David Bohm. Physicist and Magician

“We are all linked by a fabric of unseen connections. This fabric is constantly changing and evolving. This field is directly structured and influenced by our behavior and by our understanding.” David Bohm

Read about him at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bohm

This extraordinary man was a physicist who worked at Princeton with Albert Einstein. Einstein called him his “intellectual son”. He connected physics to philosophy through his extraordinary work on the implicate-explicate universe. He saw that these two ways of being and seeing the universe mirrored the writing of Martin Buber, who started the philosophy of dialogue with his book “I and Thou”. David Bohm was intensely concerned with bringing society back to creative cooperation and away from ever increasing polarisation and conflict.

He proposed a form of dialogue, called Bohmian Dialogue, which took Buber’s ideas and applied them to society. Essentially it is a form of deep listening between people in a group, from which arises newly emergent and creative shared meaning.

He took this to MIT (Massachussetts Institute of Technology), where he was deeply influential on figures such as Peter Senge and Donella Meadows. Peter Senge set up the MIT Dialogue Project, which in turn has been enormously influential in the creation of learning organisations such as Microsoft and Google. Donella Meadows was a founder of systems thinking and the movement toward ecological economics.

He famously worked with Krishnamurti on links between eastern and western thinking and the implication for meaning. Last but by no means least he worked in London with Basil Hiley and Sir Roger Penrose on black holes and consciousness, with links to panpsychism.

Really, an amazing man.

Penrose and Purpose

I heard Roger Penrose interviewed on Desert Island Discs. Certainly he is a proper grounded mathematician and scientist (look up his Wikipedia entry). He’s worth listening to (unlike soap-box orators like Richard Dawkins).

I was struck by his representation of Artificial Intelligence as fundamentally an algorithm – since it will forever lack mind and consciousness. So I’ve been looking into his views. Just a couple of quotes below. Science is certainly NOT consistent with materialist atheism as some would have us believe ..

There is a certain sense in which I would say the universe has a purpose. It’s not there just somehow by chance. Some people take the view that the universe is simply there and it runs along-it’s a bit as though it just sort of computes, and we happen by accident to find ourselves in this thing. I don’t think that’s a very fruitful or helpful way of looking at the universe, I think that there is something much deeper about it, about its existence, which we have very little inkling of at the moment.

Intelligence cannot be present without understanding. No computer has any awareness of what it does.

I would say the universe has a purpose. It’s not there just somehow by chance.

our present picture of physical reality, particularly in relation to the nature of time, is due for a grand shake up