“Thought as a System”
You’ve heard the phrase "the human condition". "Thought as a System" might be considered a diagnosis of that "condition", a look at the root of that condition — thought.
The course of this book is one of discovery for the reader. At the end of this discovery you have a new set of concepts without quite having a structure for how you arrived at them. There is no formal chapter structure or well planned outline. Instead this book presents a conversation between the late David Bohm and 50 others that took place over several days in 1990. David Bohm gets the ball rolling, and then feedback from the audience shapes the actual conversation that became the book’s contents. By the end you’ll see that there was probably a reason for this format as it is complimentary to the concepts presented. Bohm himself was a theoretical physicist. His life was all about exploring the nature of reality, in all its facets, and thought-as-a-system is just one of those facets. The ideas in this book and the book itself are only one of Bohm’s many contributions to our world of thought.
Thought
So what is "thought" in this material? Thought is notably past tense, and the sum of what you’ve already "thought". To that end thought is a part of you, but not you. Just as you might consider your hand a part of you, but not you. An aspect of the human condition might be that we confuse thought with our total self, instead of considering thought a part of our total self. This would be like confusing our hand for our total being, in other words. It would be like giving our hand so much authority and importance that we forget it is "just a hand" — a valuable part of us, but a part nonetheless.
System
The other side of the title is the "system", which considers thought on a much more expansive playing field than we normally do.
A system is an assemblage of related elements comprising a whole, such that each element may be seen to be a part of that whole in some sense. — Wikipedia
If thought is a system, then what are the elements of that system? The elements, simply, are "everything". Absolutely everything "entering" thought is/becomes an element in thought’s total system. When you look at a something with your eyes, the images are an element entering your total thought system. Even [new] thoughts occurring in the present moment are themselves new input into the thought system.
Thought in the World
Now let’s tie thought to the system and set it out into the world. We divide our reality in two parts — a personal reality (ourself), and a world reality (outside ourself). We artificially treat these as two different systems. We think of the world reality as fundamentally separate from our personal reality — a world of people and things that can be considered on a level ultimately separate from ourself. When thought is treated as a system, however, elements of the world reality are instead a fundamental, interconnected, and ultimately indistinguishable part of our personal reality.
For example, if someone is speeding down the highway in their car, the image of that speeding car + human is going to enter the systems of every observer along the way. While the same world reality of the speeding car may meet the personal reality of every observer, as an actual element in each personal thought system, the speeding car is going to be represented quite differently:
- "That man is a lunatic. He’s putting everyone in danger."
- "Wow, I hope nothing is wrong. I remember when I had to go that fast because my dog was injured and had to get her to the vet."
- "I’m great, I follow the rules. He’s going to get his just reward soon for breaking them."
- "Crap, that reminds me, I should probably speed up a little. I’m late for work."
There is no uniform world reality of a speeding car + human. There are only the personal systems of thought that reflex around the world reality of the speeding car based on the history of each system. So which is one is the true representation of the world reality? — simultaneously / paradoxically all of them and none of them. To each his own system of thought. This is a little reminiscent of the adage, "If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound if there is no one around to hear it?"
Closed Systems
Now our personal thought system, like our hand, is absolutely essential to being human and getting around in the world. It’s wonderful and amazing in its own right. However, as is discussed in the course of this book, there is a problem. The problem is that we confuse our thought system with reality.
Thought is creating divisions out of itself and then saying that they are there naturally. – David Bohm
Thought creates divisions within itself, about the world, and reports back to us that they are true and natural facts about reality. It makes final conclusions about reality that at the time are taken for the complete and total picture. You might say here that thought-as-a-system is the concept where thought-is-reality. "He is a lunatic" is the man driving to the down the road. "She hates me and will fire me" is the angry boss. "Atoms are the smallest unit of matter" is the now old fashioned scientific view of matter. "War is the only way to get this change made" is the oil producing nation given artificial power by the nations that need its black resource.
As a reflexive system, thought responds to pain and pleasure — the thought system tends away from pain and towards pleasure. How the system defines pain and pleasure is represented differently to each individual. To be clear, I use pain and pleasure loosely here. You might replace "pleasure" with "feel good / comfortable / initial thought", and you might replace pain with "feel bad / uncomfortable / have to think more about it". To the person angry with the speeding driver, based on whatever past experience makes up their thought system in that moment, it is most pleasurable for their system to go to that condemning thought first. Left alone, the thought system will remain with that initial assessment about reality.
As it tends towards pleasure (its own relative definitions of pleasure), you might consider that thought also tends towards homeostasis or sameness. If the definitions of pleasure and pain at any given moment in a person’s life are built up on the definitions of past thought, then it is pleasurable to maintain a thought system in its current state. In other words, it’s more painful to "think" outside of the existing system. Left to its own tendencies, you might say that thought closes itself off from new input.
Open Systems
One of the greatest things about this work is that Bohm does not allow for reductionism in the thought system, as he so easily could have with this material. He could have said "thought is a system, that’s all thought is, that ultimately explains all human behavior and conditions, and therefore that’s all ‘we’ are." In fact, it would have been very difficult for me to take this book seriously had it gone down this road. Having some prior exposure to Bohm’s other ideas about "reality", however, gave me ample promise that he would not take the lazy way out in reductionism.
Bohm uses two words to consistently describe his open, non-reductionary, system — insight and creativity. If you imagine that day-to-day thinking is like the cogs of your past thought system turning over past thoughts, then insight and creativity would lie definitively outside that mechanism. Whereas the 5 senses could be considered one form of input into your existing thought system, insight and creativity be considered another form of input.
It’s important to not diverge into territory where we try to figure out the ultimate source or definition of this insight and creativity. The book does not, and so we won’t here. What’s decidedly clear is that insight and creativity lie "outside" the thought system. If we’re listening for them, then they’re capable of affecting great change to the system, much more change than the system left to its own devices.
Another input into our system might be deeply hearing the thought systems of others, and that leads us into the final concept.
Dialogue
The final concept that Bohm delivers is "dialogue". Dialogue is a way to share our thought systems with others, ideally as new input into their system, with no specific goal in mind. It’s not: "Let’s sit down for 1 hour and discuss how we’re going to get XYZ goal, or $ABC success". Instead it is simply: "Let’s talk. Let’s dialogue." Maybe it’s slightly more specific: "Let’s talk about XYZ and see what happens." It is non-directed communication, exposing thought systems to each other in a respectful, accepting way.
Dialogue is group oriented. The example given in the book is a romantic image of two Native American tribes in some kind of dispute — not a dispute escalated to war, but a dispute nonetheless. To resolve their dispute, the tribes would sit around a fire and dialogue. Picture 50 Native Americans circled and cross-legged around a roaring fire. Each person in the circle may take a turn speaking, or perhaps it is more free form. The goal of the discussion is non-directed and unspecified. Each person in the tribe is simply sharing their view of the world at that moment — their thought system. At the end of these discussions, the two groups walk away knowing how to resolve their dispute — perhaps not specifically yet, but they have opened themselves to the thought systems of the other group’s individuals. It is this non-directed sharing of world views in a valuing and respectful way that constitutes successful and beneficial dialogue.
Final Thoughts
If I were to write this overview again, it would turn about these concepts in a completely different way. I took liberty in not just reporting concepts verbatim, but also participating in the global dialogue about what my thought system thinks of all this. This overview is ultimately just the tip of a larger set of concepts that are best appreciated by taking Bohm’s journey — the journey he and his dialogue participants took during the creation of this inspiring material. Read it, use it as input into your own thought system, and then let it out into the world.
