Tacit Knowledge

A representative sentence from Bohm's chapter 6: "So the first point is: is it possible to suspend the action without suppressing it? If you finde it is not possible, then you observe the process of suppression without suppressing the suppression." The prose in these chapters often had me spinning in circles. If I understand, generally, what Bohm is talking about throughout these chapters, than I think this type of circular reasoning, reinforcement, and complicated simplicity forces his reader to enact his strategies for improving the communication gap. This style of writing gave me consistent emotional reactions, ones that I was aware of throughout the chapters.

While I wasn't always sure what was going on in Bohm, I was able to appreciate some his discussion of tacit knowledge. Bohm brings up tacit knowledge to explain the shift from incoherence to coherence (pages 89-91). For this change to take place, Bohm contends, must take place in the space of concrete thought itself. Abstract thought is not enough to take the mind from incoherence to coherence.

His example in this section is a familiar one, once you learn how to ride a bike yaddayaddayadd, but the idea of unconscious knowledge brought up another example in my mind. In 2006, Michael Pollan wrote a book called the Omnivore's Dilemma. Pollan, a journalism professor at UC Berkeley, traces a 'natural history' of three meals through the book, but in his introduction he meditates on a the dilemma facing all omnivoric animals in the world: how do I know what food is? It is truly an amazing thing to watch an animal approach an unknown object, and go through the steps to decide if that object is food or not. Where does this knowledge come from? How are certain omnivores so good at eating things that nourish them and ignoring things that might poison them? I think this is an apt example for a few reasons. First of all, the omnivore's ability to differentiate relies on evolutionary memory as well as learned memory. The second reason is that the tacit knowledge of what to eat impacts the actions of the omnivore as well. I'm not sure exactly how these two are connected, but hopefully rereading and discussing Bohm might make it easier to see.

Food and memory are strongly linked, no question. One reason this could be true is that, once upon a time, we had to make life-and-death decisions about what to eat and what to let be. The stronger our memory functioned in this realm, the more likely we were to learn from our previous mistakes. Perhaps this is less about memory and more about tacit knowledge.