Attention as an Art Form - by Ashley Zhang and Adam Robbert

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SPEAKER 3

0:00Hello, everyone. Welcome to Imbue. My name is Kan Jun. 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. You know, I don't like to put my phone in my room at night because I might end up scrolling Instagram till 2am. not my fault. Somebody else is trying to hijack my attention for their own profit. And so we have this world where we have devices, and on those devices is a lot of stuff whose incentives is not fully aligned with ours. 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, we're definitely in the singularity. We think at the end of the year, agents will get to a point 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. And so that's a lot of what Imbued 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. And so 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. So if you're interested in it, feel free to follow us, subscribe, whatever it is you want to do. That's one way we build toward this kind of future. But a second way we do that is by figuring out, what does it mean to serve humans? What does it mean to be human in this world of very powerful technology? And technology that can think. We thought that that was our advantage, right? And so the conversation today is about attention. And we'll have Adam and Ashley chatting. Attention is one of our most precious resources as a human. And they'll have thought about it a lot more, and we'll be talking more about it. I want to introduce Ashley, and she'll introduce Adam. Ashley is our storyteller at Imbue. So Ashley really does a lot of investigation into what it means to be human and figures out what we should stand for. And 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 sub stack. It's called Soft Power. And without further ado, Ashley and Adam, welcome.

SPEAKER 2

3:21Hi, welcome. It's so wonderful to see new and familiar faces. This is the second of this Art of Being Human series, which is I think I like to think of it as like 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 writer and editor. He's written this wonderful book, Practice in Still Life, which is a collection of fragments, essays, and lectures on the topic of attention and perception and introducing various traditions of thought. Our first event was last month with my friend Nicholas Paul on the topic of thinking, which I thought really flowed well into this topic. Someone actually asked the 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. So I'm excited to chat about attention today, which I think is like one core aspect of thinking and also just being here in the world and find your way through it. And I think Adam has a very particular way of conceiving of attention that is beyond, I think, a resource to be used and captured and exploited, and something that actually puts the power back in our hands as a practice or as an art form that we can practice in our everyday lives. So I'll let you, I guess, give first an overview of how did you get interested in attention as a topic? What is your perspective on it?

SPEAKER 1

5:14Yeah, sure. 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 that I'm sure we'll talk about are being created and shared throughout the world. So thank you for having me. As Ashley mentioned, my background is in philosophy, fairly broadly construed, I would say. I have a particular view on the philosophical tradition that opens out into areas or disciplines that you might call spiritual exercise, contemplative practice, various religious traditions, spiritual traditions, religion, arts and religion, basically sort of kind of taking a full sweep of the humanities, but anchored in philosophy. And when I talk about philosophy, I'll just say a little bit about my perspective and how I got to attention as a philosophical topic. 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 concepts. 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. And as I started to deepen my inquiry into my philosophical path, learning more about, you know, 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 describe them today, we would think of as spiritual exercises, meditating. exercises, contemplative practices, more so than philosophy, more so than what you would think of what you would get in a sort of a philosophy 101 course, a survey course. But it became apparent to me that these practices were and we can get into what some of them are, were actually sort of the medium or the vehicle by which philosophers came to the insights that they shared with the rest of us. And as I was looking over all of these practices, I realized that one of the set of practices kind of 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. So I started to realize that actually one of the key philosophical insights or one of the key philosophical moves or attitudes is this question of attention. And what happens when we learn how to cultivate attention? What happens when we start to think about how our attention is shaped, right? There's this idea that attention is just a flat singular thing, but it's not. My view is that this is a very unique thing. It's a very particular thing and it's very rooted in your habits and practices. So 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 that, for me, that became kind of like the center to the rest of philosophy.

SPEAKER 2

8:36So then I'm curious, what are these practices that you've come to understand as like crucial to cultivating attention?

SPEAKER 1

8:43Yeah, so if we look at the tradition, there's a famous story in Plato's Symposium where the description we get of Socrates is that they're 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, right? And... the description we get of him is that he's kind of lost in thought or he's in this sort of meditative trance, right? And we hear from other people who knew Socrates that he would do this from time to time. And sometimes he would do it for hours on end, just uninterrupted, sort of silent meditative states. But when you look at the Greek of the description, Sometimes it says he was lost in thought, or sometimes his mind was wandering or something like that. But the actual, the most literal translation is that he turned his attention to his intellect, or he turned his attention on himself, or he turned his attention to his thinking. Right. And so this is kind of at the core of the Western philosophical tradition, as we learn it from Plato, that this whole idea of knowing yourself isn't just about this kind of, you know, this question of knowledge, this question of like understanding you as a biographical being, but this practice of turning your attention onto yourself in this meditative state, this kind of meditative inquiry. And if you look at some of the other practices, there are many of them we could discuss, but some of them tend to be more physical. There are practices of fasting. Fasting is something that shows up again and again in these traditions. This is something that's emerging again today. relationship with food and how we take care of our physical body that's very important. There's other connections with physical training. You know, if you think about the setup, the physical setup of these physical spaces, they were built in gymnasia like literal places where you would train your body physically and this was thought of as sort of happening right alongside of the philosophical inquiry that you would you know be familiar with reading the dialogues right so there's this relationship between the fasting and the training of the body and the philosophical practice and this all comes together I think in this sense of like One, how do you perform these kind of contemplative maneuvers, this kind of turning your attention onto attention or onto yourself? And what are the supporting practices that help you do that, right? So if you move ahead a little bit into the late Roman and early Christian traditions, you get these similar ideas that you have... You live in a world full of distractions. You live in a world that's calling for your attention in different ways. Some of those things are good and virtuous things to pursue, but a lot of them are kind of leading you down the wrong path. They're encouraging the wrong thought patterns. They're leading you off the way of truth and goodness and all these other things that we want to cultivate. So in those contexts, we find like these practices of like withdrawal, right? Like you think of like monastic monks, like they leave the city, they leave the town, and they go into a monastery. That whole monastery, again, it's like if you think of the gymnasium, the gymnasium is designed for a certain kind of physical training. A monastery is designed for a certain kind of spiritual training. And the whole space is designed to kind of free you up. from some of those distractions, from some of those other commitments, so that you can then focus on this practice of contemplation. But I will say, I'll just add a note to that, that in a lot of the traditions, we also find that that leaving is important, but the returning is also just as important. So Socrates is, you know, he's constantly talking about, you know, leaving the city and coming back to it, leaving the cave and going back into the cave. So we have all of these practices. And in a way, they're kind of goods in themselves, right? Like the fasting, the physical training. These are goods in themselves. But they also kind of the language that we get in some of these traditions is that they guard the stillness that you need for contemplation. So there's all these practices, and it's in those moments of contemplation, of insight, that I think we then get some of these texts, some of these insights, some of the written words that come out of these traditions that then circulate in the books and the history that we know. But they're impossible without the practices.

SPEAKER 2

13:10I'm glad that you brought up the question of returning, because I think we often have this sense of, in order to live a more virtuous life in some way. It requires this rejection of society, almost like a Therovian retreat into the woods. But I also, I guess, Plato and Socrates didn't live in the time of TikTok and Twitter. And today, even beyond our devices, we walk outside. There are cars. There are billboards. There are so many things calling for our attention. Do you think we have to settle for this kind of compromised state of like, we can kind of guard our attention, but really if we're living in this urban modernity, we have to accept some degree of constant distraction?

SPEAKER 1

13:58Yes. Darn. I was hoping you'd say I have a solution. I would think about it this way. Our unique version of those distractions is, is particular to us, it's particular to our technologies, it's particular to our moment in time, but that struggle to maintain the intention, to maintain the practice is present throughout human history. It is a perennial problem. We have texts of like medieval monks. These are like 11th century monks living in their monasteries and they're stitching together their manuscripts and books, which used to be a very complicated thing before the printing press. And we have commentary from these fellows to the effect of saying things like, I think these illuminated manuscripts are getting out of hand. I think the lettering here is distracting from the text. you know, um, and it's, it's getting too visual. It's not really focused on the content. It's like, you know, they're trying to be appealing in a certain way. And so they're having these debates of like, you know, this is, this is robbing us of our attention. Or if you think of, uh, if you think of Socrates again, there's this whole section in the Phaedrus where he's like pulling his hair out about people starting to write, you know, he's like, this is going to end philosophy. Like, people are going to just write things down instead of remembering them on their own, you know, and there's, there's an interesting conversation about what he means there, right? I think maybe we can talk a little bit about memory later. But, you know, he's, he's looking at this and going like, this is putting us at real risk, you know, like, this is like, we're outsourcing something really important, our memory, our capacity for attention, our capacity to like, keep the sort of living set of insights within us and accessible to us without the use of technology. And, you know, I think we now we all kind of just accept that writing is part of the intellectual life. It's part of philosophy. It's as I've been saying, it's not the whole of philosophy, but you can see again and again that the shape and scope of the problems change, but like the underlying dynamic is always there. And I think it comes back to this question of like, what is the human being? And why would somebody like Socrates be concerned about the relationship between technology, between writing and what the human is? And I think there's a lot of interesting inquiry there. And I think we all have that intuition that we like technology, we want technology, we want to develop certain kinds of technology. But as we heard in the intro to this talk, even there's a risk, there's always a risk with technology. And what's at stake is who we are as people, right? And so my view is basically like, Philosophy is not new to these problems. The specific shape of the technology is new. Maybe the sort of the level and scope is new. But these are problems that we've looked at before. These are things that 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.

SPEAKER 2

17:07That's funny, the anecdote about writing. And I think it also touches on something that I think is really quite beautiful about and powerful about humanity is our ability to adapt. And I'm curious if you think the act of philosophy or thinking or the practice of it and training our attention, how do you feel like it will evolve in this, I guess, world today as we incorporate new technologies and mediums and environments?

SPEAKER 1

17:33Yeah, I mean, I think if somebody tells you they know the answer to that question, that's a little bit of a red flag, I think. Like... there are so many moving pieces, you know, in the technology itself. I don't know if we understand what television has done to us, you know, like, and that was a long time ago, like, we're still trying to figure out the printing press, you know, and there's new technologies, waves after waves of technology coming after that. So I think, I think rather than my approach would be like, thinking again of practice, instead of trying to come up with, like a forecast or a prediction about some certain set of circumstances, The move would be instead to leverage this fact that 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 like a physical agility, you're training a mental, spiritual ability. kind of contemplative and emotional agility, right? 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 10 years. You don't know what it's going to look like in six months, you know, 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. Okay, what's happening? What's going on? What's important? Am I being led down the wrong path here? What's going on? I can pull myself back. Can I use some of these practices of withdrawal? You know, in withdrawal, we were talking about, you know, monks going to a monastery, but that kind of withdrawal can take all kinds of small shapes, all kinds of small maneuvers. You can have a little space in your home. You can have a little space in your office. That's, it's kind of a, you know, I don't want to sound cheesy about it, but it can be kind of a sacred space, a contemplative space. You know, if you think about the word contemplation, that word templation is the same suffix that we have in the word temple. It's literally like 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 and think that, oh, I know what's going on and I have the answer. You give yourself some time to breathe. You give yourself some space to do it. And I think just in terms of this question of the human being, One, one universal fact that I think is true of all humans is that we are in some important sense, open ended. So we have, that's why we have education, right? That's why we have these different cultural traditions that are passed down to us from generation to generation. If you look at, I was just speaking of social media, I just saw this clip of a, you know, this horse that had just given birth to a little baby horse. Is that a calf? I don't know if it's a calf, but you know, this little being has been out for literally a couple of hours and it's already running. It's already galloping and it kind of knows what to do. You know, there's mom, there's the community there, you know, it's kind of giving it feedback here and there, but 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. We need a lot from the tradition, need a lot from history, from our communities, but we also have this curious quality of being able to shape ourselves through these practices. And those practices and that open-endedness is precisely what gets us into a place where, you know, we can develop into the kinds of people that 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 there. We're not set and 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 that facility, that agility to kind of make sure that we're going in the direction we think we should be going in, right? So there's a kind of athleticism to that.

SPEAKER 2

21:44I love this concept of open-endedness because I think it also, I feel like there's this, especially in San Francisco, collective anxiety about becoming obsolete. And I think there's kind of this resignation of like, oh geez, every time there's this like new technical capability and it's, you know, LLMs can, they've reached this benchmark that we set for ourselves. And I'm kind of like, even as individuals, it's like we don't know who we're going to become. We have these goals that we can set for ourselves. But I feel like it's the sense of our lives are so expansive, and it feels like such a disservice to kind of think of life as a series of benchmarks that hit. But I also think there is that anxiety, um, we talked about this last time of, um, of freedom, I suppose, or kind of when there are so many possibilities open to you, um, you can train your attention anywhere. How do you know what is worthy of, you know, bestowing your attention?

SPEAKER 1

22:37Yeah. I mean, in some sense that is the question, right. Um, and you know, my response to that would be something like, um, I have a belief in human beings that we have a sort of innateness to us and an innate calling towards something. And if you look at the word philosophy, the word means love of wisdom, right? But it doesn't mean knowledge of wisdom. It's not, it's not a, what would that be? Logo? logosophy or something, or sophology. It's philosophy. And the reason for that is because in the love, there's a kind of a desire or an impulse, a longing of being drawn towards something that's guiding you. You don't know what it is. There's a mystery there. But you think that Okay, I have some kind of an intuition. I have a kind of a conscience. Maybe if I follow it, something will happen. And I think that's a good place to start. But the other thing I would say is that we are not the first people who have asked that question. 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 other things that can lure you forward and draw your behavior in certain directions, certain 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. And I don't think that those two things are actually that circumstantial. I think if you look at history, we've gone through many phases of you know, what, what we today would call sort of existential threats or crises, real turns in civilization. Um, and, and people have thought about it. They have answers to these questions or they at least have, they at least have, I would say, attitudes or stances that will help you navigate them more, you know, and I feel like we're in one of those moments right now, um, with this sort of rapidly expanding AI technology that's new. Um, 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 that we can see coming. You know, we think about them a lot. We navigate, we adapt. I keep underlining practice, but practice is what's going to make you more adaptable and also make you more able to transform the thing that's coming into a shape that might be more livable.

SPEAKER 2

25:35You've touched on a few practices like walking and writing and meditation earlier. I'm curious if you could go deeper into that and also both like practices as individuals and also more relational or communal practices.

SPEAKER 1

25:48Yeah, so I mean, I'm always struck by how difficult it is to like talk verbally about practices and describe them. And, you know, like I could give you a handbook. There's 15 steps. And if you do these things for 30 days, everything's going to be everything's going to be better. I have bad news for you. It's not going to work out like that. But yeah, I think. There's the one thing that I will say about these practices is that I think we've gotten into a mode, I'll speak for myself, this is very biographical now, like in history, when you think about religious practices, philosophical practices, spiritual exercise, these were things done in a fairly cohesive community, at least relative today. So, you know, if you were born in 14th century England, you were probably going to be born a Catholic into a family of Catholics, right? And the whole sort of social system is kind of organized around these sets of practices. This calendar, you know, time takes on a different shape, right? It's not just 365 days. They're all the same. there's a there's there's a liturgy to the way the year processes, right? So there's different things that you do at different times of the year. And everybody around you is kind of following the same calendar. So you're kind of synced up, right? We don't really have that experience. I don't really have that experience. I know a lot of people in the Bay Area don't have that experience because, you know, for many good reasons, we decided that politics and the social world and governance should be rooted in the primacy of the individual, right? If you want to go do something else, you should be able to do that as long as it's not hurting other people. That should be sort of the unit of governance. We're going to do democracy, you're going to get one vote, regardless of, you know, what your worldview is, or your religious belief, that's going to count the same as anybody else's. And so there's all these gains, right? But I think what we lose is that sense of collectivity. And so one of the things that I think we're groping towards right now dealing with these larger existential crises is that our individual sort of 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. I think you might go crazy if you just try to address it as an individual subject doing your own kind of inwardly facing practice, right? So I would say rather than, you know, focus more on specific exercises, I would think more about like, 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.

SPEAKER 2

28:40You spoke earlier about kind of the temple and the like kind of creating a sacred space where contemplation can be practiced. I'm curious, like what are the conditions that allow for what you're just talking about, this like kind of collective practice to emerge?

SPEAKER 1

29:02Yeah, well, you know, there's an institutional component to it, right? And there's a component of lineage. There's a physical architectural component, you know, where Lucky to have spaces like this one where we can come together and talk. This affords us, if you think in terms of affordances, this affords us a different kind of interaction, a different kind of grip on the problem by coming together. And 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, I think, for designers and architects and people who are thinking about arts and aesthetics and things like that to help us re-envision new forms of sort of collective practice and collective exercise. And we can do that. And again, we don't have to pretend like we have to reinvent the wheel. There's all kinds of good examples in history for how to do this. The one I think about the most, of course, is the university system, you know, coming out of an academic background. I'm very much looking at, you know, what does the university become What is it doing today? Is it sort of fulfilling its mission of like 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, you know, we see a lot of decline in the humanities, a lot of decline in enrollment, a lot of departments closing. There's a whole generation of tenured professors that are retiring. I don't think they're going to be replaced. You know, it's shrinking, right? But then if you look at history, the roots of philosophy in the West, in the tradition that I think in, the relationship to the university is kind of incidental, honestly. There's... There's, you know, what, 2000 years of like 1500 years at least of like some of the most influential philosophical activity happening before the university even comes on the scene. So there are different ways of thinking collectively. There are different institutional ways of arranging these things where we can do this as a group with some rigor, with some sort of historical influence, but also with some novelty that's appropriate to our times. The technology is also making new things possible. There are things that 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 I think there's a lot of optimism, honestly, from... from my perspective, as well as all these dangers.

SPEAKER 2

31:37Can there be, like, a collective organizing or coordination of attention that isn't top-down? Like, I feel like whenever you talk about this, my sense is, like, there's some authority figure who's, like, this is what's good, this is what's important, this is what we should be, like, value and aiming toward and thinking about. But can there be kind of this, like, more bottoms-up democratic sense of, like, Collectively figuring out like what is worthy of our attention? How do we create the conditions that like foster that and going from there?

SPEAKER 1

32:04Yeah, I mean, I think bottom up is the approach, right? And even like bottom up and and regional, you know, so that, you know, San Francisco probably needs something particular to San Francisco. New York needs something particular to New York. Regaining the sense that like where you are in space, you know, we were talking about, you know, time having a kind of qualitative characteristic to it in some of these traditions. Place has the same, right? And so to me, it makes more sense to think about like, what's a bottom up sort of like a kind of an ecological approach to institution building that would do some of the things that you're describing right now. And that wouldn't be so effective top down. I think actually what we've been trying is a top down sort of monoculture, universalistic approach to institutions, especially if you think of something like universities. There's a lot of top-down energy to them, and I don't think it's serving their mission very well.

SPEAKER 2

33:04I'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 for us to think about it, especially as we're feeling like we're trying to wrangle our attention from you know, so many other distractions or devices or things calling for it?

SPEAKER 1

33:24Yeah, well, I think it's really important to think about the kinds of things that you're paying attention to because the kinds of things that you pay attention to become part of who you are. And I think this is so there's this important piece here that we haven't really talked about in terms of memory. The reason that practice works is because you have this layer, this capacity for memory, not necessarily just memorization of facts like human memory doesn't really work like a file system on a computer. Right. If you you can upload any kind of file or download any kind of file to a computer and the hardware doesn't reorganize around the content. Right. But you do. your memories actually reorganize your sense of who you are as a person, you know, which is why we sound like we come from a certain place. You know, we pick up the language and we store that as a memory. But in terms of our practices, that's how they... develop us, right? Otherwise, it would just be the first time doing the practice every time. So your memory is reorganizing your day to day perception of the common sense world, like your memory is there, like syncing up with down to like the level of your physical sensations and your physical perceptions of things, um, up to your, you know, more abstract intellectual thinking. So, so your memory is, is very important. Um, and it's really important to tend to your memory and to think of it as a kind of a living ecosystem, a living part of your perception, a living part of your acting, um, I'm going to get to the attention economy. But there's this this woman I don't I don't know if you guys have ever read Eleanor Robbins. She has a great sub stack. She writes a lot about memory and she she created this metaphor that that really stuck with me, which is like if you accept this, this view of memory as this 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 sort of inputs, right? You're kind of creating, she uses the metaphor of a desert. You're kind of, your inner life is kind of becoming a desert. Your memory is in this process of like desertification, right? But you can be the kind of the gardener of that. You're in charge, right? You can read different books. You can listen to different music. You can have different conversations. You can connect more meaningfully with other kinds of people. You can create these other kinds of memories and reenliven that sort of inner garden of memories. And that's going to transform your perception. So if you think of it that way, and then you think about what you're doing in this, this sort of attention economy, you're kind of like sort of monocropping your inner life with, you know, the certain set of, of content on, on social media. And, you know, we all, I think basically every human being, I think, you know, even, you know, sort of quote unquote, spiritually advanced people struggle with their phones. You know, there's something about it that is really, really addictive. Like it's really designed for us to use over and over again. And I, I think there's uses there, right? Like I, I find a lot of interesting things on the internet. I find a lot of interesting essays, a lot of, like I solve a lot of problems going out there, but it comes back to the intentionality, you know, and, and, is this serving me or is it serving the company who's trying to sell me ads or whatever? And so it ends up being kind of a trite point, right? But like you have to guard that, you have to protect that. And if you feel susceptible to that, engage in some of these practices, like see if you can't, again, make yourself more lucid and agile in those moments. And then do simple things, you know, put your phone in the other room, like if you can't deal with it, you know, basic withdrawal activities, you know, shut it off and shut it down. But yeah, I think, you know, you shouldn't underestimate like, just the amount of money and resources that's after your attention specifically. You know, and there are all all of those algorithms are so honed into you as a person, you know, and they're reflecting back to you something about what what you're interested in, what your attention gets drawn to. And so you need you need to be you need to be careful about that. You need to guard it. And I don't see I don't see a time in the near future where that's going to that's going to change, you know, so but you can change and you can change your relationship to it.

SPEAKER 2

38:00Yeah, Simone Weil, the French mystic and philosopher who I think we both adore, she had this saying of like, we have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will. And when I first read it, I was like, oh, that's cool. That's nice. And then I like chewed on that. And I was like, well, I think to your point just now of like, I feel like willpower, at least initially, I think it's closely tied with attention. Like 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 like attention is our will in some way. I don't know. What do you think of the relation between the two?

SPEAKER 1

38:35Yeah. So there's Simone Weil is a fantastic person to think with about these questions. If you don't know Simone Weil's 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, her name's Simone Cotva. And she writes exactly about this sort of paradox or this contradiction. She has a book, it's called Effort and Grace. And it's exactly about this relationship that like the practices have something to do with effort, with willpower. with your kind of your desire, your force, your the sort of repetitious nature of your disciplined activity. But on some level, that's not really enough. And that's not really actually the deepest part of the practice necessarily. And the deepest part and this I think I think you could You could say contemplation is different from attention in this way, where attention is this kind of concentrated sort of one pointed fixedness where you're really focused on something. And contemplation has more of this character of of sort of of letting go and letting be. giving up the project of sort 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 and seeing if in that space of grace, something else doesn't emerge. If things don't show up to you differently, right? A lot of these practices are, you know, especially thinking of attention as an art form, You know, we're really talking about how do you get things to show up for you in your first-person experience, right? We don't all share the same physical experience even of the, you know, physical objects in the room. They have everything to do with our training, our knowledge, our education, our experience, right? So things are showing up differently to each of us, different levels of detail. You know, we were talking about architecture, how to design a space. Physical space is showing up to them in a particular way because of their attention practices. And so there's 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, that other people are getting or that, you know, that understanding or interpreting 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, I'm going to stop trying to figure out and understand and I'm going to, I'm going to let go. 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. And so I think this is kind of what Simone Weil is talking about. She talks a lot about waiting, waiting for years sometimes, and how central that is to sort of a deeper kind of philosophical insight. And I think that That might be, you know, one of the essential moves in a time where there's never not something to pay attention to. You know, so kind of withdrawing from that and just sitting, sitting in the silence, sitting in the emptiness, sitting in the darkness. And that's it. You know, there's no goal. There's nothing else on the other side of it. And then, you know, they describe some interesting things might happen.

SPEAKER 2

42:24Wonderful. I think we should turn it over to some audience questions, if people have anything. Michelle will.

SPEAKER 4

42:34Thank you for the educational talk. So 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? So beyond name and form, who are you? And knowing who you are, How do you define surrender? Thank you.

SPEAKER 2

43:10Do you want to take a stab at answering that first? I'll put it back to you.

SPEAKER 4

43:17I don't know. I don't know the answer. It's the question. Yeah.

SPEAKER 2

43:19Okay.

SPEAKER 4

43:21Who am I?

SPEAKER 1

43:22Beyond name and form, of course. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's, I think that's, that's a good example of a question that you could just sit and wait with. Yeah. I mean, the, you know, the, the philosopher in me wants to say something like I am a space in which meaning emerges or something like that. You know, a certain kind of understanding takes shape. through the activity that is me. And that, that shape and that understanding is actually a kind of, um, has a, 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. I think as a human being, um, we are that, uh, we are a unique kind of opening where we can even ask and reflect on that question. And so I think that's who we are. And I think there are, um, There are answers to that question, I think, or there are understandings will show up in that space. And we are some in some sense responsible for how that makes us act and how that affects other people and the earth as a whole.

SPEAKER 2

44:33Oh, I would say something similar, but perhaps less poetic, which is just like the collection of kind of experiences, but also like kind of histories and stories long and the lineage long before you. And I think to the question of surrender, I feel like I think of that in the sense like, you know, I believe that we have... free will to some degree. We have our willpower. We have our agency. And I think that's very valuable and something I care about. But also part of surrender is being like whoever you are is shaped by forces beyond your control. So that's how I think about it.

SPEAKER 4

45:09Thank you both. So we're at an AI company. And I wonder when we use terms like attention, perception, contemplation, consciousness, thinking, judgment. Is that something that we should be even considering attributing to large language models or digital computation of whatever kind? Because when I think back at these prior media technologies, whether it's Socrates worrying about writing or the printing press and the book and how that changes our whole political economy overnight, 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 are actually, they have attention. They make decisions. They're agents. How would you think through those sorts of questions that seem to be right at the center of this whole industry right now?

SPEAKER 1

46:15Yeah, I mean, I think those are open-ended questions. And I think the answer you would give would probably change maybe month to month, year to year. I think that that whole packet of terms that you just use, judgment, thinking, decision, attention, I think we're anthropomorphizing the system to a large degree. I don't know if you guys are familiar with Yuck Hui, who wrote... a great essay on LLMs. It was actually maybe two years ago now, but 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 100% confidence that that's true, But I do think that in order for it to be like 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 a self-awareness. And I don't see that in the systems that we have today. And I don't see technologists, correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't see scaling up these systems will by itself create that.

SPEAKER 2

47:46I don't have a robust answer to whether it's accurate to apply these to these systems. But I think what I can say is I'm glad that I think this new technological wave has kind of raised these questions and inspired us to examine these terms more closely. I feel like there's a sense of before we thought of things like thinking and agency, we kind of took it for granted in a way, in a sense. We all participate in these activities of thinking and judgment without really I think mostly inquiring as to like what the purpose of these things are and like why we engage in these things. And I think now maybe in this anxiety to try to differentiate ourselves from machines and the actions that they do. And I think these are very powerful actions that we can like, if we understand them, can harness them better. And also like understand ourselves and like what I think the things that we do and what ways they're different from, I think, ways machines work.

SPEAKER 3

48:43You can try answering the question if you want. One way that 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. And you could say that, okay, maybe all humans don't have a point of view that's determined by us, but we have a kind of like open-ended, like from our perceptual experience, we'll evolve our own point of view. And like, maybe that's fully determined, but maybe there's some like willfulness in that. So that's something that agents are missing today. That doesn't mean that in three years they're still going to be missing that. I think that there is kind of like a lot of progress in continual learning and open-endedness. And it's totally possible that they will have some of these properties that humans have. They don't seem to have a thing that we have, this like awareness, attention, workspace where we're like recombining things. But maybe that's just an experience we have and they have a different experience. It's hard to tell.

SPEAKER 4

49:57Do you think our experience with LLMs and ML models would be a sort of attempt for self-recognition in the same way that we do when we meet someone else and we try to make them see ourselves? But those models are actually only mirrors, and we are confusing them with subjects, and we're getting confused there. And do you actually think as well that looking at what your company is doing, which is super interesting, that we can actually create semantic values mathematical models to understand how this attention is harnessed to revert the effects of it by creating some sort of subjective, some semantic model of subjectivity, of the way we make sense of through meaning of reality? Do you think this can be formalized and actually implemented?

SPEAKER 1

50:57I'm skeptical. I'm skeptical, but I'm sure you all know more about the technology than I do. But I do think that, again, 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, you know, beyond it. Um, and I, I think the way that at least as I understand it, the way that the technology is being organized, if it does create something like that, it'll be along a completely different, a completely different line. Um, 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, um, with these, uh, 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 I think in some sense, the question of the algorithm on social media is, in a way, transferring over into the way Some of these LLMs are being designed in order to capture your attention. They have increasingly good sort of 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. But it's not it's not giving you the same connection that you will have with another human being. I do think that that's going to be the key thing is engagement with other humans. And I don't think that that's replaceable.

SPEAKER 2

52:36I do think, broadly, technologies reflect the values of their creators and also the incentives that govern the values of their creators. So that's my high-level answer. But I am very curious about that. And I'm curious. I think there are some researchers in this room. If people have takes, if you want to raise your hand and we can have a little corner of afterwards so we can chat about this, I'd love to hear your takes on that. So no? Yeah? OK. We'll find a corner there. We'll talk about this. OK. More questions over there?

SPEAKER 4

53:07These 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 then kind of a follow-up on that, 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?

SPEAKER 1

53:44Yeah, I'm glad. Thank you for that question. Um, I do think in some sense, love is at the center of what pull these practices forward. Um, I think it's attention is itself a question of what we love and what we care about and what we're concerned about. Um, so, you know, you think a lot about, um, intellectual activity is kind of being centered in the mind and the brain and concepts and language and reason and so on. But a lot of these practices will describe them. Some of the words that we use to describe them sort of as in the scholarship is cardio centric. These are cardio-centric practices. So if you think again about the Christian monastic practices of contemplative prayer, Cloud of Unknowing is a great anonymously authored 13th century text, which is basically this like sitting in the love of God, basically. And the reason for that is because there are these sort of transcendental questions of ultimacy that knowledge actually can't attain to. There's something about knowledge that is perspectival, it's circumstantial, it has to do with this sort of more empirical sense of reality. But what goes beyond that, this is the cloud author's language, is love, this kind of loving devotion. And the loving devotion is in some sense both what gets you to care about the practice and drives the practice and is, if done right, what the practice is actually developing. So I think the loving devotion is absolutely central. And that gets lost again in our very overly intellectualized environment.

SPEAKER 2

55:30I really appreciate that question. I think it reminded me, again, a Simone Weil quote of love being the rarest and purest form of generosity. And I think in that framing of it, I think it feels very abundant in some sense. I think it just makes me, it just feels like it's like why I liked, I think that the way that we The words we use, I think, really actually shape the way that we conceive of things. And I think right now the language we use around attention feels really aggressive. And I often find that something like generosity and bestowing attention feels quite beautiful in that way. And there's also the poet Mary Oliver wrote a lot about attention. And she has this one, I think, essay where she writes that attention without feeling is just a report, which I thought was quite interesting. And I think there's something about you know, we can, we talk a lot about like, you know, using will and training our attention and attuning it. But also there's a sense of like, what are we called towards? Like what speaks to us? And that's something that like, it's the movement of, you know, our soul or our emotions that I think is often, you know, overlooked in these conversations. So I don't know if I answered your question, but just love and attention. I think they're so closely intertwined. So thank you for that.

SPEAKER 4

56:51Hey, how's it going? So I like how you said that memory drives a lot of where our attention goes. And so naturally, I would say that what you value, your virtues, your interests are going to drive what you consume and what you basically store as memory. And so my question is, do you feel that attention follows value, virtue and interest? Or is it the inverse, actually, that interest, value and virtue are actually following attention?

SPEAKER 1

57:21I think they have a complex relationship. I think, um, what you, what you value tends to be what you attend to. But I think, I think ultimately like what, what makes any of this philosophical, right? Is this, this, this act of, or this phase in your human beingness of, in some sense, trying to give words or put on display these processes. Like, how do my values guide my attention? How does attention transform my values, right? There's a sense in which that you can go through life without examining much of any of this. You know, you don't really have a firm report or a firm sense of why you care about the things that you care about or whether you should care about other things, right? So all of this stuff takes on a new kind of tone or shows up in a different way when you start to ask questions like this. And I would say the way to think about it would be like the values are driving... what you pay attention to. But as you pay attention, and as you follow those values, your sense of how to judge and enact those values, it becomes a question of action, right? And judgment changes, right? This is this is kind of Aristotle's point, right? He's saying very similar to what you're saying is that, you know, if you what is ethics, ethics is a practice, it's a habit. So you practice by imitating virtuous people, and that starts to transform you who you are as a person, right? But as that happens, your sense of judgment is increasing. your sense of being able to pick out, you know, if you think of perception in the physical sense about, you know, the lights and everything in this physical space, there's also moral perception, right? So like, what is moral character? What is moral behavior? What is right in this particularly complex, concrete situation? This is the kind of stuff that like attention starts to bring to the surface. if you're engaged in these kind of self-reflective practices of them. So I think they have this kind of, there's a reciprocality there, right? Where the values are transforming your attention and the attention are kind of deepening your understanding of the value.

SPEAKER 2

59:32Yeah, I like to think or hope that there is some sort of like virtuous cycle to it. This reminded me of... The writer Jenny O'Dell, who wrote this book, How to Do Nothing, I think she has this anecdote about over COVID, she would go to this local park and watch the birds. And over time, she became curious about what types of birds are these? And she'd look them up. And kind of this sense of attuning her attention to these birds and understanding them deeper helped her see the world also in a like deeper, richer way. And I think that's kind of the sense of like, you know, the more you pay attention, the more things come into your like purview, the more details you're able to see. And there's kind of this like cycle of this like, I think the world like kind of unfolding itself to you, the more attention you pay to it. So I like to think that, yeah, there's some reciprocality to it.

SPEAKER 4

1:00:26Hi. I was curious because when we look at things that kind of draw our attention today, like social media or with AI, how everything's trying to capture your attention, I always viewed it as the outcome of economic incentives. But when you mentioned that back then they were talking about the block printing being kind of too gaudy and grabbing attention, do you think that we kind of have an innate desire to create things to grab attention? Or is it kind of an accidental outcome of creating better technologies?

SPEAKER 1

1:01:02Well, I'll say this, I think I think a lot of our relationship to technology is inevitable. And so the question of how to steer it is actually the question. I don't know, I'll share this very quick story. It's a bit, it's Plato again. How many of you know Prometheus, the story of Prometheus? Most people, right? How many of you know about Epimetheus? A couple people. So in the Protagoras, Socrates tells this myth, Epimetheus and Prometheus. And this is a story that... a French philosopher Bernard Stiegler has made a lot out of. He's written several books. If you're interested in the relationship between humans and technologies, Stiegler is a great resource for this. But basically, the story of Epimetheus is how we got to Prometheus and the gods give They're called Titans, Epimetheus and Prometheus. They're given this task, right? Epimetheus is given the task of assigning the essential skills or characteristics to all of the creatures on Earth, including the human beings, right? So he gives the turtles a shell to protect them. He gives the tiger claws and teeth to hunt with. He gives, you know, the birds this ability to fly and glide. And so all the creatures get these unique skills and he forgets the human beings. He's a little bit absent-minded. He's a little bit aloof. And then Prometheus comes over and says, oh, so how did it go? Like, how did you get it done? He's like, yeah, I think mostly. And then Prometheus looks around. He's seeing all of these creatures that have like abilities, like real abilities. He's looking at the humans and he's like, hey, what about these guys? And Prometheus is like, I forgot. So we're running around, this goes to our open-endedness again. We don't get one of those innate skills.

Attention as an art form

Art of Being Human #2 with Adam Robbert

Ashley Zhang and Adam Robbert

Apr 11, 2026

Transcript

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:

10 theses on attention

Ashley Zhang

Mar 14

Read full story

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.

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