One may perhaps usefully consider here the image of a radio receiver. When the output of the receiver 'feeds back' into the input, the receiver opera… - David Bohm

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One may perhaps usefully consider here the image of a radio receiver. When the output of the receiver 'feeds back' into the input, the receiver operates on its own, to produce mainly irrelevant and meaningless noise, but when it is sensitive to the signal on the radio wave, its own order of inner movement of electric currents (transformed into sound waves) is parallel to the order in the signal and thus the receiver serves to bring a meaningful order originating beyond the level of its own structure into movements on the level of its own structure. One might then suggest that in intelligent perception, the brain and nervous system respond directly to an order in the universal and unknown flux that cannot be reduced to anything that could be defined in terms of knowable structures.

Intelligence and material process have thus a single origin, which is ultimately the unknown totality of the universal flux. In a certain sense, this implies that what have been commonly called mind and matter are abstractions from the universal flux, and that both are to be regarded as different and relatively autonomous orders within the one whole movement. (This notion is discussed further in chapter 7.) It is thought responding to intelligent perception which is capable of bringing about an overall harmony or fitting between mind and matter.

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About David Bohm

David Joseph Bohm (20 December 1917 – 27 October 1992) was an American-British scientist who has been described as one of the most significant theoretical physicists of the 20th century and who contributed unorthodox ideas to quantum theory, neuropsychology and the philosophy of mind.

Biography information from Wikiquote

Also Known As

Native Name: David Joseph Bohm Böhm Dávid József
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Additional quotes by David Bohm

It is a most important characteristic of the mechanistic philosophy, however, that it permits one to make a limitless number of adjustments in his detailed point of view, without giving up what is essential to the mechanistic position.

In relativity, movement is continuous, causally determinate and well defined, while in quantum mechanics it is discontinuous, not causally determinate and not well defined. Each theory is committed to its own notions of essentially static and fragmentary modes of existence (relativity to that of separate events, connectable by signals, and quantum mechanics to a well-defined quantum state). One thus sees that a new kind of theory is needed which drops these basic commitments and at most recovers some essential features of the older theories as abstract forms derived from a deeper reality in which what prevails in unbroken wholeness.

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We often find that we cannot easily give up the tendency to hold rigidly to patterns of thought built up over a long time. We are then caught up in what may be called absolute necessity. This kind of thought leaves no room at all intellectually for any other possibility, while emotionally and physically, it means we take a stance in our feelings, in our bodies, and indeed, in our whole culture, of holding back or resisting. This stance implies that under no circumstances whatsoever can we allow ourselves to give up certain things or change them.

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