The following is from an interview with David Bohm in Amsterdam 1990. My emphasis in italics.
1:20 >>David Bohm: As early as the late 1940s, … there was a tendency to believe that mathematics was the essential point about physics, and concepts, intuitive notions were not that important. And I found that very disturbing, and that tendency has grown… People say, unless you have an equation you have nothing to talk about. … The experiments and physics now are very large and abstract… So you don’t really have a sensory contact with the world…
2:52 There are certain concepts which it seems almost impossible to to say you know in any other way except mathematics… I’ve been developing an idea from the implicate order and enfolded order… I think that there’s a big resistance in the physics community to doing this unless it produces some new results… I developed another interpretation of the quantum theory which I…called the causal interpretation, but people said it gave no new results…and they were not interested. In other words, the idea now is that people are [only] interested in equations predicting experimental results.
5:10 I say that they [relativity theory and quantum theory] show that reality is an undivided whole… The notion of breaking things up into separate parts which just interact is not adequate… So, in principle the universe cannot be divided but we can make an approximate division… in the large-scale… The second point is you have this wave-particle duality, [an] electron behaves both like a wave and a particle… This behavior seems so mysterious that people like Niels Bohr said that there was no way to understand it intuitively at all. You could only calculate the probabilities… The third point is the non-locality, namely an action at a distance… We find that particles and certain circumstances can apparently act on each other at long distances directly, faster than light, although we can’t use it to transmit a signal. Well, that’s what Bell’s Theorem is concerned with.
18:08 I think that there is…in society today…a growing need for a new approach with wholeness. I think people are sensing that this fragmentation is inadequate… Science, art, and spirituality, and economics…[need to be] brought together… We have got to start looking at ourselves differently. … We have to see it as one world, and we have to see ourselves as emerging out of this world, and being sustained by the world… It is not an environment surrounding us, but it is our ground of existence.
22:55 There’s an order between determinism and indeterminism… I think we have to broaden the question — it’s not just determinism — to necessity; and determinism is a form of necessity; and necessity is what cannot be otherwise…
24:07 But then that [absolute necessity] was replaced in physics by the laws of nature. … I take the view that nature is inexhaustible. … We have…necessity and we have contingency. … Contingencies are made necessary by conditions…but they can change… I say everything is eventually a contingency and if brought enough context… Massive contingencies makes up a new necessity… So, there’s an inter weaving of necessity and contingency in my view. … In classical physics, we thought of absolute necessity of determinism, and now quantum mechanics talks of the absolute necessity of chance, but I say these are extremes.
27:27 The idea must come from a more general experience. I mean, I think that things have gotten so abstract now…
28:27 Realities are things which you have to grasp in your thought, as well as by your hand, right? Now… I think that…realities have changed constantly going back to prehistoric times…
29:54 I would like to explain my views of reality by an example [Bohm discusses the apperances of a circular table]… We have a kind of a situation where what was the essence at one level becomes an appearance as we go deeper… What I’m saying, too, [is] that the appearances are correct…
33:28 We don’t know what the limits are… whether we can transcend them in some ways… In some sense I think we always have a multi-dimensional perception of reality… Artists, for example, explore something more multi-dimensional…
34:24 Implicit order means enfolded order… A very simple example is to fold up a piece of paper many, many times, and make a few cuts in it. When you unfold that you see a pattern… The idea is that somehow the things that we see in front of us, which I call explicate order [is] … the unfoldment of a deeper pattern that is not visible. …the idea is that everything is constantly folded and unfolding in a dynamic process… That means you have a kind of wholeness, because the whole universe is…present — not only passively, but actively.
40:33 I think there’s nothing that can replace clarity. … If people are not clear, if they are incoherent, confused, …whatever you say is not going to work. … So, I think we have to say our first priority is clarity.
41:52 The whole cannot be grasped in thought. There’s some sense of the whole which…cannot be put in words, and we have to move from that…
43:54 I think intelligence is…key, without intelligence there can be no reason…
46:38 If we had this common consciousness, we would be able to…think together, which means not that we are trying to convince each other of anything, but rather some person would have an idea, [and] it would pass to another, to another, to another… Then…the intelligence of the group would be available and there would be a common feeling… a sense of participation. And I think that that did exist…and it was lost as soon as we got into large-scale civilization… We must not make assumptions of necessity, because they’ll trap us… If you say we need this, that’s an assumption, … That could mean it’s impossible, but that meant the impossibility may arise from the assumption. That’s why you have to watch the assumptions.
47:47 Now, the point is a that what we’re suggesting is that we could just get together, groups of 20 to 40, and see if we can do it, not for the purpose of establishing a group, but for the purpose of exploring communication… We are creating an empty space [in dialogue] for the sake of exploring communication, because it has really broken down…
53:30 Coherence literally means to hold together… The main point is to sense incoherence… We may feel something is out of place… and we look and see what is it and so on… I think the principle problem of the human species is incoherence of the process of thought, and its activity, and what comes out of it. And, in other words, that the main sign of incoherence says that you do not get the results you intend… It should in some sense hold together…
55:41 I think its inherent in thought that thought tends to produce incoherence, the way we’re working it now, because we are not very clear about what we’re doing… I’m not saying that we should get perfect coherence… but we have to have an attitude, a moving toward coherence… But if we have an attitude of defending… then that will be very destructive… I think you will see that people generally do find themselves defending their incoherence.
56:53 A coherent mind in one person could do more than an incoherent mind, but a coherent mind among 20–30 people could do much more. Well, it would burn a hole in our our present social arrangements, I think, because…it would expose the incoherence…so…that something might happen…
9:03 The implicit order also has another kind of self-similarity, that something unfolds, and then the next stage unfolds itself similar but different, and so…
1:02:02 I think that dialogue develops, and the longer time the better chance we have for it [to develop]. And I think…one of the most difficult points about dialogue is to have a dialogue among scientists… If we could establish that, and then going on from there… We ought to have a dialogue of science, art, and spirituality, which would be even harder… But I think that would be a kind of dialogue which would greatly begin a change of our culture.
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