Thought as a System by David Bohm

In Thought as a System, David Bohm attempts to shed light on what he views to be the greatest threat to the continuation of the existence of humankind and to offer the beginnings of a way to meet this threat and overcome it. This book is difficult for me to review for a couple reasons. Bohm draws on examples from a wide range of disciplines including psychology, neurology, biochemistry, physics, philosophy, anthropology, and sociology, for many of which I have little basis from which to critique his usage. Also, the book is actually the transcription of series of discussions from a weekend seminar led by Bohm. As such, it has no footnotes and few attributions of various ideas. Because of these facts, I will not attempt to judge the originality of Bohm’s ideas here (though their originality does seem to be one of the first targets whenever I try to describe the book to someone else). Another complication resulting from the seminar setting is the somewhat rambling presentation of the Bohm’s ideas, which I will attempt to distill in the following paragraphs. The lack of rigor in the back and forth discussions has lead me into circular or near meaningless series of statements as I attempt to summarize them for myself. Still I think they bear food for thought.

As can be deduced from the title, the crux of Bohm’s argument hinges on the concept of thought as a system. Bohm defines a system to be an entity composed of many parts with some internal structure that is open to outside influences but reacts to avoid basic change. Bohm at times takes a much broader view of thought than the commonly held one and at others views thought as a part of a much larger process from which it should not be separated. Thought is a series of reflexes learned from experience and physically reinforced by biochemical processes. This network has developed over the millennia as an aid to our survival. The feeling of security is reinforced by endorphins which give a pleasant feeling. More mundanely, everything we see from cars on the street to doors on buildings to berries on trees is perceived within the framework of the previous experiences; they allow us to function on the most basic level. The network is wired deep within us – it has been observed that electrochemical pulse is created within brain preceding the advent of a conscious intention.

While this network of thoughts is fundamental to our existence, Bohm points out that it has a systemic flaw. Though is deceptive: it claims that is passive while it is in reality almost always active. Such deception leads to a sustained incoherence which can be harmful in the long run – although Bohm never attempts to justify the assumption, he strongly holds to the notion that coherence and truth are the most desirable qualities to possess at all times (as aside, Bohm mentions that all the receptors in the brain are tied together, pleasure and pain. It is incoherent to attempt to sustain pleasure since it inevitably leads to pain). It might be the case though that it is paradoxical to strive for anything that is not coherent.

Bohm focuses on several related concepts to illustrate the deception of thought. The main three are perception, the self, and time (with the nation state being a close fourth). Perception is the most straightforward though I feel there are better examples and studies than the ones to which Bohm alludes. In our day to day lives, we (or at least I) tend to fall into the assumption of seeing “what’s there” and forget that thought colors everything we see and can even at times suppress that which it does not want us to see. The self is perhaps not as straightforward though I imagine it is often discussed in philosophy texts. Thought divides the human being abstractly into an “I” and a “me” and links them together by a “myself:” it is I who possesses a will and does thing while others do things to me. There is a fabricated identity for this me and a sense of necessity that I must protect this me. The case of time is similar. Thought divides all things into the past and the future with the present but a “flash” in between. Much like with the I and the me, this sense of space allows the possibility for a formulated action to take place. Bohm rejects the separation into I and me calling for a “creative” being rather than an “identified” one and likewise rejects the past and the future instead placing the primacy on the present moment with the future but conjecture and the past sustained in its physical remains on our bodies. He argues that time is just a sense of succession that can sometimes be made more precise within the framework of science, but this sort of precision is folly in the realms of psychology and human affairs.

So, these are some examples of the deceptive nature of thought, of the systemic flaw that Bohm identifies. To this flaw Bohm attributes all of modern humanity’s problems. All wars, greed, corruption, and stubbornness flow from the reactionary nature of thought. Bohm gives the case of a person who has been offended by some gesture of a friend. The natural reaction is one of anger and a desire to stop these feelings of hurt and anger. These feelings often lead to lashing out and revenge, when simply removing the thought of the offense and the biochemical process that it initiated would remove dissipate the feelings just as well. The most compelling point that Bohm makes in regards to this broader application of his concept of thought as a system is that it might have been okay to have this flaw when there were only a few million people on the Earth, but it is not sustainable now with several billion and with a rapidly advancing technological capacity besides. Sustained deception and incoherence can have much more catastrophic consequences today than they could in those people in whom this flaw first developed.

Bohm does more than just present the problem though. He champions self-awareness as a possible way out. Specifically, he identifies proprioception, a self-awareness that exists outside of time, as a way growing aware of the web of reflexes that composes thought. Proprioception is the feeling a person has when he moves his limbs. It is the instantaneous awareness of what one is doing with the need to wait for confirmation from nerve receptors. Bohm offers proprioception as a means of coming to terms with thought by claiming that if we can not get outside of the system then we have no hope. Assuming the possibility of a way out is the only option we have. Bohm advocates practicing a self experiment with words with the intent of learning about the system – not with the intent of changing the system since that kind of active approach would fall back into the system, but only of learning and growing of thought’s active role. By saying certain phrases, we can begin to draw out emotional reactions. When true words are spoken, the body reacts, the thought reflexes react. Finding words that ring true will trigger these reactions and allow them to be triggered repeatedly – giving a firsthand view of the reflexes in action and possibly weakening them through triggering without reinforcement. The reflexes grow hard with repeated reinforcement.

Bohm extends the problems of thought beyond the individual. The concept of the identified self is one shared through our culture (along with many other ideas) – this very fact is somewhat ironic: much of society views itself as an individual actor, ignorant to the shared nature of this belief system perpetuated by thought, a belief system that is taught over the years to every new human being born to our society. So many of “our” ideas were put into our heads before we even had inkling that they were “ours.”

It will take more than proprioception to solve the conflicts in our world. A large source of that conflict is the notion of necessity – that thing which a person or group of people sees being one way and incapable of being another. Bohm identifies dialogue as the way past conflict but singles out these differing notions of necessity as obstacles to dialogue. He quotes Krishnamurti’s “sorrow is a jewel” when he describes the possibilities for dialogue to overcome the differing views. By staying with conflict and struggling with it, people can through dialogue come to an understanding. I agree with Bohm that when people work through a disagreement like this a strong bond is formed between them, but the actual prospect of, for example, Palestinians and Israelis sitting down and resolving all their difficulties in dialogue does not seem practical.

Bohm does come up with an interesting concept of freedom from his notion of necessity though. Bohm separates actions into necessity and contingency. Necessity is that which can not be another way and contingency that which can. From these definitions, there is not much room for freedom. Necessity obviously involves no freedom but contingency does as well: that which can be one way or another consequently has little meaning being one of those ways or the other. Meaning is derived from necessity. Bohm instead defines freedom as the ability to perceive and create a new order of necessity. This ability is similar to his notion of proprioception in that both involve an insight which happens outside of time and thought. These insights from “beyond” are what allow the system to change.

Bohm likewise invokes this unconditioned “beyond” when he presents the ancient concept of the creative self in opposition to the identified self. The creative self is unknown but constantly revealing itself out of this underlying infinity. This acknowledgement of the unknown, of the openness of the world seems very important to Bohm. At times, it seems like a technicality to me, but I can see his point – often I find myself falling into the mind set that everything is known and though I obviously acknowledge I don’t know everything, I still feel that a concerted effort on humanity’s part could obtain any knowledge desired.

I greatly enjoyed reading and rereading Thought as a System perhaps in part for the very flaws I mentioned at the outset. The lack of rigor and clarity does leave room for interpretation if one is so inclined to make the effort. There are several points at which it is easy to assail Bohm’s arguments and likely my poor rehashing does not aid his cause, but his ideas are still interesting to me and worth consideration. I believe his vision of a better world begins with small steps at first: individuals making small steps towards proprioception of thought and small groups starting out with dialogues. I worry that these efforts could never really amount to much, but they are likely better than the alternative of taking no action.