Science Quote by David Bohm

There is a quiet provocation in Bohm’s phrasing: he treats “thought” less like a private mental spark and more like a running operating system, one that updates itself through culture, language, and habit. The line sounds modest, even deferential to uncertainty, but its intent is sharper. By saying thought has been “constantly evolving,” Bohm undermines the comforting idea that our perceptions are neutral snapshots of reality. If thought is a system in motion, then what feels like immediate “common sense” is often the latest build of a long, collective history.

The second clause does the real work. “We can’t say when that system began” is a refusal to grant thought an origin story simple enough to master. It pushes against the scientific temptation to locate a clean starting point: the first concept, the first word, the first rational mind. Bohm implies that the machinery of thinking is older than any individual and largely invisible to the thinker, which makes it powerful and potentially self-deceptive. You don’t stand outside it; you’re running inside it.

Context matters: Bohm spent years challenging rigid, mechanistic pictures of the world, arguing that fragmentation is a habit of mind, not a law of nature. Read that way, the quote is also a warning about certainty. If thought is historically accumulated and perpetually changing, then our most confident categories may be provisional artifacts - useful, yes, but never final. The subtext: the mind can’t claim sovereignty over reality when it can’t even fully account for its own software.