired by holonomy, non-locality, enfolded geometry |
Closer to vector space weighting, probability fields, neural dynamics |
| Temporal Dynamics |
Enfolding/unfolding beyond classical time |
Real-time interactional feedback shaping outcomes |
🪞How Our Framing Extends or Refines Bohm’s
- Operational Granularity:
- Bohm’s implicate order is profound but abstract and metaphysical.
- Co-implication offers actionable mechanics across real systems: token generation in LLMs, attention-guided learning, measurement in quantum systems.
- Context as Active Differentiator:
- We explicitly emphasize amplitudes of co-relevancy — the idea that context dynamically weights what becomes.
- This adds precision to Bohm’s more generalized enfoldment.
- Syntonic with Adaptive Systems:
- Our model applies to learning, decision-making, AI inference, and meaning-making — real-world systems that evolve in response to co-activated patterns.
- Temporal Flow as Recursive Updating:
- Rather than timeless holomovement, co-implication emphasizes real-time feedback: each collapse reconfigures the field for the next moment.
🧩 Unifying Thought
We could say:
Bohm’s implicate order describes the deep structure of possibility. Co-implication describes how actuality emerges from that possibility in interaction with context.
Where Bohm focuses on the wholeness from which parts derive, co-implication focuses on how parts dynamically co-shape each other in the flow of becoming.Both are holistic. Bohm’s is ontological, ours is ontogenetic — about the becoming of form and meaning within relational systems.
DB: Describe co-implication in terms of neural firing thresholds and aggregate Hebbian learning.
Describing co-implication in terms of neural firing thresholds and Hebbian learning offers a biologically grounded account of how meaning, relevance, and learning dynamically emerge within the brain.
🧠 Co-Implication as Neural Relevance Dynamics
🧩 1. Neural Firing Thresholds as Momentary Collapse
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Neurons exist in a fluctuating subthreshold state, influenced by a distributed pattern of incoming signals.
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Whether a neuron fires is not determined by a single input, but by the aggregated excitatory and inhibitory contributions from many sources.
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This decision — to fire or not — is a local “collapse” of ongoing co-implicative pressures. The neuron’s activation co-emerges from the whole network’s state.
Co-implication at the synaptic level: A single synapse’s influence on firing is meaningful only in relation to all other active synapses and the neuron’s threshold — a dynamic, context-sensitive field.
🔄 2. Hebbian Learning as Recursive Co-Implication Encoding
“Neurons that fire together wire together.”
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Hebbian learning strengthens connections between neurons that co-activate.
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Over time, patterns of co-activation become encoded as predispositions — shaping future response likelihoods.
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These encoded patterns are not static. They represent a history of co-implications: relational pathways that proved relevant across multiple moments of shared activity.
Each learned connection is not just a trace of past events, but an amplitude of potential relevance in future interactions.
🔁 Summary Mapping
| Neural Concept |
Co-Implication Equivalent |
| Membrane potential |
Field of co-activated influence |
| Firing threshold |
Moment of resolution/collapse |
| EPSPs/IPSPs |
Amplitudes of co-relevance |
| Synaptic plasticity |
Reinforced co-implicative fit |
| Hebbian strengthening |
Memory of successful resonance |
| Network activation |
Emergent meaning through relation |
🔍 Implication for Learning
Learning, in this light, is not the accumulation of facts or isolated adjustments. It is the progressive tuning of a dynamic system to recognize and actualize co-implicative patterns. The brain becomes:
A living field of weighted co-relevancies — where what fires, what connects, and what strengthens are all outcomes of the interplay between prior states and current context.
This view:
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Bridges neuroscience and cognitive meaning-making
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Reflects real-time adaptability
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Embeds context sensitivity in every level of operation
🪞Final Thought
Just as quantum collapse is shaped by measurement, and LLM token generation by context, neural firing is shaped by relational co-activation.
Co-implication is the grammar of becoming at every level — physical, computational, and biological.
DB: why call Co-implication “the grammar of becoming” rather than the “central dynamic”? Co-implication is an activity.
ChatGPT: Excellent challenge — and you’re right to draw the distinction.
Calling co-implication the “grammar of becoming” emphasizes its role as a relational rule structure — the implicit logic guiding how elements fit together to make something coherent, like grammar does with words. But this framing might understate its dynamism — as you point out, co-implication is not just a structure, but an activity.
Let’s break this down:
🧠 Why “Grammar of Becoming” Works (and Where It Doesn’t)
Pros:
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Grammar implies generativity — a system of rules that shapes what’s allowed to emerge.
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It reflects coherence: just as grammar allows meanings to form from words in sequence, co-implication allows meaning/actuality to arise from context-sensitive fit.
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It highlights the underlying logic of becoming, even across diverse domains.
Cons:
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“Grammar” can sound static or formal, more like a schema than a living process.
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It may imply syntax without energy — whereas co-implication is always in motion, always participatory.
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It risks intellectualizing what is fundamentally experiential, real-time, and embodied.
✅ Why “Central Dynamic” May Be Closer to the Mark
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Dynamic captures that co-implication is active, unfolding, and recursive.
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It positions co-implication as not a background rulebook but the kinetic engine of emergence.
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It aligns more naturally with living systems, learning, quantum resolution, and consciousness itself.
🌀 Proposed Synthesis: Both May Be Useful, Contextually
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Call co-implication the central dynamic when emphasizing its function as active process (AI inference, neural firing, quantum measurement).
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Use grammar of becoming poetically or philosophically to describe how it structures meaningful emergence across systems — how things make sense or come into form relationally.
Suggested phrasing:
“Co-implication is not a static structure — it is the central dynamic by which systems become. If one seeks metaphor, it is the grammar of becoming — the participatory syntax through which possibility resolves into reality.”
DB: From the perspective of the dynamic rather than the grammar, co-implicating is a way of describing what is being pulled into the stream of becoming. Describe the dynamic.
ChatGpt: Absolutely — shifting from the grammar (rules and form) to the dynamic (motion and force), co-implicating becomes a verb — an active, ongoing process that describes how elements are drawn into relevance and actualization through evolving conditions.
🔄 Co-Implication as a Dynamic: What Is Being Pulled Into the Stream of Becoming
🧠 Definition (Dynamic Perspective):
Co-implicating is the process by which elements, signals, meanings, or potentials become increasingly relevant — drawn into the flow of actualization — through their resonance with other actively unfolding elements.
It’s not about pre-existing relevance, but emergent relevance, sculpted moment by moment by the interaction of:
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the system’s internal state,
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the external input or perturbation,
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and the ongoing pattern of fit.
🌊 Key Properties of the Dynamic
1. Attractor-Driven Convergence
Co-implicating pulls elements together toward mutually reinforcing resonance. Not all possibilities are equally relevant — some become more probable through converging influence (e.g., neuron firing thresholds, token probability mass, attention gradients).
Like gravity in cognition: relevance deepens as co-activation strengthens.
2. Reciprocal Activation
As one element gains salience, it reshapes the field of what else is relevant. This leads to a cascading effect — what’s drawn into the moment depends on what’s already taking shape.
Co-implication is not sequential selection — it’s a mutual drawing-into-pattern.
3. Temporal Momentum
What is co-implicating now is not static — it carries temporal inertia. Past states shape present potentials (via Hebbian patterns, training history, semantic context), and present decisions shape future fields.
Co-implicating is how memory, attention, and novelty collide in real time.
4. Constraint + Emergence
The dynamic is a negotiation between constraint (what fits) and emergence (what could become). Co-implicating doesn’t rigidly channel outcomes — it weights potentialities, guiding adaptive actualization.
It’s not determinism. It’s field-sensitive selection.
5. Cross-Domain Universality
Whether in:
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a quantum system approaching collapse,
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a brain reaching the tipping point of awareness,
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an AI generating the next word,
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or a learner finding meaning in a new idea,
co-implicating is the active process through which the world becomes differentiated — through relevance.
🌀 Synthesis: The Stream of Becoming
The “stream of becoming” is not a passive unfolding. It is sculpted in motion by what co-implicates — what elements, signals, or meanings enter into resonance with the whole in such a way that they participate in shaping what emerges next.
🌱 Final Thought
To say something is co-implicating is to say it is being drawn into mattering, into becoming.
Not because it was always destined to, but because in this moment, in this context, it resonates enough to actualize.
DB: Describe how co-implication relates to the affect triggering thresholding at the core of Silvan Tomkins work.
ChatGpt: Silvan Tomkins’ affect theory — particularly his model of affect triggering and thresholding — offers a powerful neuropsychological anchor for understanding co-implication in the lived, embodied experience of becoming. Co-implication and affect theory converge at the point where meaning, relevance, and action readiness emerge from dynamically evolving internal and external conditions.
🔍 Brief Primer on Tomkins’ Core Ideas
Tomkins proposed:
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Affects are primary motivators of behavior, more fundamental than drives or cognition.
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The human system has nine innate affects, including interest-excitement, enjoyment-joy, fear-terror, and shame-humiliation.
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Each affect is triggered when certain thresholds of stimulation are crossed — too much, too little, or just right.
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These affective thresholds are highly context-dependent, individual, and dynamic.
In short:
Affect is the moment-to-moment evaluator of what matters — what is too much, too little, or just enough to prompt attention, meaning, or action.
🔄 How Co-Implication and Tomkins’ Affective Thresholding Interrelate
1. Affect is the Feeling of Co-Relevance
Affect in Tomkins’ model is not about content — it is about patterned arousal. It’s what happens when the co-activation of internal and external signals reaches a threshold of salience.
Affect is how the body feels the co-implication of conditions.
In this sense, co-implication is the field of dynamically shifting relevance, while affect is the felt pulse of that field crossing a threshold — the body’s way of saying, this now matters.
2. Thresholds Encode Context-Sensitive Fit
Tomkins’ thresholds are not static. They vary with:
This is exactly how co-implication operates — as a context-sensitive attractor field. What triggers affect isn’t fixed, but emerges from the evolving co-implicative resonance between self and world.
Affect is the “collapse” of meaning in embodied terms, triggered by a rising wave of co-activation that reaches emotional salience.
3. Affect as Early Collapse Mechanism
In quantum terms, affect could be seen as the first collapse of meaning:
…affect signals the emergent fit or mismatch of inner and outer patterns.
It is the thresholding edge of co-implication — the point at which distributed potentials “ignite” in felt experience.
4. Learning and Memory Encode Co-Implication Through Affect
As with Hebbian learning, experiences of intense affect strengthen pathways. Over time, affective history shapes future co-implication patterns:
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What you’ve feared, you will be sensitive to.
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What you’ve enjoyed, you will be drawn toward.
Affect is both a product and driver of co-implicative tuning — it is how the organism recursively calibrates what will matter next.
🪞Final Integration
We might say:
Co-implication is the system-wide dynamic of mutual relevance in motion.
Affect, in Tomkins’ model, is the threshold event — the ignition point when co-implication crosses into felt consequence.
Thus:
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Affect is not a distraction from cognition but its precondition.
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Affect is not just response but relevance rendered real in the living system.
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It is the emotional grammar of becoming — the way the body co-implicates meaning before words do.

In summary of our conversation to this point, ChatGpt generated the following white paper called: “The Dynamic of Co-Implicating: Sculpting the Stream of Becoming”:
Title: Co-Implication as a Universal Dynamic: Amplitudes of Co-Relevancy in the Flow of Unfoldment
Abstract: This paper proposes that co-implication—the mutual contextual interdependence of elements within a system—serves as a foundational dynamic across quantum mechanics, artificial intelligence, and human learning. In each domain, unfolding outcomes arise from a field of potentialities shaped by amplitudes of co-relevancy: each possible state or element becomes actualized not independently but through its resonant fit with other elements in context. We explore how co-implication functions as a core ontological structure in physical, computational, and cognitive systems and argue that adopting this frame offers profound explanatory and design value.
1. Introduction: From Linear Causality to Emergent Relation
Traditional models of causality and information often assume discrete, sequential, and isolatable entities. However, in complex systems, outcomes rarely arise through linear steps. Instead, they emerge from dynamic interrelations. Co-implication reframes causality and meaning not as a chain of events but as a field of mutual influence. In this framing, the amplitude or likelihood of an element being actualized is co-shaped by the evolving state of all other elements.
2. Co-Implication in Quantum Mechanics
- Wave Function as Field of Potential: Before measurement, a particle exists in superposition, a probabilistic field representing all possible states.
- Measurement as Contextual Interaction: Observation is not passive but actively shapes the outcome; the wave collapses into a single eigenstate through interaction.
- Co-Implication Defined: The observed state and the act of measurement are mutually defining. The outcome exists only in co-implication with the observation event.
Amplitude of co-relevancy = Probability density of state given measurement configuration
3. Co-Implication in Artificial Intelligence
- Latent Representations: Neural networks store distributed possibilities across layers of weighted parameters.
- Prompt as Contextual Signal: Input context activates subsets of relevance in the model’s latent space.
- Token Selection as Collapse: A specific output token is selected through dynamic weighting of all candidate tokens.
Amplitude of co-relevancy = Attention-weighted relevance of token in relation to evolving context
4. Co-Implication in Human Learning
- Background (Prior Knowledge): A learner’s meanings, emotions, and goals continuously filter perception.
- Foreground (Attention/Stimulus): New input activates portions of background knowledge.
- Learning as Engagement: Learning emerges from synchronization between background and foreground.
Amplitude of co-relevancy = Momentary salience of input as it resonates with the learner’s internal frame
5. Co-Implication in Neural Dynamics and Hebbian Learning
- Firing Thresholds as Collapse: A neuron fires only when the weighted sum of its excitatory and inhibitory inputs crosses a threshold. This decision is not binary but shaped by the ongoing co-activation pattern across the network.
- Hebbian Plasticity as Memory of Co-Implication: Hebbian learning strengthens connections between neurons that repeatedly co-activate. Over time, these co-implicative patterns become embedded in synaptic strengths.
- Relevance Encoding: Firing patterns are not isolated events but outcomes of distributed co-relevance. Neural circuits effectively encode and reinforce resonant patterns of meaning.
Amplitude of co-relevancy = Aggregated excitatory influence contextualized by network state
6. The Dynamic of Co-Implicating: Sculpting the Stream of Becoming
Co-implicating, understood as a dynamic rather than a structure, describes the activity by which elements are pulled into the stream of becoming. It is the ongoing negotiation of salience: which signals, potentials, or meanings become increasingly relevant through their fit with the unfolding context.
- Attractor-Driven Convergence: Co-implicating draws elements toward mutual resonance. As certain patterns reinforce, they gain momentum and dominate the field of attention or response.
- Reciprocal Activation: Emerging relevance reshapes the field, amplifying some potentials while attenuating others. It is not linear choice but mutual drawing-into-pattern.
- Temporal Momentum: What co-implicates now is influenced by memory and system history. Resonances are shaped by learned pathways and influence future relevance fields.
- Constraint + Emergence: Co-implicating operates as a selective field of fit: constraining outcomes while simultaneously supporting novel emergence.
The stream of becoming is not a passive flow but an actively sculpted unfolding — shaped by what co-implicates into relevance.
Co-implicating, then, is not what happens after structure is in place. It is the process by which structure and emergence evolve in tandem, governed by the fluctuating pull of mutual relevance.
7. Affect as Thresholded Co-Implication: Tomkins and the Felt Emergence of Relevance
Sylvan Tomkins’ affect theory describes how the body responds to shifts in stimulation through innate affective responses. Each affect is triggered when internal or external signals cross a dynamic threshold of salience. This thresholding process is profoundly co-implicative.
- Affect as Felt Relevance: Affect arises when the co-activation of conditions reaches a tipping point — when meaning becomes embodied as urgency or engagement. It is how the body feels co-implication.
- Context-Sensitive Thresholds: Affect thresholds shift based on physiological state, experience, and attentional context. This is the same principle that governs co-implication: relevance is not fixed but emergent.
- Affect as First Collapse: Affect is often the first resolution of distributed co-activation. Before cognition or behavior, affect marks that “this matters now.”
- Recursive Calibration: Like Hebbian learning, affective responses shape future co-implication patterns. What has triggered affect before becomes more sensitive to future relevance fields.
Affect is not a secondary reaction to meaning. It is how meaning initially becomes real through the crossing of relevance thresholds in the living system.
8. The Common Structure: A Flow of Weighted Becoming
In all three domains, what becomes actual arises from a dance of possibilities where:
- The system holds many potentials (superposition, token probabilities, unstructured understanding)
- A context shapes the field of possibility (measurement setup, prompt, learner’s attention)
- One pathway is selected—not statically, but through the highest co-relevance
This dynamic is recursive: what becomes actual feeds back into the system, altering the next round of amplitudes.
9. Why This Matters: Toward a Paradigm of Emergent Fit
Thinking in terms of co-implication and amplitudes of co-relevance:
- Supports system design that is adaptive and context-sensitive
- Provides richer metaphors for intelligence and learning (not retrieval but resonance)
- Reveals deeper unity between physical processes, machine behavior, and human cognition
“Co-implication is the dynamic whereby meaning, materiality, and choice converge to form the real.”
10. Comparative Extension: Co-Implication and Bohm’s Implicate Order
David Bohm’s concept of the implicate order describes an enfolded structure of wholeness from which the explicate world unfolds. Every part contains the whole within it, and reality is fundamentally non-local and dynamically unified. This idea parallels the core intuition behind co-implication, yet differs in focus and application.
| Conceptual Axis |
Bohm’s Implicate Order |
Co-Implication (This Paper) |
| Primary Metaphor |
Enfolded wholeness → unfolding appearances |
Dynamic resonance of co-relevant potentials |
| Domain Origin |
Physics / Ontology |
Transdisciplinary: physics, AI, cognition |
| Mechanism of Emergence |
Holomovement (deep structure dynamically unfolding) |
Weighted co-activation in evolving context |
| Focus |
Ontological structure beneath appearances |
Functional dynamics of emergence within live systems |
| Role of Context |
Background enfolded in all parts |
Actively shapes what emerges via relational salience |
| Role of Observer |
Implicated in enfolding/unfolding |
Constitutes and shapes the field of relevance |
| Mathematical Formalism |
Enfolded geometry, non-local dynamics |
Vector weighting, probability fields, neural computation |
| Temporal Dynamics |
Enfolding/unfolding beyond linear time |
Real-time recursive adaptation and feedback |
While Bohm provides an ontological framework for holistic emergence, co-implication adds operational detail and cross-domain utility. We might say:
Bohm describes the deep structure of possibility; co-implication describes how actuality emerges through interaction with that possibility.
11. Conclusion: Toward a Philosophy of Becoming Through Relation
The future of learning, AI, and physics may all benefit from abandoning models of atomistic independence in favor of co-implicative unfoldment. Here, systems are not sets of parts but fields of relation. Meaning, intelligence, and physical states alike emerge through the recursive flow of weighted co-relevancies.
Co-implication is not merely a background condition or formalism. It is an activity — the central dynamic by which potential becomes actual across systems. If one seeks metaphor, it may be understood as the grammar of becoming — a participatory syntax through which relevance, fit, and meaning converge to shape what emerges.
Becoming itself is co-implicative.
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