David Bohm Quotes

Contrast this with the word “discussion,” which has the same root as “percussion” and “concussion.” It really means to break things up. It emphasizes the idea of analysis, where there may be many points of view, and where everybody is presenting a different one – analyzing and breaking up. That obviously has its value, but it is limited, and it will not get us very far beyond our various points of view. Discussion is almost like a ping-pong game, where people are batting the ideas back and forth and the object of the game is to win or to get points for yourself. Possibly you will take up somebody else’s ideas to back up your own – you may agree with some and disagree with others – but the basic point is to win the game. That’s very frequently the case in a discussion.

Throughout his career as a theoretical physicist, Bohm made note of the fact that, in spite of claims to pursue “truth,” scientific endeavor was often infected with personal ambition, a rigid defense of theory, and the weight of tradition – all at the expense of creative participation toward the common goals of science. Based in part on such observations, he frequently remarked that the general lot of mankind was caught in a similar web of contradictory intentions and actions.

If we all had to do a job together, we would likely find that each one of us would have different opinions and assumptions, and thus we would find it hard to do the job. The temperature could go way up.

i like to go into the roots of words, because they often show early insights, a fresh perception of meaning. the word 'economy' has a greek root, meaning 'household management'. we can say that there are so many households in the world and they all behave independently. in fact they are all interdependent. the earth is one household really, but we are not treating it that way. so the first step in economics is to say, the earth is one household, it is all one. The implicate order would help us to see that, to see that everything enfolds everything, but actually everybody is everybody in a deeper sense. we are the earth, because our substance comes from earth and goes back to it. it is a mistake to say that environmentjust surrounding us, because that would be like the brain regarding the rest of the body as part of its environment.

Indeed, the attempt to live according to the notion that the fragments are really separate is, in essence, what has led to the growing series of extremely urgent crises that is confronting us today. Thus, as is now well known, this way of life has brought about pollution, destruction of the balance of nature, over-population, world-wide economic and political disorder, and the creation of an overall environment that is neither physically nor mentally healthy for most of the people who have to live in it.

We were saying that thought is not merely the intellectual activity; rather it is one connected process which includes feeling and the body, and so on. Also, it passes between people — it's all one process all over the world. I suggested that we call that process a 'system' — a whole system in which every part is dependent on every other part. I also suggested that there is a kind of systemic flaw which is pervasive. So when we see something wrong with a part of this system, we bring another part to bear to try to correct it; but doing so will just add more, very similar troubles. We went on to say that it's not possible to solve our problems that way — rather, they may get worse instead of better — and that these troubles throughout the world have been going on for thousands of years. Also, we said that when you try to look at what's going on inside you when all this is happening you may get unpleasant feelings such as pain or fear; and that instinct, as well as the whole culture, leads you to move away from looking at it. But it is necessary to stay with it somehow, in spite of the difficulty of doing so. That was what we were discussing at the end — that it is really worth doing because in this way we may learn something about how it all goes. Now, I thought that people might have a few points to raise about what we've been talking about before we go on.

The notion of a separate organism is clearly an abstraction, as is also its boundary. Underlying all this is unbroken wholeness even though our civilization has developed in such a way as to strongly emphasize the separation into parts.

If intelligence is to be understood as an unconditioned act of perception, its ground cannot be in structures such as cells, molecules, elementary particles, etc. Ultimately, anything that is determined by the laws of such structures must be in the field of what can be known, i.e. stored up in memory, and thus will have to have the mechanical nature of anything that can be assimilated in the basically mechanical character of the process of thought.

A key difference between a dialogue and an ordinary discussion is that, within the latter people usually hold relatively fixed positions and argue in favor of their views as they try to convince others to change. At best this may produce agreement or compromise, but it does not give rise to anything creative.

On the whole, you could say that if you are defending your opinions, you are not serious. Likewise, if you are trying to avoid something unpleasant inside of yourself, that is also not being serious. A great deal of our whole life is not serious. And society teaches you that. It teaches you not to be very serious – that there are all sorts of incoherent things, and there is nothing that can be done about it, and that you will only stir yourself up uselessly by being serious. But in a dialogue you have to be serious. It is not a dialogue if you are not – not in the way I’m using the word. There is a story about Freud when he had cancer of the mouth. Somebody came up to him and wanted to talk to him about a point in psychology. The person said, “Perhaps I’d better not talk to you, because you’ve got this cancer which is very serious. You may not want to talk about this.” Freud’s answer was, “This cancer may be fatal, but it’s not serious.” And actually, of course, it was just a lot of cells growing. I think a great deal of what goes on in society could be described that way – that it may well be fatal, but it’s not serious.

My suggestion is that at each state the proper order of operation of the mind requires an overall grasp of what is generally known, not only in formal logical, mathematical terms, but also intuitively, in images, feelings, poetic usage of language, etc. (Perhaps we could say that this is what is involved in harmony between the 'left brain' and the 'right brain'). This kind of overall way of thinking is not only a fertile source of new theoretical ideas: it is needed for the human mind to function in a generally harmonious way, which could in turn help to make possible an orderly and stable society.

I warned especially against phrases, often found in the physical literature, such as ‘disturbing of phenomena by observation’ or ‘creating physical attributes to atomic objects by measurement’. Such phrases are…apt to cause confusion,…

the idea that mathematics expresses the essential reality of nature was first put explicitly, in modern times, by scientists, such as Sir James Jeans and Werner Heisenberg, but within a few decades, these ideas were being transmitted almost subliminally. As a result, after passing through graduate school, most physicists have come to regard this attitude toward mathematics as being perfectly natural. However, in earlier generations such views would have been regarded as strange and perhaps even a little crazy — at all events irrelevant to a proper scientific view of reality.

However, as indicated earlier, truth and falsity have actually, like relevance and irrelevance, to be seen from moment to moment, in an act of perception in a very high order.

It is worth repeating what I've said the last few years — that in our language we have a distinction between 'thinking' and 'thought'. 'Thinking' implies the present tense — some activity going on which may include critical sensitivity to what can go wrong. Also there may be new ideas, and perhaps occasionally perception of some kind inside. 'Thought' is the past participle of that. We have the idea that after we have been thinking something, it just evaporates. But thinking doesn't disappear. It goes somehow into the brain and leaves something — a trace — which becomes thought. And thought then acts automatically.