If the formalism of quantum theory made indeterminacy unavoidable, David Bohm’s response was to make it unacceptable.
Bohm did not deny the empirical success of quantum mechanics. Nor did he attempt to modify its predictions. His dissatisfaction was ontological, not technical. A world in which fundamental events were not determined — even if only probabilistically — was, for him, a world left incomplete.
Beneath the Appearances
Bohm’s proposal is often summarised as “hidden variables,” but this description understates its ambition.
What Bohm sought was not merely an addition to the theory, but a restoration of determinacy. The apparent randomness of quantum outcomes was to be understood as the surface manifestation of an underlying, fully specified order — one inaccessible in practice, but real nonetheless.
The wavefunction, on this view, is not an expression of possibility. It is a guiding field. Particles follow definite trajectories, even if we cannot know them. Probability enters only because of ignorance, not because the world itself is indeterminate.
The price of this move is well known: non-locality must be embraced without reservation. What happens here may depend instantaneously on what happens there.
Bohm accepted this price without hesitation.
Wholeness Without Construal
To make this vision intelligible, Bohm introduced the language of wholeness and the implicate order. Reality, he argued, is fundamentally undivided. Apparent separations are abstractions imposed by classical habits of thought.
This is often taken to sound “relational.” But the resemblance is superficial.
Bohm’s wholeness is ontological, not constitutive. The world is whole in itself, prior to and independent of any construal. Relations do not bring phenomena into being; they merely reveal an already-determinate structure.
The Relational Question
From a relational perspective, the crucial question is not whether hidden variables exist, but what work they are doing.
Hidden variables function to re-actualise possibility. They treat uninstantiated outcomes not as genuine possibilities, but as unrealised actualities — facts that already exist, but are concealed.
In doing so, they collapse the distinction between:
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a distribution of outcomes, and
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a field of potential for instantiation.
What appears as probability is, in truth, only ignorance.
The relational challenge is simple but uncompromising:
What if determinacy is not hidden — but absent?
Readiness, Not Randomness
Relational ontology does not replace Bohmian determinism with randomness. It replaces it with readiness.
Probability is not a measure of how often an already-fixed outcome will occur. It is an expression of the structured potential of a system to actualise differently under different construals.
To insist otherwise is to treat possibility as a defective form of actuality — something that must be redeemed by an underlying story.
The Cost of Refusal
Bohm’s achievement is clarity. He saw exactly what quantum mechanics threatened: not locality, not causality, but the idea that reality might not be fully specified prior to its instantiation.
His refusal is equally clear.
To preserve determinacy, he accepts non-locality, hidden structure, and an ontological order forever beyond access. The world remains complete — but at the price of becoming fundamentally unanswerable.
Determinacy is saved, but possibility is lost.
And with it, the becoming of possibility itself.
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