By Mike Zonta, BB editor (and Google AI)

Me: What did David Bohm say about the the endarkenment?

• Google AI Overview

In his 1980 lecture and writings on “Knowledge as Endarkenment,” the physicist and philosopher David Bohm argued that accumulated human knowledge is frequently an active form of “misenarking” or self-deception. Instead of bringing clarity, our rigid collective thoughts and memory-driven assumptions lock us into cycles of fragmentation, conflict, and psychological blindness. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

The Core Idea of Endarkenment

• Active Misinformation: Bohm proposed that our pool of collective knowledge is thoroughly infected with unexamined assumptions, biases, and a false sense of separation between the observer and the observed. [1, 2]
• The Trap of the Ego: When people make mistakes driven by these fractured frameworks, they do not question the underlying thought process; instead, they blame others or double down on the error, which compounds human suffering. [, 2]
• Accumulated Memory vs. Living Insight: Real understanding requires breaking free from habitual mental patterns. True perception cannot happen when the mind merely reacts mechanically from dead memory and old information. [1]