This is the recording of our second Art of Being Human event with philosopher Adam Robbert. Adam is a philosopher by training, and a writer, editor, and researcher by vocation. His focus is on the relationship between practice and perception in the fields of philosophy, religion, and contemplation. He writes regularly on his newsletter, The Base Camp.
A summary of this conversation can be found here:
The Art of Being Human is an event series by Imbue for the exploration of the shared human questions in our technological age. Sign up to receive invites here.
KANJUN (OPENING REMARKS)
Hello, friends. If you’re standing, please get your food and come sit down. All right. Well, hello, everyone. Welcome to Imbue. My name is Kanjun. I’m the CEO and I’m really excited to have you all here for the second event in our Art of Being Human series.
I’ll talk a little bit about Imbue first. Imbue is a fairly radical AI company. Our mission is to make tech serve humans. By tech, we mean tech like the software we use and also the technology industry. And by serve, we mean that we want technology that serves us and is not exploiting us. Today, we live in a world where we are kind of exploited. I don’t like to put my phone in my room at night because I might end up scrolling Instagram till two a.m. Not my fault — somebody else is trying to hijack my attention for their own profit. We have this world where we have devices, and on those devices is a lot of stuff whose incentives are not fully aligned with ours. And we believe that as AI agents become more powerful, this exacerbates the problem. Agents are getting to a point — we think at the end of the year — where they’re starting to make decisions on our behalf and starting to represent us. And in that world, we want those agents to fully serve our interests, not the interests of others.
So that’s a lot of what Imbue does. We are basically trying to build toward an open agent ecosystem to combat monopoly power in tech, because we think monopoly power and centralization is what allows for this kind of exploitation. Our goal really is to increase the percent of people in the world who can use agents that are fully aligned to them, where your agents are fully expressing your own values and you own them — they’re yours. Maybe your data is local and yours. And over the next few months, we’ll be shipping a lot of tools toward that.
That’s one way we build toward this kind of future. But a second way we do that is by figuring out what it means to serve humans — what it means to be human in this world of very powerful technology, technology that can think. We thought that was our advantage, right? So the conversation today is about attention. Attention is one of our most precious resources as a human. I want to introduce Ashley, and she’ll introduce Adam. Ashley is our Storyteller at Imbue — she really does a lot of investigation into what it means to be human and figures out what we should stand for. She has the unique property of writing pieces where almost every piece she writes, I cry. So if you want to be crying, you can subscribe to her Substack. It’s called Soft Power. Without further ado, Ashley and Adam, welcome.
ASHLEY (INTRODUCTION)
It’s so wonderful to see new and familiar faces. This is the second of the Art of Being Human series, which I like to think of as a shared collective investigation into these human questions in our technological age. And I’m so excited to be here with Adam today, who is a proper philosopher and a writer and editor. He’s written this wonderful book, Practice in Still Life, a collection of fragments, essays, and lectures on the topic of attention and perception, introducing various traditions of thought.
Our first event was last month with my friend Nicholas Paul on the topic of thinking, which I thought flowed well into this topic. Someone actually asked a question about attention at the end. I think a lot of what we talked about was: how do we create the spaciousness and conditions to allow for expansive thinking? Thinking that is beyond the calculation of machines, thinking that is truly novel and expansive and builds upon this great project of the humanities and being human.
I’m excited to chat about attention today, which I think is one core aspect of thinking and also just being here in the world and finding your way through it. Adam has a very particular way of conceiving of attention that goes beyond a resource to be used, captured, and exploited — something that actually puts the power back in our hands as a practice, or as an art form, that we can cultivate in our everyday lives.
Conversation
ASHLEY: How did you get interested in attention as a topic? What is your perspective on it?
ADAM: Thank you all so much for being here. And thank you for inviting me. It’s a beautiful space, and I’m so glad we can all come together here to have important conversations like this one, in the heart of the city where a lot of the technologies we’ll talk about are being created and shared throughout the world.
My background is in philosophy, fairly broadly construed. I have a particular view on the philosophical tradition that opens out into areas you might call spiritual exercise, contemplative practice, various religious traditions, spiritual traditions, arts and religion — basically taking a full sweep of the humanities, but anchored in philosophy.
I started to look at philosophy first in the same way that most people do — as a tradition of texts and arguments and concepts, propositions, logical statements, things that you would debate over and argue over, the realm of reason and rationality. And I think that’s a very important layer of philosophy. I just don’t think it’s the whole of what philosophy is and does. As I started to deepen my inquiry, learning more about the deep tradition of the history of philosophy, I started to become aware of the reality that these statements, these arguments, these worldviews, these big philosophical systems were actually primarily grounded in a set of practices — practices that if we described them today, we would think of as spiritual exercises, meditative exercises, contemplative practices, more so than what you would get in a philosophy 101 survey course. But it became apparent to me that these practices were actually the medium or the vehicle by which philosophers came to the insights that they shared with the rest of us.
As I was looking over all of these practices, I realized that one set of practices felt more central than the others — or a lot of the other practices were actually based on the idea that they would support this central practice. And that practice is a practice of attention. I started to realize that one of the key philosophical moves or attitudes is this question of attention: what happens when we learn how to cultivate attention? What happens when we start to think about how our attention is shaped? There’s this idea that attention is just a flat, singular thing, but it’s not. My view is that attention is a very unique thing, a very particular thing, and it’s very rooted in your habits and practices. That’s how I came to this phrase: attention is an art form. It’s something that you can shape deliberately, on purpose. And for me, that became kind of the center of the rest of philosophy.
ASHLEY: What are these practices that you’ve come to understand as crucial to cultivating attention?
ADAM: There’s a famous story in Plato’s Symposium where the description we get of Socrates is that he’s there going to this symposium, this party — it’s a drinking party, they’re going to have a good time, they’re going to discuss philosophy. And Socrates kind of lags behind. The description we get of him is that he’s lost in thought, or in a sort of meditative trance. We hear from other people who knew Socrates that he would do this from time to time, sometimes for hours on end, just uninterrupted, silent meditative states. But when you look at the Greek, the most literal translation is that he turned his attention to his intellect — he turned his attention on himself, he turned his attention to his thinking. So this is kind of at the core of the Western philosophical tradition as we learn it from Plato: this whole idea of knowing yourself isn’t just about knowledge, not just understanding you as a biographical being, but this practice of turning your attention onto yourself in this meditative state.
If you look at some of the other practices — and there are many we could discuss — some tend to be more physical. There are practices of fasting. Fasting is something that shows up again and again in these traditions. There’s something about our relationship with food and how we take care of our physical body that’s very important. There are other connections with physical training. If you think about the physical setup of these ancient spaces, they were built in gymnasia — literal places where you would train your body physically. This was thought of as happening right alongside the philosophical inquiry you would find in the dialogues. So there’s this relationship between the fasting and the training of the body and the philosophical practice, all coming together in this sense of: how do you perform these contemplative maneuvers, this turning of your attention onto attention or onto yourself? And what are the supporting practices that help you do that?
If you move ahead a little bit into the late Roman and early Christian traditions, you get similar ideas: you live in a world full of distractions, a world that’s calling for your attention in different ways. Some of those things are good and virtuous to pursue, but a lot of them are leading you down the wrong path or encouraging the wrong thought patterns. So in those contexts we find practices of withdrawal. Think of monastic monks — they leave the city and go into a monastery. If you think of the gymnasium as designed for a certain kind of physical training, a monastery is designed for a certain kind of spiritual training. The whole space is designed to free you up from some of those distractions so you can focus on contemplation.
I’ll add a note: in a lot of the traditions, we also find that leaving is important, but the returning is just as important. Socrates is constantly talking about leaving the city and coming back to it, leaving the cave and going back into the cave. A lot of the practices are goods in themselves — the fasting, the physical training — but the language in some of these traditions is that they guard the stillness you need for contemplation. It’s in those moments of contemplation, of insight, that we then get some of these texts, some of the written words that come out of these traditions. But they’re impossible without the practices.
ASHLEY: I’m glad you brought up the question of returning, because we often have this sense that in order to live a more virtuous life, it requires a rejection of society, a kind of Thoreauvian retreat into the woods. But Plato and Socrates didn’t live in the time of TikTok and Twitter. Today, even beyond our devices, we walk outside and there are cars, billboards, so many things calling for our attention. Do you think we have to settle for this kind of compromised state — that we can guard our attention somewhat, but really, if we’re living in urban modernity, we have to accept some degree of constant distraction?
ADAM: Yes, I would think about it this way: our unique version of those distractions is particular to us, particular to our technologies, particular to our moment in time. But that struggle to maintain the attention, to maintain the practice, is present throughout human history. It is a perennial problem. We have texts of medieval monks — eleventh century monks living in their monasteries, stitching together their manuscripts — and we have commentary from these fellows to the effect of: I think these illuminated manuscripts are getting out of hand. The lettering is distracting from the text. It’s getting too visual. They’re having these debates about how this is robbing them of their attention.
Or think of Socrates in the Phaedrus, where he’s practically pulling his hair out about people starting to write. He’s like: this is going to end philosophy. People are going to just write things down instead of remembering them on their own. He’s looking at writing and going: this is putting us at real risk. We’re outsourcing something really important — our memory, our capacity for attention, our capacity to keep this sort of living set of insights within us and accessible to us without the use of technology. And now we all just accept that writing is part of the intellectual life.
You can see again and again that the shape and scope of the problems change, but the underlying dynamic is always there. And it comes back to this question of: what is the human being? And why would somebody like Socrates be concerned about the relationship between technology and what the human is? My view is basically that philosophy is not new to these problems. It’s the specific shape of the technology that is new. Maybe the level and scope is new, but these are problems that we’ve looked at before, things we’ve thought about before. We have a deep history of thinking about the human being in relation to technology. There are resources in the tradition that I think can help us today with our particular questions.
ASHLEY: The anecdote about writing touches on something beautiful and powerful about humanity — our ability to adapt. How do you think the act of philosophy, or thinking, or the practice of training our attention, will evolve as we incorporate new technologies and mediums and environments?
ADAM: If somebody tells you they know the answer to that question, that’s a little bit of a red flag. There are so many moving pieces in the technology itself. I don’t know if we understand what television has done to us — and that was a long time ago. We’re still trying to figure out the printing press, and there are new waves of technology coming after that.
Rather than trying to come up with a forecast or a prediction about some certain set of circumstances, the move instead would be to leverage this fact: humans are transformable through practice, and the practices give us new abilities. They give us a kind of facility. If you think of this athletic metaphor again — you’re training different kinds of agility, but instead of physical agility, you’re training a mental, spiritual, contemplative, and emotional agility. And I think that’s going to be a better approach, because you don’t know what the world’s going to look like in ten years. You don’t know what it’s going to look like in six months. But you can train your agility. You can train your lucidity. You can keep hold of your attention. You can return to the practice of attention: what’s happening, what’s going on, what’s important, am I being led down the wrong path here? Can I pull myself back?
That kind of withdrawal we were talking about — monks going to a monastery — can take all kinds of small shapes, all kinds of small maneuvers. You can have a little space in your home, a little space in your office. It can be a kind of sacred space, a contemplative space. The word contemplation — that suffix, templation, is the same root we have in the word temple. It’s literally marking out a space, a clearing, for that practice. And what do you do? You wait, you practice. You wait for insights. You don’t necessarily sit there thinking you have all the answers. You give yourself some time to breathe, some space to do it.
Just in terms of this question of the human being: one universal fact that I think is true of all humans is that we are, in some important sense, open-ended. That’s why we have education, why we have these different cultural traditions passed down from generation to generation. If you look at a horse that had just given birth, the foal has been out for literally a couple of hours and it’s already running, already galloping — it kind of knows what to do. Humans aren’t like that. We are open-ended. We come out and we need a lot from the outside. We need a lot from the culture, from the tradition, from history, from our communities. But we also have this curious quality of being able to shape ourselves through practices. And that open-endedness is precisely what allows us to develop into the kinds of people we want to be — but it’s also the open-endedness that leaves us vulnerable to this kind of capture that we started with. There’s something up for grabs. We’re not set. We can be directed in different directions by algorithms, by news media, by politics, by propaganda, by all of these kinds of things. But it’s because we’re open-ended, and the practices are what give us the agility to make sure we’re going in the direction we think we should be going.
ASHLEY: I love this concept of open-endedness, because I think — especially in San Francisco — there’s a collective anxiety about becoming obsolete. There’s this sense of resignation every time there’s a new technical capability or a benchmark we set for ourselves gets crossed. But our lives are so expansive, and it feels like such a disservice to think of life as a series of benchmarks to hit. There is that anxiety, though — when there are so many possibilities open to you, you can train your attention anywhere. How do you know what is worthy of bestowing your attention?
ADAM: In some sense, that is the question. My response would be something like: I have a belief in human beings that we have a sort of innateness to us, an innate calling towards something. If you look at the word philosophy, it means love of wisdom — not knowledge of wisdom. It’s philosophy. And the reason for that is because in the love, there’s a kind of desire, an impulse, a longing of being drawn toward something that’s guiding you. You don’t know what it is. There’s a mystery there. But you have some kind of an intuition, a kind of a conscience. Maybe if I follow it, something will happen. I think that’s a good place to start.
The other thing I would say is that we are not the first people who have asked: what is actually good to do? What is the good? What is goodness? What is virtue? The world traditions have many answers to these questions, and they tend to collect around a series of ideas and concepts and practices that can clarify why these teachers said what they said. So I think part of it is having some faith that you as a human being have a conscience that can tell you something about what to do, and that you actually have a community — both here and in history — that can help you navigate that.
I don’t think those two things are actually that circumstantial. If you look at history, we’ve gone through many phases of what today we would call existential threats or crises, real turns in civilization. And people have thought about it. They have answers to these questions, or at least they have attitudes or stances that will help you navigate them. I feel like we’re in one of those moments right now, with this rapidly expanding AI technology. But having to deal with new and novel things isn’t new. We’re actually quite good at that. And as long as we’re thinking about it, we tend to be quite good at the things we can see coming. We think about them a lot. We navigate, we adapt. Practice is what’s going to make you more adaptable and also more able to transform the thing that’s coming into a shape that might be more livable.
ASHLEY: You’ve touched on a few practices — walking, writing, meditation. Can you go deeper into that? And also both individual practices and more relational or communal practices?
ADAM: One thing I’ll say about practices is that I think we’ve gotten into a mode — and I’ll speak for myself, this is very biographical — where we’ve lost the cohesive community context in which these practices used to live. In history, when you think about religious practices, philosophical practices, spiritual exercises, these were things done in a fairly cohesive community. If you were born in fourteenth-century England, you were probably going to be born a Catholic into a family of Catholics, and the whole social system was organized around these sets of practices. Time took on a different shape — there was a liturgy to the way the year processed. There were different things you did at different times of the year, and everybody around you was following the same calendar. You were kind of synced up.
We don’t really have that experience — a lot of people in the Bay Area don’t have that experience — because for many good reasons, we decided that politics and governance should be rooted in the primacy of the individual. There are all these gains from that. But I think what we lose is that sense of collectivity. And so one of the things I think we’re groping toward right now, dealing with these larger existential crises, is that our individual, idiosyncratic practices aren’t quite enough to get at the problem. The question of how AI technology is going to change society is such a big one. You might go crazy if you just try to address it as an individual subject doing your own inwardly facing practice. So rather than focusing on specific exercises, I would think more about: what’s the collectivity here? Does something change when we perform these practices together, when we have these discussions together, when we do this kind of group, collective activity of thinking about these problems together? I think the equation changes quite a bit.
ASHLEY: You spoke earlier about the temple and creating a sacred space where contemplation can be practiced. What are the conditions that allow for this kind of collective practice to emerge?
ADAM: There’s an institutional component, and a component of lineage. There’s a physical, architectural component. We’re lucky to have spaces like this one where we can come together and talk. This affords us a different kind of interaction, a different kind of grip on the problem, by coming together. So I think architecture and design — including the design of technological artifacts, apps, and the way we engage with media — there’s a lot of opportunity for designers and architects and people thinking about arts and aesthetics to help us re-envision new forms of collective practice and collective exercise. And we don’t have to reinvent the wheel. There are good examples in history for how to do this.
The one I think about the most, coming from an academic background, is the university system. I’m very much looking at: what has the university become? Is it really fulfilling its mission of giving us a unified understanding of both what the universe is and what the human being is — how the two relate, how we should act, what we should do, what we should care about? Are they really fulfilling that mission? Especially in the humanities, we see a lot of decline — a lot of decline in enrollment, departments closing. There’s a whole generation of tenured professors retiring that I don’t think are going to be replaced.
But if you look at history, the roots of philosophy in the West have only an incidental relationship to the university. There’s about fifteen hundred years of some of the most influential philosophical activity happening before the university even comes on the scene. So there are different ways of thinking collectively, different institutional ways of arranging these things where we can do this as a group, with some rigor, with some historical influence, but also with some novelty appropriate to our times. The technology is also making new things possible. There are things we can do now that we couldn’t have done without it, in terms of connecting the right people and sharing and disseminating ideas. So there’s a lot of optimism, honestly, from my perspective, alongside all these dangers.
ASHLEY: Can there be a collective organizing or coordination of attention that isn’t top-down? Whenever I think about this, my sense is there’s always some authority figure who’s like, this is what’s good, this is what’s important, this is what we should be valuing and thinking about. But can there be a more bottom-up, democratic sense of collectively figuring out what is worthy of our attention? How do we create the conditions that foster that?
ADAM: Bottom-up is the approach, and even bottom-up and regional. San Francisco probably needs something particular to San Francisco. New York needs something particular to New York. There’s this sense that where you are in space matters — just as time has a qualitative characteristic in some of these traditions, place has the same. So it makes more sense to think about what a bottom-up, ecological approach to institution-building would look like — one that would do some of the things you’re describing. What we’ve been trying is a top-down, monoculture, universalistic approach to institutions, especially if you think of universities. There’s a lot of top-down energy to them, and I don’t think it’s serving their mission very well.
ASHLEY: I’m curious for your take on the attention economy as a concept and attention as a resource. Do you think that’s a helpful or accurate framework, especially as we’re trying to wrangle our attention from so many distractions, devices, and things calling for it?
ADAM: It’s really important to think about the kinds of things you’re paying attention to, because the kinds of things you pay attention to become part of who you are. There’s an important piece here about memory. The reason that practice works is because you have this capacity for memory — not necessarily just memorization of facts. Human memory doesn’t work like a file system on a computer. You can upload any kind of file to a computer, and the hardware doesn’t reorganize around the content. But you do. Your memories actually reorganize your sense of who you are as a person, which is why we sound like we come from a certain place, why we pick up the language. Your memory is reorganizing your day-to-day perception of the common-sense world — syncing with it down to the level of your physical sensations and physical perceptions of things, up to your more abstract intellectual thinking. So your memory is very important. It’s really important to tend to your memory and to think of it as a kind of living ecosystem, a living part of your perception, a living part of your acting.
There’s a woman named Eleanor Robins — I don’t know if you’ve read her, she has a great Substack and writes a lot about memory — and she created this metaphor that really stuck with me: if you accept this view of memory as a kind of living thing that is reorganizing you at a really fundamental level, and what you’re paying attention to and what gets lodged in your memory is this kind of industrialized, flat, repetitive landscape of inputs, then you’re kind of creating — she uses the metaphor of a desert — your inner life is becoming a desert. Your memory is in this process of desertification. But you can be the gardener of that. You’re in charge. You can read different books, listen to different music, have different conversations, connect more meaningfully with other kinds of people, create these other kinds of memories and re-enliven that inner garden. And that’s going to transform your perception.
If you think of it that way, and then you think about what you’re doing in the attention economy — you’re kind of monocropping your inner life with a certain set of content on social media. And I think basically every human being, even spiritually advanced people, struggles with their phones. There’s something about it that is really addictive. It’s really designed for us to use over and over again. And there are uses there — I find a lot of interesting things on the internet, I find interesting essays, I solve a lot of problems out there. But it comes back to the intentionality: is this serving me, or is it serving the company who’s trying to sell me ads? You have to guard that. You have to protect that. If you feel susceptible to it, engage in some of these practices: try to make yourself more lucid and agile in those moments, and then do simple things. Put your phone in the other room. Basic withdrawal activities. And don’t underestimate just the amount of money and resources that’s after your attention specifically. All of those algorithms are so honed in to you as a person. You need to be careful. You need to guard it. You can change, and you can change your relationship to it.
ASHLEY: Simone Weil, the French mystic and philosopher, had this saying: ‘We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will.’ When I first read it, I thought it was nice and then I chewed on it. I think willpower is closely tied with attention — at least in the beginning, when you’re trying to train or attune your attention, especially if you’re resisting these external forces. It feels like the will is attention in some way. What do you think of the relation between the two?
ADAM: Simone Weil is a fantastic person to think with about these questions. If you don’t know her work and you’re interested in anything related to what we’re talking about, she’s a great writer and thinker to get familiar with. The other person who also writes about Simone Weil is another Simone — Simone Kotova — and she writes exactly about this paradox or contradiction. She has a book called Effort and Grace, and it’s exactly about this relationship: the practices have something to do with effort, with willpower, with your desire, your force, the repetitious nature of your disciplined activity. But on some level, that’s not really enough. That’s not really the deepest part of the practice.
The deepest part — and I think contemplation is different from attention in this way — is where attention is this kind of concentrated, one-pointed fixedness where you’re really focused on something, but contemplation has more of this character of letting go and letting be. Giving up the project of willful change and just sitting. Sitting in what? Sitting in silence, sitting in receptivity, giving up the project of seeking and just seeing what happens when you give space to not seeking — seeing if in that space of grace, something else doesn’t emerge, if things don’t show up to you differently.
A lot of these practices, especially thinking of attention as an art form, are really about how you get things to show up for you in your first-person experience. We don’t all share the same physical experience even of the physical objects in the room. Everything has to do with our training, our knowledge, our education, our experience. Things are showing up differently to each of us. Some people have great expertise at, say, how to design a space — physical space is showing up to them in a particular way because of their attention practices. So there are all these ways in which you’re trying to train your attention to see things from another angle, to see another level of detail that other people aren’t getting, or to understand or interpret a kind of meaning that other people might be missing.
But then there’s this other move, this contemplative move, which is more like: I’m going to stop trying to figure out and understand. I’m going to let go. And actually in that space — that’s typically, for me at least, where the thing I was looking for kind of shows up. But there isn’t really a program for that. There isn’t a way to make that happen on command, but you can give it space to happen. I think this is what Simone Weil is talking about. She talks a lot about waiting — waiting for years, sometimes. And how central that is to a deeper kind of philosophical insight. That might be one of the essential moves in a time where there’s never not something to pay attention to. Withdrawing from that and just sitting. Sitting in the silence. Sitting in the emptiness. Sitting in the darkness. There’s no goal. There’s nothing else on the other side of it. And then, as Weil describes, some interesting things might happen.
— Audience Q&A —
AUDIENCE: Thank you for the educational talk. If someone were to ask you, beyond name and form, who are you — how would you answer that question? And secondly, knowing who you are, what would you define as surrender?
ADAM: Beyond name and form. That’s a good example of a question that you could just sit and wait with. The philosopher in me wants to say something like: I am a space in which meaning emerges. A certain kind of understanding takes shape through the activity that is me, and that shape and that understanding has a responsibility and a uniqueness to it — as an expression of the rest of reality, as an expression of the rest of the universe. As a human being, we are a unique kind of opening where we can even ask and reflect on that question. And I think we are in some sense responsible for how that makes us act and how that affects other people and the earth as a whole.
ASHLEY: I would say something similar, but perhaps less poetic: just the collection of kind of experiences, but also histories and stories along the lineage long before you. And to the question of surrender — I believe that we have free will to some degree. We have our willpower, our agency, and that’s very valuable and something I care about. But part of surrender is being like: whoever you are is shaped by forces beyond your control.
AUDIENCE: We’re at an AI company, and I wonder: when we use terms like attention, perception, contemplation, consciousness, thinking, judgment — is that something we should even consider attributing to large language models or digital computation? Because when I think back at prior media technologies — whether it’s Socrates worrying about writing or the printing press — no one was worried that books could think or perceive or were conscious on their own. And now we’re tempted to imagine that these digital technologies actually have attention, make decisions, are agents. How would you think through those questions?
ADAM: Those are open-ended questions, and I think the answer you would give would probably change maybe month to month, year to year. That whole packet of terms — judgment, thinking, decision, attention — I think we’re anthropomorphizing the system to a large degree. There’s a great essay by Yuk Hui on LLMs — maybe two years ago now — basically still thinking about them along the lines of a human prosthetic. They’re an extension of us, and will likely remain an extension of us. So we’re still doing the judging, the directing, and the attending, and they are executing on that. I don’t have one hundred percent confidence that that’s true, but I do think that in order for something to be a judgment in the same sense that a living human being makes a judgment, it has to have a point of view, and it has to have a kind of self-awareness. And I don’t see that in the systems we have today. And I don’t see how scaling up these systems will by itself create that.
ASHLEY: I don’t have a robust answer to whether it’s accurate to apply these terms to these systems. But what I can say is: I’m glad that this new technological wave has raised these questions and inspired us to examine these terms more closely. There’s this sense that before, we kind of took things like thinking and agency for granted — we all participate in these activities without really, mostly, inquiring as to what the purpose of these things are, and why we engage in them. And I think now, in this anxiety to try to differentiate ourselves from machines, we’re being pushed to understand them better. And also to understand ourselves — what we do, in what ways it’s different from the ways machines work.
KANJUN: One way I think about agents is that they are actually taking on a lot of the things that humans do today, and they do make judgments. They have a point of view, quote-unquote. But that point of view is not necessarily determined by them — it’s determined by someone or something else. You could say that maybe all humans don’t have a point of view that’s fully determined by us, but we have a kind of open-ended process where, from our perceptual experience, our own point of view will evolve. And that’s something agents are missing today. That doesn’t mean that in three years they’re still going to be missing that. Continual learning and open-endedness — it’s totally possible that they will have some of these properties that humans have. They don’t seem to have this thing we have: this awareness, attention, workspace where we’re recombining things. But maybe that’s just an experience we have and they have a different experience. It’s hard to tell.
AUDIENCE: Do you think our experience with LLMs and ML models would be a sort of attempt at self-recognition — the same way that we do when we meet someone else and try to make them see ourselves? But those models are actually only mirrors, and we are confusing them with subjects. And do you actually think that we can create semantic mathematical models to understand how attention is harnessed, to reverse the effects of it by creating some sort of semantic model of subjectivity, of the way we make sense of reality through meaning? Do you think this can be formalized and implemented?
ADAM: I’m skeptical. A living organism, I think, is organized in a particular way on purpose, such that it actually does reflect a kind of underlying order in the universe that gives rise to it and maybe even beyond it. And the way that, as I understand it, the technology is being organized — if it does create something like that, it’ll be along a completely different line. I don’t think it’ll be like us. But I do think that as it stands right now, when you’re interacting with these platforms, that is what you’re doing: you’re getting this kind of reflection back to you based on your inputs, based on your inquiries. And in some sense, the question of the algorithm on social media is transferring over into the way some of these LLMs are being designed — in order to capture your attention. They have increasingly good memory about your previous inquiries and where to guide you. But I think that’s all a reflection of you in a certain sense, in the same way that your social media feed is a reflection of some part of you. It’s not giving you the same connection you will have with another human being. I do think engagement with other humans is going to be the key thing, and I don’t think that’s replaceable.
ASHLEY: I do think broadly, technologies reflect the values of their creators and also the incentives that govern the values of their creators. That’s my high-level answer, but I’m very curious about this. I think there are some researchers in the room — if people have takes, find us afterward and we can chat about this.
AUDIENCE: These practices — whether individually or communally — are they sustainable or even real without a common object of love that the individual or the community possesses? And are we even capable of identifying what that is on our own in a way that will be sustaining and orienting enough to free us from the distractions around us?
ADAM: I’m glad you asked that. I do think in some sense, love is at the center of what pulls these practices forward. Attention is itself a question of what we love and what we care about and what we’re concerned about. Intellectual activity is often thought of as being centered in the mind, in the brain, in concepts and language and reason. But a lot of these practices, some of the words used to describe them in the scholarship, are cardiocentric. If you think again about the Christian monastic practices of contemplative prayer — Cloud of Unknowing is a great anonymously authored thirteenth-century text — it’s basically about sitting in the love of God. The reason for that is that there are these transcendental questions of ultimacy that knowledge actually can’t attain to. There’s something about knowledge that is perspectival, circumstantial, tied to a more empirical sense of reality. What goes beyond that — in the Cloud author’s language — is love. This kind of loving devotion is both what gets you to care about the practice and drives the practice, and is, if done right, what the practice is actually developing. The loving devotion is absolutely central. And that gets lost in our very overly intellectualized environment.
ASHLEY: That question reminded me again of a Simone Weil quote — love being the rarest and purest form of generosity. In that framing, it feels very abundant. And I think the words we use really shape the way we conceive of things. Right now the language we use around attention feels really aggressive. I often find that something like generosity — bestowing attention — feels quite beautiful in that way. There’s also the poet Mary Oliver, who wrote a lot about attention, and she has this one essay where she writes that attention without feeling is just a report. There’s something about what we’re called toward — what speaks to us — that’s a movement of our soul or emotions, and that’s often overlooked in these conversations. Love and attention. I think they’re so closely intertwined.
AUDIENCE: You said that memory drives a lot of where our attention goes, and naturally I would say that what you value — your virtues, your interests — is going to drive what you consume and what you store as memory. Does attention follow value, virtue, and interest? Or is it the inverse — that interests, values, and virtue are actually following attention?
ADAM: I think they have a complex relationship. What you value tends to be what you attend to. But what makes any of this philosophical is this act of trying to give words to these processes: how do my values guide my attention? How does attention transform my values? You can go through life without examining much of any of this — without a firm sense of why you care about the things you care about, or whether you should care about other things. All of this stuff takes on a new tone when you start to ask questions like this.
ADAM: The way to think about it: values are driving what you pay attention to. But as you pay attention and follow those values, your sense of how to judge and enact those values changes. This is Aristotle’s point — ethics is a practice, a habit. You practice by imitating virtuous people and that starts to transform who you are as a person. But as that happens, your sense of judgment increases, your sense of being able to pick out — if you think of perception in a physical sense, about the lights and everything in this physical space, there’s also moral perception. What is moral character? What is moral behavior? What is right in this particularly complex, concrete situation? That’s the kind of stuff that attention starts to bring to the surface if you’re engaged in these self-reflective practices. So there’s a reciprocality there: the values are transforming your attention and the attention is deepening your understanding of the values.
ASHLEY: This reminded me of the writer Jenny Odell, who wrote How to Do Nothing. She has this anecdote about over Covid, she would go to a local park and watch birds. Over time, she became curious about what types of birds they were and would look them up. This sense of attuning her attention to these birds and understanding them more deeply helped her see the world in a deeper, richer way. The more you pay attention, the more things come into your purview, the more details you’re able to see. There’s a cycle — the world, kind of unfolding itself to you the more attention you pay to it. There’s some reciprocality to it.
AUDIENCE: When we look at things that draw our attention today — like social media or AI — I always viewed it as the outcome of economic incentives. But when you mentioned that back then they were talking about block printing being too gaudy and grabbing attention, do you think we have an innate desire to create things that grab attention, or is it an accidental outcome of creating better technologies?
ADAM: I think a lot of our relationship to technology is inevitable, and so the question of how to steer it is actually the question. Let me share a very quick story — it’s a myth, Plato again. How many of you know Prometheus? Most people. How many of you know about Epimetheus? A couple. In the Protagoras, Socrates tells this story of Epimetheus and Prometheus — a story that the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler has made a lot of, and if you’re interested in the relationship between humans and technology, Stiegler is a great resource for this.
ADAM: Basically: Epimetheus and Prometheus are called Titans, given this task by the gods. Epimetheus is given the task of assigning essential skills or characteristics to all of the creatures on Earth, including human beings. He gives turtles a shell. He gives tigers claws and teeth. He gives birds the ability to fly. All the creatures get these unique skills — and he forgets the human beings. He’s a little absent-minded. Then Prometheus comes over and says, how did it go? Epimetheus says, yeah, mostly fine. And Prometheus looks around, seeing all these creatures with real abilities, and he looks at the humans and says, what about these guys? Epimetheus: I forgot.
ADAM: So we’re running around — and this goes to our open-endedness again — we don’t get one of those innate skills. Prometheus then takes the fire. But it’s actually two things: the fire and technê — technology. He goes and gives us that knowledge because we don’t have an innate skill. And so instead of an innate characteristic, we have this ability to externalize ourselves through technology. This isn’t something that we have separate from who we are. This is part of who we are. Regardless of where we are in history, whatever part of the world, whatever time — past or future — if there are human beings there, they’re going to be technological beings, because we don’t have any other means to get around. The question of technology is part of the essence of who we are. Our essence is, in some sense, outside of us.
ADAM: Stiegler also says: this is why we have to tell each other stories. This is why we have to create schools and universities and cultures where we transmit knowledge — orally or through the written word — to the next generation every time again. We need some means of transmitting that across generations in that technology. The reason this comes up, and I find this a compelling story about the human being, is that this is part of who we are. There’s no back-to-the-land, let’s-abandon-technology option. It’s in some sense part of what being human is. So the question of practice in relation to the technê, in relation to technology, is where philosophy comes in, where thinking comes in, where transformation comes in. We can transform ourselves through practice and culture, and we can transform ourselves through technology. And ideally, we have some kind of wisdom guiding the practice, guiding the transformation, that can feed into how we build the technologies. But the technologies are always going to be there.
