3 ms·
> Of course, Bohm says, you can never truly plumb your own mind; any attempt to examine your thought changes it--just as the measurement of an electron alters i
by ggpsv 3y ago
> Of course, Bohm says, you can never truly plumb your own mind; any attempt to examine your thought changes it--just as the measurement of an electron alters its course. We cannot achieve final self-knowledge, Bohm seems to imply, any more we can achieve a final theory of physics.
I found Bohm through Krishnamurti, which is all I have to say about whatever bias I have on this subject. So, of course, I was nodding along as I read this article.
> Bohm hopes scientists will eventually move beyond mechanistic and even mathematical paradigms. “We have an assumption now that’s getting stronger and stronger that mathematics is the only way to deal with reality,” Bohm says. “Because it’s worked so well for a while, we’ve assumed that it has to be that way.”
Bohm's ideas on implicate order and his call to move past the mechanistic paradigm reminds me of E.F. Schumacher's critique on "materialistic scientism" and its limitations in the face of the unknown:
> Since the findings of science, on account of its methodical restriction and its systematic disregard of higher levels, never contain any evidence of the existence of such levels, the process is self-reinforcing: faith, instead of being taken as a guide leading the intellect to an understanding of the higher levels, is seen as opposing and rejecting the intellect and is therefore itself rejected.
I appreciate that Bohm opened a door for me into a subject which I was not intrinsically interested in, and I'm looking forward to what comes out of this conversation in the years ahead.
- abhishekjha 3y ago> any attempt to examine your thought changes it--just as the measurement of an electron alters its course. Wait a minute. Isn’t this factually wrong? I mean the uncertainty in measurement is not brought by the experiment perturbing the system but something inherent to the system. We know how much we are perturbing the system. We can always subtract that from the calculation and the system still ends up having uncertainty. Not a physicist, can somebody correct me if there’s something wrong?
- inciampati 3y agoBohm is completely correct. It is impossible to think about something without changing your own thought of it. Or more specifically, memory, is changed by remembering. This has been demonstrated in a very literal way, in that amyloid secondary structures that are key to memory are transformed by neuronal activation. See https://scitechdaily.com/surprisingly-historically-misunderstood-amyloid-is-necessary-for-long-term-memory-formation/ https://scitechdaily.com/surprisingly-historically-misunders... for a summary. These systems are absolutely quantum scale.
- PeterWhittaker 3y agoMeasurement perturbs the system, always. Most of the time (radar speed check on a car, e.g.), the perturbation is so small as to be insignificant. When one bounces a photon off an electron to measure its position, though, one moves it. Likewise, when one uses a magnetic field to detect an electron, one deflects it. Add to that that position is poorly defined for such quantized objects in the first place, and things only get fuzzier.
- disconcision 3y agobohm here is talking about the observer effect, which is distinct from, though has historically been conflated with, the uncertainty principle. the former refers to how measurement unavoidably affects a system, whereas the latter is an inherent limit to accuracy effecting all wave-like systems