Q: Isn't the employment of thought in the psychological sense synonymous with corruption? Bohm: Why do you say that? Q: Are there not only two states… - David Bohm

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Q: Isn't the employment of thought in the psychological sense synonymous with corruption? Bohm: Why do you say that? Q: Are there not only two states: corruption and innocence? Bohm: Are you saying that thought by itself is incapable of innocence? Q: In the psychological sense it seems so. Bohm: It may seem so. But the question is whether it is actually so. That's the question we're trying to explore. We'll admit the fact that it seems so; it has that appearance. Now the question is: what is actually the case? We have to explore this, and it will take some digging into. We can't simply take the way things seem and just work on that, because that would be another kind of mistake thought makes — taking the surface and calling it the reality.

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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

Bohm suggests that while literal thought has been predominant since the inception of civilization, a more archaic form of perception, formed over the whole of human evolution, remains latent – and at times active – in the structure of our consciousness. This he refers to as “participatory thought,” a mode of thought in which discrete boundaries are sensed as permeable, objects have an underlying relationship with one another, and the movement of the perceptible world is sensed as participating in some vital essence. Even today, says Bohm, many tribal cultures maintain aspects of participatory thought.

"...thought with totality as its content has to be considered as an art form, like poetry, whose function is primarily to give rise to a new perception, and to action that is implicit in this perception, rather than to communicate reflective knowledge of "how everything is." This implies that there can no more be an ultimate form of such thought than there could be an ultimate poem (that would make all further poems unnecessary)."

In other words, the creative person does not strictly know what he or she is looking for. The whole activity, therefore, is not regarded as a problem that must be solved but simply as play itself. Within this play it is not taken for granted that new things must always be different or that they can never in any significant way be related to what came before. Indeed, it could be suggested that the more different things are, the greater may be the importance in seeing how they are similar, and likewise, the more similar things are, the greater may be the value in perceiving their difference. Science, according to this argument, is properly a continuous ongoing activity. Through creative play and fresh perception there is a constant movement of similarities and differences, with each new theory differing in some subtle but significant fashion from what came before.

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