The Post

Why do we think and react in a certain way? Why does our brain think about X when it sees/hears/feels/thinks Y? What invites the brain to connect different things, and how are feelings, thoughts, and perceptions/abstractions of reality playing a role in what we think?… How do you think?

I’ve always been fascinated by a mix of the above questions, and Thought as a System by David Bohm is a good read to fuel those thoughts.

There are several affirmations and points made by the author. I won’t cover them all — I will cover the ones that made me reflect a bit more.

The Book

Thought is incomplete… a thought is not the reality… only reality is reality and not what we can gather/sense from it. A good analogy is that thought is the map, and the territory is reality.

Knowing that thought is incomplete and that we don’t really know what reality is… How do we align thought with the way we intend to act? When we achieve that, that’s coherence. Bohm mentions that today thought is mostly incoherent, but not on purpose, at least not superficially, and the culprit is fragmentation or a lack of understanding that thought is an interconnected system rather than isolated elements (elements: reality, thought, perception, feelings…).

Because thought is incomplete, we can’t know how to achieve only X… even X itself we don’t fully understand. It’s like thinking, “I want to be healthy” — does anyone really understand all the consequences of being healthy? We can’t. So, what can we get from this without going too much into the details and losing ourselves in these thoughts? What is useful from this discussion?

I can only answer for myself, and even “what is useful” is a question I have, and others might not really want to get anything else from this discussion. Anyway, if you are like me, what can we learn from this book that we can apply to our lives to be more coherent?

  • Transforming thought - modify thoughts to align better with your wants.
  • Holistic thinking - try to understand the entire interconnectedness of reality and avoid fragmentations that do not add value.
  • Awareness - especially awareness of thought and how it operates as a system.

Still related to the above but on a different note, two other ideas really stuck with me:

  1. Thought is a reflex.
  2. Layers of thoughts.

The reflex aspect is part of my “thought system” today — I cannot not take into account that how we react is not an active and self-aware action, but simply a reflex. Building and improving these reflexes is an important part of life, as that is what most people judge you for.

Layers of thoughts links to the reflex aspect — why am I feeling, thinking, reacting like this about this event? What memories does this trigger and connect to? Different layers of memories, thoughts, and feelings seem to be brought up, and those layers, when weighted, create our reflex.

Other Ongoing Thoughts

  • Machine learning and AI models are just reflexes models - it’s inputs are always finite, abstracted and fragmentated.
  • The way of thinking teached/learned seems to prefer fragmentation, “mono word thinking” (thinking verbally one thought and sequentially) and some times it’s assisted by images. We should consider expanding to add more ways of thinking to our thought system… intuitive thinking and a form of “thinking as a feeling,” which is hard to describe and I couldn’t find anything about. It is a form of not really holding something in the brain as a word… or an image… but as it is understood.