25 wnt. "Thought as a System" by theoretical physicist David Bohm

In three days of conversation with fifty seminar participants, part one of two.

Bohm is a notable theoretical physicist, who also is developing this thesis on the nature of thought. And he is a pioneer in that he calls, “the process of group dialogue”. I will divide this post in two parts. The first part is this introduction, and the second is an extensive Q&A, (which may or may not be similar to his concept of group dialogue).

The book "Thought as a System" is radical perspective on an underlying source of human conflict, an inherited belief that mind (or thought) is of an inherently different and higher order than matter. This belief has nurtured a faith in what we call “objectivity” — the capacity to observe and report neutrally on some object or an event, without having any effect on what we are looking at. (4,200 words)

If this premise is not true, then the ‘flow of meaning’ between people is more fundamental than any individual’s particular thoughts. It's the role of thought and knowledge at every level of human affairs, from our private reflections on personal identity to our collective efforts to fashion a tolerable civilization.

[Many here might say that they already know all about this. But do their actions confirm their statement, or not?] Take a look.

Bohm explores the manner in which thought actively participates in forming our perceptions, our sense of meaning and our daily actions. Collective thought and knowledge have become so automated that we are in large part controlled by them.

Thought is the instantaneous display of memory, a superimposition of past images onto the active, living present. Memory is responsible for various aspects of fear, anxiety or apprehension, and the actions that proceed from these memories. The whole spectrum of emotions as we typically experience them, is seen by Bohm as thought-related, a structure of neurophysiological reflexes. It's an ‘electrochemical fog’ generated by accumulated reflexes. Through repetition, emotional intensity and defensiveness, these reflexes become ‘so-habitual' in consciousness, to such an extent that they respond independently of our conscious choice.

The pervasive tendency of thought to struggle against its own creations is the central dilemma of our time.

Here are a few things he says below, as a summary:

Yet it looks as if the thing we use to solve our problems is the source of our problems.
Thought can never be complete, 
One of the obvious things wrong with thought is fragmentation. 
People split into religious groups. They split into racial groups.
At the same time, we are trying to establish unity where there isn't any, - in diversity.
In Science, every little specialty is fragmented from every other one.
We have false division and therefore false unification. 
The information takes over. It runs you. Thought runs you. 
Every religion was invented by somebody's thinking, that he had a certain idea about "God" that was right and true. 
Thought divides itself from feeling and from the body. But thought is not different from emotion. 
You will not get the results you expect. That’s the major sign of incoherence in thought. 

Thought is always doing a great deal, but it tends to say that it hasn’t done anything, that it is just telling you the way things are in nature. But thought affects everything.

SO HERE'S THE INTRODUCTION:

These meetings have been concerned with the question of thought and what certain thoughts have been doing in the world.  By way of review, we all know that the world is in a difficult situation and has been basically for a long time; that we now have many crises in various parts of the world. We have the fact that there is nationalism all over. People seem to have all sorts of hatreds, such as religious hatred or racial hatred, and so on. There is the ecological crisis, which goes on and off on the back burner, and there is the continuing economic crisis developing. People seem unable to get together to face the common problems, such as the ecological one or the economic one. Everything is interdependent; and yet the more interdependent we get, the more we seem to split up into little groups that don’t like each other and are inclined to fight each other and kill each other, or at least not to cooperate.

So one begins to wonder what is going to happen to the human race. Technology it keeps on advancing with greater and greater power, either for good or for destruction. And it seems that there is always this danger of destruction. No sooner does the rivalry between the West and the East sort of dissolve away than other conflicts pop up elsewhere. And doubtless others will come up later, and on it goes. It's sort of endemic; it's not just something that occasionally happens. It's in the whole situation.

I think we are all familiar with this situation. And with technology advancing you have the possibility that nuclear bombs will perhaps soon be available to all sorts of dictators, even in relatively small nations. There are biological weapons and chemical weapons, and other kinds of weapons that haven’t yet been invented but surely will. And then there is the economy to consider. Either we go into a depression, which will help save the ecology, or we go into a boom, which will momentarily make us happy but will eventually ruin the ecology. I mean the faster we go into prosperity, the faster we create all of these other problems.

It seems that whichever way you turn, it doesn’t really work. Why not? Is there any way out? Can you imagine that a hundred or two hundred years of this won’t lead to some gigantic catastrophe, either to the ecology or in some other way? Surely more wars, who knows?

People have been dealing with this piecemeal - looking at symptoms, saying that we’ve got to solve this problem or that problem or that problem. But there is something deeper, which people haven’t been considering, that is constantly generating these problems. We can use the analogy of a stream, where people are pouring pollution upstream, at the same time they are trying to remove it downstream. But as they remove it, they may be adding more pollution of different kind. -

What is the source of all this trouble? That is really what we have been concerned with in all these dialogues of the past few years. I’m saying that the source is basically in thought. Many people would think that such a statement is crazy, because thought is the one-thing that we have, with which to solve our problems. That’s part of our tradition. Yet it looks as if the thing we use to solve our problems is the source of our problems. It’s like going to the doctor and having him make you ill. In fact, in 20 per cent of medical cases we do apparently have that going on. (Doctor’s mistakes.) But in the case of thought, it’s far over 20 per cent.

I'm saying the reason we don’t see the source of our problems is that the means by which we try to solve them are the source. That may seem strange to somebody who hears it for the first time, because our whole culture prides itself on thought as its highest achievement. I’m not suggesting that the achievements of thought are negligible; there are very great achievements in technology, in culture and in various other ways. But there is another side to it which is leading to our destruction, and we have to look at that.

Now I'll try to say what is wrong with thought. I’ll just give a brief summary and then we might start talking about it, if you like.

One of the obvious things wrong with thought is fragmentation. Thought is breaking things up into bits which should not be broken up. We can see this going on. We see that the world is broken up into nations; more and more nations. The Soviets no sooner got rid of their communist dictatorship than it began breaking up into a lot of little bits which obviously are unable to manage, and they started fighting each other. That’s a source of concern. It’s a concern for the whole world. There are new nations all over the world. During the Second World War, nationalism developed in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. They said Lithuania for Lithuanians, Latvia for the Latvians, Armenia for the Armenians, and so on.

Nationalism has broken things up, and yet the world is all one. The more technology develops, the more people depend on each other. But people try to pretend that it’s not so. They say that the nation is sovereign, that it can do what it likes. And yet it can’t. The United States can’t do what it likes because it depends a lot on other countries for things of all sorts?  On the Middle East for oil, apparently on Japan for money. And Japan obviously can’t do what it likes. Those are just some examples, (written in 1994).

It seems very hard for human beings to accept seriously this simple fact of the effect of fragmentation. Nations fight each other and people kill each other. You are told that for the nation you must sacrifice everything.

Or you sacrifice everything for your religious differences. People split into religious groups. They split into racial groups and say that’s all important. Inside each nation there are various splits. People are divided up into sections and into all kinds of interests. The division goes on down to the level of the family, inside families and so forth. People are supposed to be getting together, but they can’t seem to.

You can see that nations are established by thought. The boundary of the nation is invented by thought. If you go to the edge of the nation, there’s nothing to tell you that it is a boundary, unless somebody makes a wall or a border guard or something. It’s the same land; the people may often be not very different. But what is one side or the other seems all important. It's thought that "make it so":

I was informed that most of the nations of the Middle East were invented either by the British or the French, whose various bureaucrats drew lines and determined the boundary of this nation, that nation. And there they were, (and are). So, then they have to fight each other.

In other words, what we are doing is establishing boundaries where really there is a close connection.  That’s what is wrong with fragmentation. And at the same time, we are trying to establish unity where there isn't any, or not very much. We say we’re all one inside that boundary. But when you look at these groups, they are not actually all one. They are fighting each other inside the boundary as much as they are fighting outside.

We can also consider professional groups. In science, for instance, every little specialty is fragmented from every other one. People hardly know what is happening in a somewhat different field. And it goes on. Knowledge is fragmented. Everything gets broken up.

Thus, we have false division and therefore false unification. Thought is pretending that there is a sharp division outside and that everything is unified inside, when it’s really not so. This is a fictional way of thinking. But to go on with this fictional way of thinking seems to be very important, so important that the actual fact that it is wrong, the fact that it’s not that way at all, is ignored.

It seems strange. Why should people do such a strange thing? It really could be thought of as irrational at the very least, or perhaps crazy. So much trouble, which may even prevent our survival, is created out of such small things.

The more general difficulty with thought is that thought is very active, it’s participatory, and fragmentation is itself a symptom of the more general difficulty. Thought is always doing a great deal, but it tends to say that it hasn’t done anything, that it is just telling you the way things are. But thought affects everything. It has created everything we see in this building. It has affected all the trees; it has affected the mountains, the plains and the farms and the factories and science and technology. Even the South Pole has been affected because of the destruction of the ozone layer, which is basically due to thought. People thought that they wanted to have refrigerant? - a nice safe refrigerant? - and they built that all up by thinking more and more about it. And now we have ozone layer being destroyed.

Thought has produced tremendous effects outwardly. And, as we’ll discuss further on, it produces tremendous effects inwardly in each person. Yet the general tacit assumption in thought is that it's just telling you the way things are and that is not doing anything – that a 'you' is inside there, deciding what to do with the information. But I want to say that you don't decide what to do with the information. The information takes over. It runs you. Thought runs you. Thought, however, gives the false information that you are running it, that you are the one who controls thought, whereas actually thought is the one which controls each one of us. Until thought is understood - better yet, more than understood, perceived - it will actually control us; but it will create the impression that it is our servant, that it is just doing what we want it to do.

That's the difficulty. Thought is participating and then saying it’s not participating. But it is taking part in everything.

Fragmentation is a particular case of that. Thought is creating divisions out of itself and then saying that they are there naturally. The divisions between nations are regarded as being ‘just there’, but obviously they were invented by people. People have come to accept those divisions and that made them be there. The same holds for the divisions between religions. Every religion was invented by somebody's thinking that he had a certain idea about “God” that was right and true. Eventually people thought that other religions weren't right, that other religions were inferior, perhaps even heretical or evil or wrong, that they could fight them, try to suppress them and destroy them. There were vast religious wars. And we may still have more coming, in spite of all the development of the enlightenment, knowledge and science and technology. In fact, science and technology now seem, at least equally well, to serve those who are perhaps at a more Mediaeval mentality stage, as it serves those who regard themselves as more advanced. Anybody can use science and technology without fundamentally altering his own frame of mind, which governs how they are used.

I’m saying thought has the character that it is doing something and saying it isn’t doing it, saying that it is “nature”. Now, we really have to go into that, to discuss it a great deal, because what thought is actually doing is very much more subtle than what I’ve described – that’s only the beginning.

Another problem of fragmentation is that thought divides itself from feeling and from the body. Thought is said to be the mind; we have the notion that it is something abstract or spiritual or immaterial. Then there is the body, which is very physical. And we have emotions, which are perhaps somewhere in between. The idea is that they are all different. That is, we think of them as different. And we experience them as different because we think of them as different.

But thought is not different from emotion. We’ll discuss this in more detail later; but for a very elementary example, if you think that a certain person has treated you badly you may get angry. Suppose that somebody keeps you waiting for a couple of hours. You can get angry thinking: ‘What does he mean treating me like this’ He has no concern, no consideration for me. ‘You can think of various things:’ ‘He’s always doing this, he treats me badly’, and so on. By thinking that way you can get very angry. Then if he comes and explains that the train was late, the anger goes. This shows that the emotion was influenced by thought. By changing your thought, the anger fades.

So thought at least can sustain those feelings. The thought of something pleasant will make you feel good. The thought that you are doing great will make you feel good inside - all the good feelings will come out. Or the thought that you have done something wrong may make the adrenalin flow, may make you feel guilty. If somebody says you are guilty, which is a thought, then you can feel very miserable. Feelings are tremendously affected by thoughts. And obviously thoughts are tremendously affected by feelings, because if you are angry, you don’t think clearly. Likewise, if you have a feeling of pleasure in something, you may find yourself reluctant to give up that idea which gives you pleasure, even if it is wrong - you engage in self-deception.

The intellectual center will normally tell whether an emotion is appropriate or not. That is what happens in the example of being angry about somebody’s delaying you two hours, and then coming along and saying, 'The train was late.' If you believe him, then the intellectual center says 'there's no longer any good reason to be angry'. And the emotional center duly says 'OK, no reason, I give up my anger'. And vice versa - the emotional center may send information saying that there is danger, or there is this or that, and the intellectual center picks it up and tries to find out what is the danger. It thinks.

Those centers are intimately and closely related. The very wish to think must come from an emotion or from an impulse to think. (To seek security in seeming risk.) They are really almost two sides of the same process. But our language separates them and our thought separates them into fragments. I'm saying that emotion and intellect are closely connected, but we introduce into our thought a very sharp division - just like the one between nations - where there really isn't such a division. We're introducing a fictional way of thinking about this situation. If our thinking is fictional, it will mislead us.

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. The example I gave about the person who kept you waiting shows how thought reinforces and sustains anger; when you have been thinking for a while, 'I have a good reason to be angry', the emotion is there and you remain angry. So thought is the response from memory - from the past, from what has been done. Thus, we have thinking and thought.

We also have the word 'feeling'. Its present tense suggests the active present, that the feeling is directly in contact with reality. But it might be useful to introduce the word 'felt', to say there are feelings and 'felts'. That is, 'felts' are feelings which have been recorded. You may remember pleasure that you once had, and then you get a sense of pleasure. If you remember pain you had, you may get a sense of pain. A traumatic experience in the past can make you feel very uncomfortable when remembered. (Childhood Trauma.) Nostalgic feelings are also from the past. A lot of the feelings that come up are really from the past, they're 'felts'. By failing to make this distinction we often give too much importance to some feelings which actually don’t have that much significance in the present. If they are just a recording being replayed, they don’t have as much significance as if they were a response to the present immediate situation.

Often you may respond according to the way you felt a long time ago, or the way you became used to feeling in the past. In effect you could be saying ‘when I was a child, a certain situation made me feel uncomfortable’, and then when any similar situation arises in the present you feel uncomfortable. You get that discomfort because you don’t see that it doesn't mean anything. But it does seem to mean a great deal, and it affects you.

So not only is there a false division between thinking and feeling, but also between feelings and - felts, and the whole state of the body. You can see that the way you think can get adrenalin flowing. You can get neurochemically affected all over the body. For example, if you are in an area which you think is dangerous and you see a shadow, your thought says that there are people around who might attack you, and then you immediately get a feeling of fear. Your adrenalin starts flowing, your muscles tense, and your heart beats rapidly - just from the knowledge that there may be assailants in the neighborhood. As soon as you look and say 'it's a shadow', those physical symptoms subside. There is a profound connection between the state of the body and the way you think. If people are constantly worried and under stress about their jobs or something, they may stir up their stomachs too much and get ulcers and various other things. It’s well known. The state of the body is very profoundly tied to thought, affected by thought, and vice versa. That's another kind of fragmentation we have to watch out for.

All of this will tend to introduce quite a bit of confusion, or what I call 'incoherence', into thinking or into action because you will not get the results you expect. That’s the major sign of incoherence: you want to do something but it doesn't come out the way you intend. That's usually a sign that you have some wrong information somewhere. The right approach would be to say; 'Yes, that's incoherent. Let me try to find out the wrong information and change it.' But the trouble is, there is a lot of incoherence in which people don't do that.

For instance, perhaps somebody likes to be flattered and he then finds that the person who flatters him can take advantage of him. It happens again and again and again. He doesn't want that, but it happens. There is an incoherence there because it's not his intention to be taken advantage of. But he has another intention he doesn't think about, which is that he wants the “glow of feeling” that comes from the flattery. You can see that one implies the other, because if he accepts the flattery then he also will accept a lot of other things the person says or does. He can be taken advantage of. Therefore, he has both conscious intentions, and another one which is going against it. That's a very common situation.

It is the same with nationalism. People didn't set up nations in order to suffer the way they've suffered - to suffer endless wars and hate and starvation and disease and annihilation and slavery or whatnot. When they set up the nations it was not their intention to do that. But that's what has happened. And it would inevitably happen. The point is that people rarely look at the nation and ask, 'what's it all about?' Rather, they say 'at all costs we've got to go on with this nation, but we don't want these consequences'. And they struggle against the consequences while they keep on producing the same situation.

This is another major feature of thought: thought doesn't know it is doing something and then it struggles against what it is doing. It doesn't want to know that it is doing it. And it struggles against the results, trying to avoid those unpleasant results while keeping on with that way of thinking. That is what I call sustained incoherence. There is also simple incoherence, which we can't avoid having because thoughts are always incomplete - thought can never be complete, as we'll discuss later. But when we find that what is happening is contradictory or confused or isn't doing what we expect, then we should change our thoughts to reflect what is happening. And in simple situations we do. When it comes to things that matter more to us, though, it seems we generally don’t. Now this is rather odd, because the things that matter are where we ought to be especially coherent. However, we feel we can afford to be coherent only in the things that don’t matter too much - which is another kind of incoherence.

Nobody has the intention of producing this sort of situation. We are producing these situations contrary to our conscious intentions because there is another resistance going on of which we're not very conscious. Whenever we intend to do something we often unconsciously have a resistance trying to prevent us from doing it. That's obviously a big waste of energy, and it is very destructive. It means we will produce problems without end which have no solution.

In the recent past the East and the West have got together for various reasons. But for various other reasons, people were sending a lot of arms into the Middle East over the years. It was not their intention to produce an impossible situation with Iraq. They said; 'Well, we're sending arms to the Middle East. We want to make money. We have a certain national policy to maintain. There are many reasons.' And then it all added up to a very dangerous situation. If there had been no arms sent there, it would not have been so serious. Also, in 1973 it was plainly brought out that the West is very dependent on oil from the Middle East, which is very unstable region. For a while people began to use their oil and their energy more efficiently. Gradually they became less concerned with doing so. And then later they say; 'Look! Surprise. We now depend on them. Half of the oil of the world is theirs. If that goes, we're all finished.'

Clearly it is not people's intention to produce these situations. Rather, they may say, 'we don't want this situation, but there are a lot of other things we've got to have. But those other things will produce these situations. There's an incoherence there.

We are constantly producing situations and things which we don't intend and then we say 'look, we've got a problem'. We don't realize that it is our deeper, hidden intentions which have produced it, and consequently we keep on perpetuating the problem. Even now very little is being done, as far as I can see, about using energy more efficiently and thus becoming less dependent on Middle Eastern oil - which would remove much of the whole problem.

So, we must ask 'why do we have this incoherence?' Nobody wants these situations, and yet the things people think they want will inevitably produce the same situations. It is thought that makes people say 'that's necessary'.

Therefore, thought has come to this kind of incoherence.

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