Bohm

During World War II, the Manhattan Project mobilized much of Berkeley's physics research in the effort to produce the first atomic bomb. Though Oppenheimer had asked Bohm to work with him at Los Alamos (the top-secret laboratory established in 1942 to design the atom bomb), the project's director, Brigadier General Leslie Groves, would not approve Bohm's security clearance

During the war, Bohm remained at Berkeley, where he taught physics and conducted research in plasma, the synchrotron and the synchrocyclotron. He completed his PhD in 1943 by an unusual circumstance. According to biographer F. David Peat,[12] "The scattering calculations (of collisions of protons and deuterons) that he had completed proved useful to the Manhattan Project and were immediately classified. Without security clearance, Bohm was denied access to his own work; not only would he be barred from defending his thesis, he was not even allowed to write his own thesis in the first place!" To satisfy the University, Oppenheimer certified that Bohm had successfully completed the research. Bohm later performed theoretical calculations for the Calutrons at the Y-12 facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. These calculations were used for the electromagnetic enrichment of uranium for the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.

Below will begin to explain a main reason Bohm had to be removed from the project...

On Possible Ancient Tacit Dialectic Technology

From On Dialogue

'Tacit' means that which is unspoken, which cannot be described - like the tacit knowledge required to ride a bicycle. It is the actual knowledge, and it may be coherent or not. I am proposing that thought - to think - is actually a subtle tacit process. The concrete process of thinking is very tacit. The meaning is basically tacit. And what we can say explicitly is only a very small part of it. I think we all realise that we do almost everything by this sort of tacit knowledge. Thought is emerging from the tacit ground, and any fundamental change in thought will come from the tacit ground. So if we are communicating at the tacit level, then maybe thought is changing.

The tacit process is common. It is shared. The sharing is not merely the explicit communication and the body language and all that, which are part of it, but there is also a deeper tacit process which is common. I think the whole human race knew this for a million years; and then in five thousand years of civilisation we have lost it, because our societies got too big to carry it out. But now we have to get started again, because it has become urgent that we communicate. We have to share our consciousness and to be able to think together, on order to do intelligently whatever is necessary.

Bohm On Assumptions

Now, I'm going to propose that in a dialogue we are not going to have any agenda, we are not going to try to accomplish any useful thing. As soon as we try to accomplish a useful purpose or goal, we will have an assumption behind it as to what is useful, and that assumption is going to limit us. Different people will think different things are useful. And that's going to cause trouble. We may say, "Do we want to save the world?" or "Do we want to run a school?" or "Do we want to make money?" Whatever it may be.

We have been saying that people in any group will bring to it their assumptions, and as the group continues meeting, those assumptions will come up. Then what is called for is to suspend those assumptions, so that you neither carry them out nor suppress them. You don't believe them, nor do you disbelieve them; you don't judge them as good or bad. You simply see what they mean - not only your own, but the other people's as well. We are not trying to change anybody's opinion

I'm going to suggest the way it ought to work. Assumptions will come up. And if you hear somebody else who has an assumption that seems outrageous to you, the natural response might be to get angry, or get excited, or to react in some other way. But suppose you suspend that activity. That means that it is sort of there in front of you. You are not suppressing it, not carrying it out, not believing it or disbelieving it, you are simply seeing the meaning of your assumption along with the other person's. You may not even have known that you had an assumption. It was only because he came up with the opposite one that you find out that you have one. You may uncover other assumptions, but we are all suspending them and looking at them all, seeing what they mean. You may uncover other assumptions, but we are all suspending them and looking at them all, seeing what they mean.

Bohmian Dialogue as a Natural Common Consensus Protocol

The object of a dialogue is not to analyse things, or to win an argument, of to exchange opinions. Rather, it is to suspend your opinions and to look at the opinions - to listen to everybody's opinions, to suspend them, and to see what all that means. If we can see what all of our opinions mean, then we are sharing a common content, even if we don't agree entirely. It may turn out that the opinions are not really very important - they are all assumptions. And if we can see them all, we may then move more creatively in a different direction. We can just simply share the appreciation of the meanings; and out of this whole thing, truth emerges unannounced - not that we have chosen it.

Something more important will happen if we can do this, if we can mange it. Everybody will be sharing all the assumptions in the group. If everybody sees the meaning together of all the assumptions, then the content of consciousness is essentially the same. Whereas, if we all have different assumptions and defend them, each person is then going to have a different content, because we won't really take in the other person's assumptions. We'll be fighting them, or pushing them away - trying to convince or persuade the other person.

Assumptions And the Group

If you are defending an assumption, you are pushing out whatever is new.

You can notice the similarity of the difficulties within a group to what we've talked about in the past relative to the conflicts and incoherent thoughts within an individual. The individual would have to suspend his assumptions, and so does the group. There is another factor in a group, though, because collective cultural assumptions come in to a much greater extent. And in a large group like this, many sub-cultures also come in.

I am saying that a genuine culture could arise in which opinions and assumptions are not defended incoherently.

Hidden Nature of Assumptions

There is a great deal of violence in the opinions that we are defending. They are not merely opinions, they are not merely assumptions; they are assumptions with which we are identified - which we are therefore defending, because it is as if we are defending ourselves

On the Limitations of Thought and the Assumptions of Scientists

If scientists could engage in a dialogue, that would be a radical revolution in science - in the very nature of science. Actually, scientists are in principle committed to the concepts involved in dialogue. They say, "We must listen. We shouldn't exclude anything."

However, they find that they can't do that. This is not only because scientists share what everybody else shares - assumptions and opinions - but also because the very notion which has been defining science today is that we are going to get truth. Few scientists question the assumption that thought is capable of coming to know 'everything'. But that may not be a valid assumption, because thought is abstraction, which inherently implies limitation. The whole is too much. There is no way by which thought can get hold of the whole, because thought only abstracts; it limits and defines. And the past from which thought draws contains only a certain limited amount. The present is not contained in thought; thus, an analysis cannot actually cover the moment of analysis.

On Cultural Assumptions

The cultural assumptions are very powerful and we are not usually aware of them, just as you are not normally aware of an accent in the way you talk.

Dialogue as a Protocol Therapy To Reveal Assumptions

An essential feature of the dialogue group is that it is able to reveal assumptions. These assumptions are actually making us ill. And in that sense, it is therapy to reveal them

On The Significance of Revealing Assumptions and Bohmian Dialogue As The Tool To Do So

...it is crucial to be able to share our judgement, to share our assumptions and listen to each other's assumptions.

...in general, if somebody doesn't listen to your basic assumptions you feel it as an act of violence, and then you are inclined to be violent yourself. Therefore, this is crucial both individually and collectively; and dialogue is the collective way of opening up judgements and assumptions.