David Bohm on limits and striving for finality and a solution:
“We’re not ever going to get a final essence which isn’t also the appearance of something.”
Bohm feared that belief in a final theory might become self-fulfilling. “If you have fish in a tank and you put a glass barrier in there, the fish keep away from it,” he noted. “And then if you take away the glass barrier they never cross the barrier and they think the whole world is that.” He chuckled drily. “So your thought that this is the end could be the barrier to looking further.” Trying to convince me that final knowledge is unattainable, Bohm offered the following argument:
“Anything known has to be determined by its limits. And that’s not just quantitative but qualitative. The theory is this and not that. Now it’s consistent to propose that there is the unlimited. You have to notice that if you say there is the unlimited, it cannot be different, because then the unlimited will limit the limited, by saying that the limited is not the unlimited, right? The unlimited must include the limited. We have to say, from the unlimited the limited arises, in a creative process. That’s consistent. Therefore we say that no matter how far we go there is the unlimited. It seems that no matter how far you go, somebody will come up with another point you have to answer. And I don’t see how you could ever settle that.”
To my relief, Bohm’s wife entered the room and asked if we wanted more tea.