Thought as a System (David Bohm, 1990) [pdf]

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28 points·eternalban··5 comments

Can a Symbolics Lisp Machine Graphics Demo render the animated concept space glombing twenty five thousand thought streams in simultaneous discussion threads on hardware having 128GB memory and how does the memory scale to half a million threads?

Hah, I'll have to give this a read, I've got Wholeness and the Implicate Order on my reading shortlist.

It's somewhat a difficult read given that it's a transcription of a weekend seminar, with Q/As included. It does not appear he was reading from prepared notes but rather impromptu expressing his thoughts.

Very topical in context of LLMs. GPT would exemplify a fully "fragmented" mind for him, I would think. He's quite alarmed in that '90s book; he would positively have a fit if he had encountered our chattering machines.

This might be the audio of the seminar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zRSVrad4nc&list=PL1n30s-LKu...

Listening to it now (thanks, +interesting). This is 1974 so predates the seminar for the OP book (1990) but it is definitely related. 'Thought as a system' is apparently Bohm's answer to the question of 'what is the root cause' of mankind's perplexity and misadventures ("stupified" per '74 audio), and this '74 is where they are asking this question.

"We're in a terrible mess because there has been 10,000 years of stupidity".

p.s. found it: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAmzziUZMYuRIEeCImzmX...

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