I rarely take the time to write reviews, but forty years after its publication, this book deserves to be far more widely read and referenced. It has tremendous implications for our understanding of science and consciousness. Even for a non-scientist, like myself, it offers a profoundly different way to understand what is going on in my own mind and direct experience.
The author was a peer to the great physicists of the twentieth century, and made numerous important contributions to the intellectual edifice of that field. Sadly, due to his interest in Marxist ideas he was persecuted by the ardent anti-communists of the 1950’s (HUAC) and basically driven out of the US. Later in his career, he again defied the strict norms of the traditional physics community by engaging in extensive dialog with the Indian philosopher J Krishnamurthi. In a less conformist era or community, his ideas likely would have gained much wider and more serious traction. It is well past time for a fresh look at his amazing insights.
Although this book has some technical content, his writing is extraordinarily clear and precise. I did give up on Chapter 4 about halfway through, as the math was simply beyond me. But as far as I can tell, nothing in chapter 4 is critical to the overall thesis of the book. One could go straight from chapter 3 to 5 without losing any comprehension or appreciation for the depth and subtlety of Bohm’s arguments.
His first critical point comes on page 4, where he points out our tendency to conflate thinking about things with direct experience itself, or as he states: “our thought is regarded as in direct correspondence with objective reality.” The result is that any dominant way of seeing the world becomes at once both largely unconscious and a self-fulfilling prophecy. Bohm argues that in order to properly understand reality, we must “be aware of the activity of thought as such; i.e. as a form of insight, a way of looking, rather than a ‘true copy of reality as it is’.”
Bohm uses the term “fragmentation” to describe the traditional Western paradigm for understanding physical reality, going back at least to the Greeks. Fragmentation has several manifestations. In academic fields, it manifests as the continual division of fields into specialities and sub-specialities. In society, people are “broken up into separate nations and different religious, political, economic, racial groups, etc.” And in physics, we have come to regard “as an absolute truth the notion that the whole of reality is actually constituted of nothing but ‘atomic building blocks’, all working together more or less mechanically.” Over time, this fragmentary worldview and the resulting empirical data have circularly reinforced each other. Obviously, the associated theories have led to many great and useful insights. But we should not lose sight of the fact that “all our different ways of thinking are to be considered as different ways of looking at the one reality, each with some domain in which it is clear and accurate.” An overly fundamentalist application of the fragmentary worldview is blinding us to see larger (or at least alternative orders) in the nature of reality and of consciousness.
He then goes on to show that both relativity and the quantum theory “show that the attempt to describe and follow an atomic particle in precise detail has little meaning.” Instead, “it can perhaps best be regarded as a poorly defined cloud, dependent for its particular form on the whole environment, including the observing instrument.” He offers an alternative analogy for thinking about relatively stable and autonomous “objects” and how they relate to the broader environment: as vortices in a flowing stream (think of whirlpools in a fast-flowing brook). Viewed in a certain way, such a vortex might appear to be quite consistent and independent of other features appearing elsewhere in the stream. And yet, without the overall flow of water, these seemingly independent “things” would instantly disappear. Bohm offers a “proposal for a new general form of insight…That is, there is a universal flux that cannot be defined explicitly but which can only be known implicitly, as indicated by the explicitly definable forms and shapes, some stable and some unstable, that can be abstracted from the universal flux. In this flow, mind and matter are not separate substances. Rather, they are different aspects of one whole and unbroken movement.”
All of what I’ve described is laid out in the first 14 pages! He goes on to describe and illustrate his thesis with penetrating analyses of language, key unresolved questions in physics, the nature of time, and various mathematical paradoxes. The logic is crisp and internally consistent. The breadth of both his scholarship and the conceptual landscape he covers are tremendous. In the end, he offers a whole new way to conceive of physical reality and consciousness. And although he doesn’t mention it, this alternative worldview has much in common with Eastern philosophy and the reports of mystics from all sorts of religious traditions.
In short, this book provides profound insights into most of the great unanswered questions: what is consciousness?, what is time?, what is the nature of physical reality?, and so on.
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Reviews with images
Book is great, but the shipper put a sticker on it.
I love the book, but a $25 book shouldn't arrive with a sticker stuck to it.
Top reviews from other countries
Arturo Meza A.
Una maravilla..., de la inspiración de un genio.
Reviewed in Mexico on September 28, 2018Raymond Ducholke
An excellent book by a brilliant scholar
Reviewed in Canada on October 12, 2014