Science and dialogue: a physicist discusses the creativity of genuine conversation, and its current impediments:

..[I]t is proposed that a form of free dialogue may well be one of the most effective ways of investigating the crisis which faces society, and indeed the whole of human nature and consciousness today. Moreover, it may turn out that such a form of free exchange of ideas and information is of fundamental relevance for transforming culture and freeing it of destructive misinformation, so that creativity can be liberated….

It seems clear that in essence culture is meaning, as shared in society. And here “meaning” is not only significance but also intention, purpose, and value. It is clear, for example, that art, literature, science, and other such activities of a culture are all parts of the common heritage of shared meaning, in the sense described above. Such cultural meaning is evidently not primarily aimed at utility. Indeed, any society that restricts its knowledge merely to information that it regards as useful would hardly be said to have a culture, and within it, life would have very little meaning. Even in our present society, culture, when considered in this way, appears to have a rather small significance in comparison to other issues that are taken to be of vital importance by many sectors of the population….

Science is predicated on the concept that science is arriving at truth – at a unique truth. The idea of dialogue is thereby in some way foreign to the current structure of science, as it is with religion. In a way, science has become the religion of the modern age. It plays the role which religion used to play of giving us truth; hence different scientists cannot come together any more than different religions can, once they have different notions of truth. As one scientist, Max Planck, said, “New ideas don’t win, really. What happens is that the old scientists die and new ones come along with new ideas.” But clearly that’s not the right way to do it. This is not to say that science couldn’t work another way. 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.

David Bohm, from The Essential David Bohm, ed. L. Nichol (London: Routledge, 2003).

For other posts on science and dialogue, see here.

For a film on Bohm’s life and legacy, see here.