Science Quote by David Bohm

Bohm is smuggling a quiet revolution into a sentence that sounds like process language. A physicist best known for questioning what counts as “real” in quantum theory, he’s also taking aim at what we think a mind is: not a sealed-off skull product, but something that can be generated between people. The phrase “a new kind of mind” doesn’t mean smarter individuals; it suggests an emergent intelligence, the way a magnetic field is real without being a “thing” you can hold. That’s the scientist’s move: treat relationship and meaning as phenomena with structure.

The intent is anti-debate and anti-performance. “Common meaning” isn’t consensus, and it isn’t compromise. It’s a shared field of understanding you can’t reach by winning. Bohm’s subtext is that most conversation is covert warfare: we trade positions, defend identities, and call it communication. Dialogue, in his sense, is an experiment where you suspend those reflexes long enough for assumptions to become visible and therefore mutable.

His wording is tellingly recursive: “begins to come into being” and “constantly transforming.” He’s insisting that the point isn’t a final agreement but the ongoing capacity to revise what “we” even means. In late-20th-century contexts - Cold War polarization, institutional mistrust, and the fragmentation of public discourse - this reads like a method for repairing collective cognition. Bohm isn’t romantic about harmony; he’s proposing that thought itself can be re-engineered when meaning is treated as something we build together, in motion, rather than a possession we guard.