Science Quote by David Bohm

Bohm takes a scalpel to the cozy fantasy that thinking happens in a private, self-contained “mind.” Calling thought a system isn’t a poetic flourish; it’s a physicist’s move: treat thinking as an interconnected field with feedback loops, not a sealed room with a single occupant. The sentence keeps widening its frame - thoughts, feelings, the body, society - until the individual looks less like an origin point and more like a relay station.

The intent is quietly radical. If thought “includes the state of the body,” then cognition is not clean, abstract computation; it is mood, fatigue, adrenaline, hunger - the whole biological weather that biases what seems reasonable. If thought also “includes the whole of society,” then your most personal convictions arrive pre-loaded with social inheritance: language, norms, institutions, and the ambient pressures of whatever era you’re breathing. Bohm’s subtext: we can’t fix “bad thinking” solely with better arguments, because thought is co-produced by environments and relationships. The error isn’t just in logic; it’s in the system’s conditioning.

Context matters: Bohm spent a career challenging reductionism in physics and later developed ideas about “implicate order” and dialogue as a way to expose collective assumptions. In the late 20th century - Cold War paranoia, mass media acceleration, and the rise of systems theory - “thought passing back and forth between people” reads like an early diagnosis of memetic contagion. He’s pointing to the unsettling implication that society doesn’t merely influence thought; society is one of thought’s organs.