Care, in the Heideggerian sense, is not merely affection but a fundamental orientation that structures human existence by determining what matters to us and how we engage with the world. In the technological age, this capacity for care is threatened by systems that prioritize efficiency and optimization over meaningful engagement, as symbol manipulation in AI lacks the embodied, pre-reflective dimensions of human languaging that connect us to what we love and care about. Protecting our capacity to care requires recognizing that intelligence is bound up with our capacity to care, and that life's meaning emerges from unconditional commitment to what matters, not from solving problems as a series of optimization tasks.
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Punk, Tech & Care with drummer and philosopher B. Scot Rousse (Dreyfus, Heidegger, Kierkegaard)Added:
My name is B. Scott Roose and my friends call me B and my Scott has only one T. Yeah, it's I love your name. It's It's really very challenging and wonderful in a way. It's so cool to be called B, too. Mhm. It's it's a funny funny way that your what you get named can end up um indicating something significant about your life having become a high degree scholar being yeah exactly wow that's really amazing yeah so okay be it's so wonderful to meet you and thank you for coming to join us on love and philosophy I'm delighted to be here thanks for the invitation so you're a philosopher but you're a very interesting philosopher. You've done all kinds of things outside of the university walls um also within them. So, just to get started, maybe you could just tell us a little bit about yourself and how you came to philosophy. Wonderful. Thanks for the opportunity to um think out loud about this. Well, my friends call me B and the story of my name is also I think fundamentally connected to the way I came to philosophy. Uh my parents were Hari Krishnas. So I grew up around a Hari Krishna temple and um was raised a vegetarian and was given a name from the Hari Krishna tradition which is vamina bhava and B is abbreviation from Bava and my parents always called me B and uh but Vamina is on my birth certificate. So I was always called B until I started public school when they gave me the name Scott. Somehow it ended up with one T. But what's significant here is that when you grow up in say something like an alternative religion or an alternative spiritual tradition uh and you're a vegetarian and everyone else around you, you're you're different. You you're different from everyone else in a certain way about your fundamental sense of what is good and what is bad or what's going on in the world. In a certain sense, everyone might think you're the weirdo for bringing your peanut butter and jelly sandwich and not eating the school lunch. But then you think everyone else is strange because you see what they don't see. You see the taken for granted ways that they what they eat, how they run their lives that are different from what you were brought up to expect. And so that leads you to see that the our our fundamental picture of reality is contingent or our sense of what is normal and abnormal is really deeply connected to the family you grew up in, the language you speak, the time of history you're born and that brings you to philosophical reflection pretty quickly. Did you uh decide to study philosophy because of all of those? Because it resonates with me in a in a lot of ways, but I moved a lot as a child. So that's been a big theme in terms of what's oriented my interests in in a very similar way to what you just said noticing because you go to a new school and things are completely like what's cool in one is not in another and all of this. So exactly.
Yeah. Yeah. Did that get you like what thinking reading philosophy like actual academic sort of philosophy or other kinds of philosophy or I think it predisposed me to philosophical questioning. I didn't I didn't care about reading until I got myself into college. And then um realized that college was my way to get out of Florida, which is a the state I grew up in in the US. And then I had one teacher at the University of South Florida, where I started my first two years, take me aside and say, "What are you doing here? You should get out of here. You should go to Berkeley. I'm going to help you." And uh she boosted me up and helped me get into Berkeley. And so I went there as a transfer student which is where I met Hubert Drifus and became very interested in Haidiger and phenomenology. And um phenomenology as you know is a way of trying to pay attention to what we don't normally pay attention to. It's a way of describing the structures or features of our experience that sometimes go away when you pay attention to them. Um of noticing what you don't normally notice. And so I think my my upbringing in my uh in that in the Hari Krishna way and my connection to um being a musician and the punk rock scene both were very much predisposed me to to that kind of philosophical reflection. So interesting that you it almost sounds like by accident but I I imagine this teacher saw something in you as many teachers do. I mean teachers are just so important. It's actually something I want to talk to you about as teaching.
But yeah, I suppose they saw this person. She saw something in you obviously, but it almost sounds like you were in a certain kind of flow or something that this kind of happened. But did is that different? Were you actually wanting really wanting at that moment to to get out of where you were? Yes, I I was. And it was and she appeared to me as somebody that uh Fernando Flores, who's somebody I work with and worked very closely with for many years and now I work with sometimes uh he came up with this phrase for these people that come into your life and open new doors for you. He calls them an ambassador of possibilities. That's beautiful. Yeah. An ambassador of possibilities. And that's also a kind of role that we can take for other people, which is one of the beautiful things about becoming a teacher yourself or becoming somebody who can um who helps other people take care that every now and then these people come up who who are able to um show you a different path or show you possibilities that were there for you that you didn't see. Oh, yeah. It's so wonderful to have someone else seeing the landscape and and noticing you and caring about you and offering something. I I can't tell you how many people that I've talked to who have really done good things in the world who talk about one teacher who did that. So I just yeah just note that. But yeah, another ambassador in your life who opened possibilities was uh Drifus, I guess. So yeah, do you remember first meeting him or what was what was that mood like? Because I know for all the kind of nerdy phenomenologists among us um that's a very interesting time to have just walked into. Yeah, absolutely. It was one of the very most lucky encounters because it was from meeting Bert that his friends and family call him that um I fell in love deeply in love with um philosophy and phenomenology and then that I through his encouragement went to graduate school and then through him met Fernando Fernando Flores and also I met um through Berth his brother Stuart who's become a dear friend of mine and also a collaborator. He's 94. I just had lunch with him yesterday and um helped him be interviewed by somebody who's working on an intellectual history project of the philosophical scene in the Bay Area in the 70s and the 80s. So, um what was special also about this is that I I ended up writing my PhD at Northwestern and I came back to Berkeley. I went to graduate school at Northwestern. I came back to Berkeley to sit down and actually write it to come back and work with Bur again. And then I it was this moment in life where Bert was in the last years of his life and I was just finishing my PhD and I stayed around um helping him teach the last courses that he was to teach for the last six or seven years or so and also working with Fernando and Fernando's family consulting and coaching company. It's interesting you already doing both of those sort of different things. Um I think a lot of people in philosophy are starting to take new paths now that might have something to do with for for example working in consulting or something like that and also still trying to be an academic but you've mentioned Flores a few times he why don't you say a little bit he's been a important person in your life just maybe we should introduce who he what who he is he was also a yeah major ambassador of possibilities for me and one of the people who really really showed me that philosophy makes a difference to the lives of real people. I mean, Bert already had that and that's one of the things that people loved about Bert's style of doing philosophy and his style of teaching and also his he saw that the arguments of phenomenology and existentialism were relevant to the arguments and assumptions being made about the artificial intelligence research of the the first waves. So he saw and was able to also create this realization that philosophy makes a difference to how we think about um important issues of life. And Fernando took that even even further and uh because he was then somebody who used his philosophical training to um create a a picture a framework for how organizations work and how people work well together. and he used his experience. He was the um finance or economics minister of the socialist government in Chile, the Aende government and was responsible there for something called project cyersin which is one of the first times information machines were put in a network. And so then he spent three years as a political prisoner and came to the US in ' 76 to Stanford University. That's where he met Terry Winterrad who introduced him to Stuart and Bert. And Fernando never wanted to be an academic, but he wanted to he read a lot of philosophy in prison and beforehand for his own research, but he wanted to make a difference and he still he wants to make a difference. Yeah. In the world, in the lives of people. So he became an entrepreneur. He became a um they developed a software program based in speech act theory. He and Terry Winterrad and their team um in the 80s and early 90s became a founded a business consulting company and had a whole framework for coaching and business consulting and um helping organizations work well together. The basic idea is this. An organization is a network of conversations that are oriented taking to taking care of the concerns of a client or a customer. Client or customer here is a formal category for anyone to whom you can make an offer.
anyone to whom you can make a difference. And so an organization is a network of conversations oriented oriented to taking care of the concerns or making a difference in the lives of your customer. And mostly those are conversations that open in offers or requests. But there's a lot of conversations that are connected to declarations. There's a lot of things you have to do to listen to the concerns of people so you can make sure you can make an offer that's relevant to them and have a kind of ethos of taking care of this these conversational skills through which work happens. You've mentioned care a few times and also this this feels like kind of the beginning of something that I think is going to blossom in a lot of different ways right now in terms of the conversational aspect of what you just said and how philosophy kind of is part of that. And um there's so many questions I want to ask you, but I'm really interested in in the care and also to think about Drifus to think about Flores Haidiger we should say you know I mean uh I wonder when you came across like Zorga or care if that was Drifus if that was Flores because sounds like they were both very concerned about that and maybe Haidiger was even the link. Um and then also technology because that's also Drifus and um that also sounds obviously like a connection with Flores. So, uh, yeah, let's think about those two things. Like, how did those come together or start to kind of stand out from the background for you in your life at that time? Hm. Yes. I I believe that uh you're right that in a fundamental way H Highiger's work is the root of my particular interest in in care or and and the way I'm sort of inheriting the project of talking about care as an important phenomenon for being human in a technological age. um and how I I saw a need for um helping to bring richer philosophical traditions or richer philosophical resources to the conversation about artificial today's conversation about artificial intelligence and being human in an age of rapid technological change and new things, new tools or new technologies that are right before our very eyes, changing how we think, changing how we write, changing how we make decisions. And so um I realized one of the things I can bring to the world is an articulation of these concerns from the perspective of the phenomenological tradition. And it is a carryover of the tradition of my mentors and my friends and my ambassadors of possibility who I worked with in my life. And so it is very much in the in the sense of that um when H highaidiger says zorga or care is the being of daine is the be is the is the way to the most fundamental way to talk about the nature of human existence he doesn't mean that we just like stuff or things uh can we can have affection for something he means that we live in a space of meaningful differences where some things can matter to and other things can be trivial to us. We have this space, we live in a space of meaningful differences that is connected to our sense of what is important and our communities for taking care of what is important together. and that this is from the Fernando side that this is something to pay attention to um about the conversations that you have with others for making sure you're taking care and common together from Drifus's side and what I learned from Hubert and Stuart about skill acquisition and the pre-reflective capacities for gaining new skills oops gaining new skills for um Haidiger was the one who when you read Being in Time, it's a a really dense, unforgiving text. But once you get used to it, you realize that it's showing you something that feels already so familiar. That you can read this text and then it's saying something in a sense that you feel already in touch with about your experience, but that you haven't had the philosophical or observational powers to notice or articulate. One of the things that's at the core of what Haidiger was doing there and that was taken up by Drifus and um Flores in different ways was that we live in um a space of life that's determined by what matters to us.
Not just by our ideas, not just by this is what Haidiger was doing, overcoming the um Cartisian tradition that thinks the most fundamental thing about being human is to pay attention to the ideas in your head and how they map on to or fail to map on to the so-called external world out there. And he wants to say, let's not get bogged down in this epistemological relationship. Let's not assume that the primary way that human beings relate to the world is of a internal mind trying to represent an external object. Let's have a different starting place. Let's acknowledge that minds relating to objects is something that happens. Let's not generalize that as the human condition as such. Instead, let's notice that we live in a space where things matter to us and where you make you live in distinctions between what's worthwhile and what's trivial. This a space of meaningful differences. And um that was already something in my early philosophical work that I inspired by Drifus wanted to say this is really important and um even contemporary analytic philosophers aren't paying close enough attention to this. And so one of the things you do when you're trained in academic philosophy uh uh what what you have to do you have to find your um dialectical opponents. And especially when you're trained in the kind of Drifus tradition of phenomenology scholarship, you you see the relevance of what Haidiger's talking about and what Merlo Ponte's talking about to contemporary contemporary debates and analytical philosophy.
And so I was really concerned to talk about um how what Haidiger was doing about care and concern and being in the world, how it illuminated debates in um analytic philosophy of identity. And so bringing his notion of care um as an orientation and meaningful differences that structures your life sometimes without you thinking about it, sometimes in a way that forces you to think about it. Um to bring his understanding of care in conversation with a philosopher named Harry Frankfurt who in the analytic tradition is one of the most important interesting people talking also about care. He has a and a beautiful little essay called the importance of what we care about. That is a um elaboration on some of his earlier work in the philosophy of agency that's super important um and interesting to think about where he makes he's the one who makes this distinction between lower order desires and higher order desires. Wanting something and what you want to want and noticing that human beings have the capacity for this higher order wanting to want. want what we want to want has to do with the kind of person we aspire to be. The kind of motivations the kind of motivations we want to have which his example of the earlier time is the um the unwilling addict as someone or the willing addict someone who smokes cigarettes who has the lower order desire to smoke and at the same time has a higher order desire. Do they want to be the kind of person who wants to smoke or do they want to be or they do they think that's cool and smoking is actually fits in with their lifestyle and the kind of person that they want to be. Frankurt eventually took this higher order desire picture and for conceptual difficulties that he was working through ended up thinking about it in terms of care. So I wanted to think about how the Haidagarian picture of agency connected to a deep conception of historical our historical way of being and our social way of being and our moody way of being how that can relate to what going on in people worrying about Harry Frankfurt's conception of agency and at the same time I brought Haidiger into conversation with contemporary contean ethics who under with the work of Christine Corsgard very interesting existential Contean um who teaches at Harvard um also was getting very close to noticing that what makes us human is what she what she called our practical identity which she defined by those identities that um that make a difference to us that make us who we are. being a drummer, being a thinker, being a neighbor, um being a family member, being a lover, those identities and connections that that shape your whole way of being. uh so in this technical philosophical work that I that I developed in the first um 10 years of my professional philosopher life those are the kind of issues I was dealing with and that's what set me up to say um when the after chat GBT came out and even leading up to that when we had the the amazing developments and from Google deep mind starting to realize the AI age is really starting to turn into something historically important that this philosophical perspective has a difference to and has a contribution to make. Oh, I just love that. And I Yeah. Frankfurt also had that book about love, I think, didn't he? Yes. Yes.
The reasons of love. It's a beautiful little book. Revisit that. So, and I love that you were already in dialogue with across what sort of were often thought of as like com combative um traditions in the way that you said with the dialectical tensions, but I think you're actually sort of, you know, they're opening up a different space there by bringing those into conversation. And one thing that feels really important in that is like what it means to be alive, what it means to be human. I mean, this goes to the phenomenology, but also in Frankfurt's work, it's really there in course. I want to hear a little bit about like about that because I think it gets lost sometimes in, you know, different worlds, but in the neuroscience world and in the philosophy world, we're really working towards things that are all about that, but I don't know that we think about it directly. I want to think about that what it means to be human. what what what that how that connects to this definition of care that's not just affection and how that matters right now in a new way. Yeah. I think here's one of the ways I think about um the stakes of this uh that we what it means to to care. There's no particular, you know, content and there caring is a way of being and it's a way of being oriented towards towards things, concerns, relationships, ideals that solicit you, that grab you as worthwhile and give you a sense of what you have to do. And the that by the way, that doesn't necessarily mean it's morally good. I think there's part of the tragic dimension of being human is that people can care about things that are also destructive or morally repugnant. That's actually an important point. Caring for what doesn't necessarily imply, you know, a certain kind of normativity of good or bad or something. It's, you know, that's something we have to remember because we tend to associate care with good. But yeah, what do we care for is actually an important point. You you often talk about caring as tending to what matters, but what matters from a particular position, right? Exactly.
Yeah. Tending to what matters. I think this is a phrase I got from David Spievok of a mathematician at the topos in Institute in Berkeley who I've been collaborating with on a paper about care.
um we're using we're developing the notion of care in contrast to the notion of values that's widely taken for granted in the AI alignment research but it's a very undigested um assumed concept of values what are values why do we even reach so naturally for this concept and is it is it a coincidence that values are also what we enter into a spreadsheet that values are what we put on our um poster boards and celebrate the values of our company sometimes in in a per performative way that the people who work there see don't actually line up to how the company works. So also with topus and David because that's mathematically talking about value too is a very interesting idea and and how that relates even in terms of symbols, representations, language which is another whole era area of your work. But something you said there like I want to get a little bit messy just for a minute because caring is tending to what matters. I think of caring as mattering. And I mean that in a it's it's like an ongoing I don't know if you know much about ecological psychology or Gibson and this like more immediate sense of you know everything is mattering and that to me feels like it's caring. I mean in in a sense um I wonder if you've ever thought about it like that in even more immediate and sort of radical way than because tending to sounds like we've thought about it and some of them but it seems very bodily and immediate to me. I don't know if that makes sense to you. I think that's really important. That's another thing we have to um be careful about when we talk about caring. It doesn't necessarily happen at the level of higher order reflection. I think you're absolutely right. And even even in the phrase tending to what matters, I would like to capture the more pre-reflective way that caring structures our lives often without us thinking about it before we think about it. And I think the the notion of um affordances that you brought up from the um Gibsonian tradition is exactly the right place to look mattering or what I made this I used this phrase that I got from Drifus and Jane Rubin and their interpretation of Kirkugard that we live in a space of meaningful differences. Meaningful differences what does that even mean? It means what's relevant and what's irrelevant in your immediate situation. And it doesn't mean necessarily what you think about and what you think you care about and what you reflectively love and care about. The meaningful differences are what's around you now that is standing out to you as relevant, important to deal with, what's receding into the background as irrelevant or not even on the map. And so what you care about first of all is reflected in the in the layout of affordances of your everyday situation. Your caring is structuring how your situation shows up to you as demanding and making available what kinds of action. So, um you know, I just got done writing a paper about that I'm going to read at a conference on machine consciousness and uh and when I was writing that paper, that was the most important thing. So, my room is chaos.
You walk into the room, you don't even see, it's not totally irrelevant to you the pile of unfolded laundry. um the the coffee cup from yesterday, the pile of books that are all around. Well, the books are relevant because you're still you're digging around in them. But what shows up to you as relevant and important and demanding of your attention, that's what care does. Um that's what mattering is making that distinction between the distinction of meaningful differences first of all shows up. This is a a phrase from phenomenology and the polarization of your field of possibilities. So yeah, I think that's cool. One really important thing that phenomenology brings to technology right now again which I mean we didn't mention it yet but Drifus was one of the first sort of critiques uh critique first person to sort of critique that I guess in a way would you say and I I wonder about uh those ideas and if that relates to this or if that relates to your ongoing work do you ever revisit Drifus and his ideas about technology? Yes, I think um the way that Drifus was able to bring out in his um in his interpretation of the the stakes of AI that he was writing against the symbolic AI or what we call good old-fashioned AI. um which was the project of basically just trying to reduce human knowledge to um statements, propositions and the logic between them. And um what he saw there was that what these researchers assumed was a neutral obvious picture of the way human cognition works actually inherited a whole tradition of understanding and perhaps misunderstanding of what it means to be human that overlooked embodied intuition and embodied skillful action and looked at intelligence as a disembodied manipulation of symbols. And the exciting and tragic and beautiful thing about being human is that there is no one human nature. We make what we are in our practices, in our traditions, in our activities. And we have the paradoxical but but that's a certain kind of ability. It's a a certain kind of capacity we have to together set up things in our culture that matter to us and orient our lives to them. We can turn ourselves into more machine-like agents. We can interpret ourselves.
We can kind of cover up and forget that we have the capacity to create ways of life dedicated to things that matter to us and become completely absorbed into the project of solving problems being efficient and optimizing everything around us for the sake of further efficiency. And this is where Drif has brought in his understanding of later Haidiger's understanding of technology where technology for later Haidiger's picture is a kind of compulsive optimization a sense that what's relevant in the world are those things that enable us to be more efficient and optimal for the sake of being more optimal and efficient for the sake of being more efficient and that in in fact this picture of cognition as this the representation of symbols belongs to this whole tradition.
of separating the mind from the body and from the so-called external world, looking at it as a process of representation, a mediated representation. That's how we're connected.
is connected to this larger tradition of the the technological way of being that um that endangers our capacity for connecting to uh what we love and care about because if we're too busy being efficient and optimal, we forget to ask for the sake of what and that's where the question of care comes in. Wonderful. And it also goes really back to this what it means to be alive and and and and and considering that. So again, I want to be messy because there's a lot of exciting things in there, but so that idea of symbol manipulation and and that kind of critique sounds like it's old, but actually it's just kind of very much even more present now if we think of language in that way as what it is for the LLM, for example. Yeah. And yeah, when we think about that and we think about care and we think about um these different kind of fractal ways of caring because it's not like a linear thing that we just care all the time for the same thing. I mean care is a very tense thing.
We can have cares that you know don't fit together um as as individuals as societies um all the time.
Our body itself is doing that. So, I I want to hear, you know, what you think about the fact that right now, um, we've kind of forgotten the body. We're hungry to remember what the body is.
We almost think we don't need the body. And yet, this thing that's come out of the body, which is our communication, our ability for conversation, um, which is actually what we're feeling in the excitement of being able to converse in new ways, um, has somehow gotten confused with the symbols.
uh and we seem to think everything is language, but we're also reading the body into that and it feels very confused in a sense in a way that actually brings up a lot of those same critiques at another level that you just expressed. Does that make any sense at all to you or Yes. Yes, definitely. Yeah, I I agree. And I think there's um the even though the the critique that Drifus and also Terry Winrad and Fernando in their book understanding computers and cognition from 1986, they were doing um also in this um project of criticizing the assumptions of symbolic AI.
And from their perspective, um, what they showed is that if you look at information, if you look at language as simply the the transmission of information, you overlook the fact that in human conversation, we're not just transmitting information. We're making and coordinating commitments and we're taking care of concerns. Language isn't just sending information from um, my information processor to your information processor. It's a way of making commitments to each other, creating our social reality. When you um invited me to um have this conversation with you and I accepted that became a commitment, a mutual commitment that we had to show up and and have the conversation. So language didn't wasn't just sending information. It was coordinating these commitments which are connected to what we care about, what our concerns are. And so the picture of an overly thin picture of language kind of blinds us to those those dimensions of the the caring concerning coordinating social reality creating dimension of conversation language as as humans have it. And um even though Drifus' picture was criticizing symbolic AI, he was actually him and his brother Stuart were very friendly to the possibility that neural networks were a much better nonrepresentational in this technical sense way of the way intelligence works. already in their book um mind over machine, they recognized what they called back then connectionism and the neural network tradition was a new way or an emerging way to make sense of how intelligence might work that didn't have the same assumptions as the um symbolic AI tradition. And the of course the AI systems that we have today are based in the neural network paradigm but they're still carrying over um carried over is still some of the assumptions from the classical AI tradition which is connected to the fact that the language as the large language models have it. Um let me just say before I kind of go on a critique I think these things are amazing. I think they're beautiful. I think it's a marvelous invention. I think it's wonderful that the people who made them don't even know how they work and we're living in this age with this new entity that speaks to us. Um, and we need to actually also exercise humility about what these things are and how they work and what their implications are going to be. All that being said, it's wrong, dead wrong, to think that they have language, that they speak language or that they have language in the way that human beings do. And it's dangerous for us to interpret ourselves as just running a large language model in our mind um just like our friends ChatGBT and Claude do which is not again not to disappoint that uh our language is connected to our being in the world. It's connected to our way of interpreting what matters to us. So living a life um involves not ne not always going around reflecting what do I care about what I love but when you when you have these moments of decision and when you have a uh when you have to navigate the the contradictions that show up in your life between different commitments and relationships. You're drawn to articulate in language what is it that matters to you that brings that gives you focus that gives you ability to um have a sense of direction and a lot of us get people who study philosophy and literature like to get it from there. I think most people get this the capacities these that they draw on for thinking about what matters to them from art from movies from music. The punk rock scene is an amazing example of people who developed an articulation of what's wrong with the world and an identification of themselves in these linguistic articulations from the singers of punk songs that you can then self- apply as making sense of what's going on in the world and your sense of displacement in it. Now, um all of that was a way of saying one of the ways for us language is connect. Language is part of our being in the world. It's not a frictionless spinning in the void. It's not um it's not simply um I want to say simply like it's a a disc. It's not statistical patterns drawn from a huge mass of text. It's connected to our way of life. What matters to us are coordinating um and our way of um making the world happen. the large language models. Um, and maybe this is going to be something that's addressed in further technological developments because um, what I'm saying isn't news to the people who build and think about these things, but they are trained and then they are deployed. So there's the training phase training phase where they they h have a develop a model and then they have post-training which is um they um have interact with humans and they sculpt and what this is called reinforcement learning with human feedback.
They give it a certain personality reward certain ways of responding um uh disincentivize other ways of responding and create a personality for these things. Then they deploy it. Um so in their deployment in a sense they are connected to human beings who are connected to the world. So they're in some sense connected to the world and being in the world but they don't learn from their interactions. Um there's a lot of caveats you have to say there. There is some in context learning the systems now some of them have ways that they can draw on your um files if you let them. But the model itself its weights are not retrained in connection to how it's interacting with the world.
But our mind, our ling linguistic capacity is fundamentally um enshed in our relationships, our real-time conversation, our real time dealing with the tragedies and dramas and perplexities of being human and figuring out what how we're supposed to live our lives and what's important to do in this moment. That's what language enables for us. um and it's in that real-time interaction with the situation that it's alive for us. So that's one way that the assumptions today when you look at language like in a a language model that's trained and then deployed and fundamentally disembodied um that some of those assumptions carry over with Flores. Did you ever meet Matana or any Yeah. Was that or I wonder if there was any kind of connection there? But I bring it up because of this idea of languaging, which I'm not really remembering so well now. But I think there's a real distinction here that you're that you're making that I want to bring out a little bit more between language like as a symbolic system or as whatever we want to call it. Language in in the kind of symbols and representations which is like math, right? But we wouldn't necessarily think that a thing doing math is kind of talking to us. But when it's in this symbolic representation that is the way we language together which is the way we converse and communicate which is different from language as like a symbolic system but which is so hard to conf to to keep clear on you know like we the embodied action of languaging is something different than language at least as I see it I don't know if if it's for you but we tend to think if it has language it's languaging and those are different things right or yes yes I think that the the materanian um understanding of languaging is um Fernando's the one who is something I was about to say something that I don't understand very well but I do think is very much in this um in this pocket that we're exploring right now like you pointed out and uh I didn't I never read Matana until I met Fernando who who was friends with Matana when I first met Fernando I just finished my PhD and Fernando had was um at that point had been a senator in Chile and was on the way to move back to California, but he did one more political activity in Chile, which is he ran a think tank on innovation called the National Council for Innovation and Productivity. And Fernando's the kind of character who wants to hire Hideiger Scholar to be on his um research team for writing the report on innovation. And he was proposed to Hubert Drifus to hire him as a consultant on the innovation report. Um Bert uh was too busy at the time and I was just a fresh PhD. So Bert introduced he said well let me introduce you to B. Uh and so then I was two months later on an airplane to Santiago to be on Fernando's research team for this report. And one of the other um tremendous opportunities for being on that team was that another consultant he hired was Hamberto Matarana. Oh wow. This is what I mean about your life. It's like a kind of weird flow of I mean it's not like you would sit there and plan this is what you want to happen but it's really quite spectacular. Yeah, exactly. I think that's um the uh you make an important point that there's sitting there and planning what's going to happen can take you so far and um but being open to the contingencies of life and seeing where they take you is um also part of the part of the adventure and I think that relates to the embodiment and the ecological aspect I'm trying to get at which is not so much about affordances but about just this immediiacy of being as the world and you not separate from the world, which is a kind of thing that's very hard to kind of really grasp, but I feel like is so what we want to grasp now or what I read into your work when you're talking about care and caring and why this why this matters in the age of technology because as you were talking, you know, you're you're talking about these amazing technology and it is amazing. I it's so amazing that I don't want us to waste the opportunity. Do you know what I mean? because I feel like there's so much we're not getting at because we're not thinking about these what it means to be human, what it means to be alive, what we could do better with this. So, just to come to that just for a minute, even though I really want to ask you about Francisco Varela, but I'm not going to. But um I didn't get to meet him cuz um I guess that was too late. But but I wonder he died in 2001 if Flores did because that's also like he was also Yeah, they were friends back then and um Francisco Varela um brought philosophy books to Fernando in prison to read. Oh wow. I'm so glad that you just said that. That's beautiful.
But but but to this thing about technology right now people are creating technologies that are changing us and changing the world and in in an embodied way like um and so what is so caring feels really important to me in a way that I don't think we've really articulated before. I don't mean me and you but I mean as humans in that organ. Yeah. So, I want to hear from your perspective like why this matters for people who are making technology, using technology, um because it feels like it's really important, but I'm not sure it's really going to be clear to people yet. Good. Yeah. Thank you for that question. And I what I I really appreciate about your work and the project that you have in this interview series and in your writing on Substack that you are um out there with this very similar agenda to raise questions about love and care and to not to lose touch with these capacities and to to ask how these capacities can be need to be um cherished and preserved and um integrated into the technological times that we have. Um, I think a a lot of the people building these technologies are aware of the world historical or potentially world historical work that they're doing and a lot of them are terrified by it. A lot of them also have a sense of mission and purpose about it and rightfully so. But I guess I would frame it in this the following sense. Um, we need richer. We need to include the phenomenon of care and taking care in our picture of what it means to be human and what we're building these technologies for.
And because in in designing technologies, we're also designing ways of being human.
That's the thesis of ontological design that Terry Winterdrad and Fernando Flores articulated in their book that there's ontological implications for creating technologies, especially those technologies that will be that will become pervasive in human life and and enter into all of our daily habits by which we construct our lives and our relationships. And so that helps to grasp the stakes. We're not we're designing ways of being human and so how can we be alive to the responsibility there and it's not only on the question of the designers of these tools it's also on the question for all of us who are using them because the tool is one thing and it does have its own affordances and invite a certain way of interacting with it. these chat bots. Um, one of the the most popular um, applications of the large language model are these chat bots.
And there's a lot of debate about um, what kind of personality these things should have. Should they be so-called sickopants telling you how great your question is and um, and sucking up?
They are right now. I'm sorry. You have to tell them, please don't just try to be nice. But yeah.
Yeah. And this is partially a design choice made because they want to have these things be pleasant to interact with. And it's partially emerges from this process as a a reinforcement learning with human feedback in a way that they're grappling with. They're they're they're struggling to find the right way to tune them so they have just the right amount of pleasantry and not necessarily being so sick of although some people really liked the sickopanty. Um, understandably so. Um, and then there's also the one the way that they something I've seen changed in the interface with chat GBT and Claude recently were there. Sometimes they compulsively prompt you to prompt.
They're like, "Do you want me to write up the the a version of this paragraph that does this, that, and the other thing? Do you want me to produce a graph that lays out the distinctions you just made? Do you want me to do this?" And that kind of um affords you or solicits you to keep engaging with it. This kind of compulsive engagement. And that's something that they are taking from the designers then are taking something there from the um engagement strategy of social media to keep you addicted to keep you wondering. It's kind of like hitting the slot machine. What's this thing going to say next? No, the next sentence it spits out that's going to be the one that I use. The next graph that it makes that'll be the one. So you get caught in these compulsive loops of engagement that um sometimes you have the illusion of doing something but you're just caught in this spiral of um impulsive prompting. So at the same time the then the there there's questions there about how can we are as users also take responsibility for creating our ways of engaging with these things and creating practices for using them so to speak to help us think. Not to totally offload our thinking um using them, inviting them into our conversations uh but um in a way that keeps them connected to real world uh real world concerns, real world conversations but let me give you by by that I mean um I think it's important. I don't have kids myself, but my um my brother and my sister both have kids. And I have a project called Curiosity Craft with a colleague of mine, Massimo, where we developed a framework for helping families, helping parents develop practices in their family for introducing their kids to AI. And the point there is to help the families be aware of the fun um and intriguing and exciting things these tools can do by helping you connect with the world. Not by falling into the cons compulsive prompting, but by using AI and the AI tools to create songs together about maybe a family vacation that you had to add these practices of family creativity to learn about something that you pass on your walk in your neighborhood to always bring the engagement with AI back to the conversation in the real world in the family with your friends and not get sucked into the compulsive prompting. So that's an example of ways that we have a um also a responsibility as users to bring the AI tools back into uh real contact with the reality around us and the conversations around us. Now um I think there's another thing to say here that there's uh even though we live as human beings in touch with this issue that we live in a space of meaningful distinctions that some things matter to us more than other things. Um, we live in a crazy world right now and uh we live in a transformative new technology that everyone's trying to figure out what these things are and how they work, how they're going to affect um how we how we live together. The postworld war II geopolitical order is dissolving.
um the the capacity the the the sense that the a AI is going to change the way people enter the workforce. There's already evidence that some entry- level positions are drying up. Although there's dispute about is that because AI or is it just because the economy itself is in has a lot of problems and the companies want to look good. So they're attributing their shrinking of jobs to their adoption of AI. So they look like early adopters rather than just people with cash flow problems. But young people and people in general including me are in a position of disorientation.
And um and there's two things that we should avoid and one thing we should remind ourselves in this period of um disorientation that first of all um life is not about just solving problems. Um and so a lot of the people who build the AI systems are engineers and they they're trained engineers are trained to solve problems. Um but life itself can't be looked at as just a series of problems to solve because the problems the series of problems to solve always has the question for the sake of what um and the for the sake of what question is brings in the question of care. But often when we get into the problem solving you're just looking at the problem itself and the solution to that and you lose the larger context. So one of the things we have to help ourselves remember and help people who are building AI remember is that solving problems is important but life itself isn't a series of problems to solve. Um second uh that um there's no right answer to what to care about.
There's no right answer to how to live your life. And this makes it stressful and especially for um people who would like a a structure and would like um a recipe for how to live. The fact that you can very much get it wrong and that there's no way to guarantee you've got it right is um and that that adds to the disorientation of of our particular moment in life where college is so expensive, rent is so expensive, um houses are expensive, um what career do you choose, what do you devote yourself to? It seems like a very fraught, nerve-wracking point, nerve-wracking um decision. But um life itself is um an exploration of of this question and not something you have a quick and easy answer to. So um I think that those these were these are two things are connected to um designing the design of technologies and the larger context in which we live that there's a sense of compulsive problem solving that life is a series of problems to solve that separates us from the larger context of what are we building for that's a phrase I got from cosmos institute who are interesting group talking about philosophy and AI and um entrepreneurship um for the sake of what are solving problems and and then accepting in a moment of awe and wonder and also ambition and determination. The fact that we live in a crazy historical time where there are no recipes and that part of the adventure of being human today is this um staying in touch with the questions what matters for our civilization now what are the conversations we need to be having and as your own individual life to to realize that there's no formula for that and it's a adventure and experimentation to do undertake with others. Those are really beautiful points and really important and I I often think about um or write about or I have this book called Holding Paradox or this tension, right? I don't mean resolving and I I I feel that in what you were saying there about the the sort of indetermination or the ambiguity or there's no one right answer and and yet we con we don't think that way like that's very hard for us to you know hold that space of tension or ambiguity. I think you know you you are also a fan of Marilu Ponti and I really like his use of indetermination and exactly and the generiveness of it. Of course you he talks about the good kind.
I mean we can use that in all kinds of ways like anything but that feels like something that's not really part of the conversation but that technology could help us better hold that tension. You know that yes space feels rich to me. Also, you talked about orientation a lot, which is a word that's really important. Uh, because I'm thinking about cognition and movement together.
I studied the hippocampus and I'm thinking about navigation. And I've heard you say that caring is a kind of orientation. And so, it's interesting when you talk about disorientation, how that would naturally relate to something that's not being noticed or maybe that we're not dealing with relative to this ongoing caring in the sense we were talking about earlier. that's not always rational. And maybe maybe maybe even that's a word to think about a little bit because you talk about instrumental rationality I think and there's the optimization stuff in your work where you know you go into the paperclip kind of example that that feels like the kind of optimization and rationalization that's connected to what I was talking about with the symbols that we've confused with the living reality. That kind of rationality is a language-based kind of rationality. And if we think of cognition as bodily, that's a different kind. That's not like that sort of rationality, instrumental rationality. That's more like what I'm thinking of as caring. I know this is kind of a lot, but does this bring up anything for you? Uh yes. Yes. It brings up um connects very well with um the things I'm concerned and disoriented about. And uh uh it reminds me of this uh following story that um one of the times I was a teaching assistant for Hubert Drifus in his existentialism class. Uh we do the whole first part of the course on Kirkagard and Kirkagard's book fear fear and trembling. Wonderful. Hard but worth it. Yeah. Yeah. And Bert's lectures on Kirkagard are on YouTube. And um he's a wonderful guide to getting through this book, Fear and Trembling, which is pretty um dense and unforgiving, but beautiful and something that will really shake you to your core.
And um by the way, I have to mention I'm helping Hubert Drifus's family in a project of protecting the cassette archive that he left behind. He he left his wife Genevieve had about 300 cassettes in their house in the Berkeley Hills that I started to work on with her and their family. They founded a nonprofit after Bert died called the Hubert El Drifus Foundation. And but then the philosophy department I was I went to the philosophy department hang up the flyer for this project and the department manager came out and grabbed me and he said we just found a bunch of bird stuff in the howison library storage cave and there was another 700 cassettes going back to the 70s and the 80s and the '9s and in the house there's some stuff from the 60s and so we have almost a thousand cassettes of Bert's lectures that we're working on raising money to get digitized and to create an authoritative archive of the lectures with the syllabi with the handouts with like context. Um so I will send a link to you so we can share in the show notes. I want to help you in any way.
That sounds definitely like a project we all want to get behind. Yeah, it's so exciting. And um so coming back to Kirkugard B made Kirkugard really come alive because he he used Kirkugard to to show that to raise a lot of um questions about what does it mean to live a meaningful life? And in the existentialist Kiragardian picture, um, meaning comes from committing yourself to something. And, uh, and the the Kirigard example is the, uh, and sometimes committing yourself to something isn't rational at all. You just, we have this expression, you fall in love. Bert loved to talk about how something just grabs you. and he found himself in debate with the AI world at MIT not because he chose to like as his rational life plan but because he happened to be at MIT. Minsky and Papa were down the hall. Um his brother Stuart happened to be working at the Rand Corporation. Um they there happened to be somebody there who suggested that they should hire somebody who knows about Merlo Ponti to assess the AI research. And so this is just concatenation of contingencies that suddenly organizes your life in such a way that shows you something in your moment that is worth doing that you can then commit yourself to to give your life purpose and direction. You don't find it just by sitting back and thinking about it. You find it by throwing yourself into life and looking at where this the strange concatenation of contingencies that makes up your drift makes up who you are. what that reveals to you as alive and important and relevant for you. And the way I just described that is kind of a mashup of what Bert would say about Kirkagard and what Fernando would say about finding your calling um and the work that I was doing with him. Um but the kids who took the Kirkagard class from Drifus, he would talk very beautifully about this thing that he called unconditional commitment. And in Kerkugard the example is Abraham has an unconditional commitment to God and this leads him to sometimes to do something that looks very crazy namely um be ready to go up and kill his only son because he's got this stronger commitment that to God and that God will make it okay and Kierard in this context talked about u the teological suspension of the ethical. You suspend ethical norms. To to have unconditional commitment means sometimes to suspend ethical norms for the sake of having this higher tilos of of tending to what matters to you, what gives your life purpose and direction. And Kerkugard used the Abraham story just to point out how gnarly it can be maybe sometimes and how irrational it can be to wholeheartedly devote yourself to something. It ain't always easy. Um, Drifus used the example of romantic love, which is also shows up in Kirkugard and in some of the stuff he talks about in Fear and Trembling, he talks about a lad falls in love with a princess. And um, Kierard scholars like to speculate that Kierard's talking about his own love for his woman he loves named Regina. But in a footnote in fear and trembling he says love uh let we can use love to stand for any relation in which an individual concentrates the whole of his life's reality. So wonderful. Yeah. So Drifus used this phrase unconditional commitment to connect to that. And at the end of the Kirigard class, the students would come up to want to chat more and they would say, "Bonditional commitment sounds awesome. Where can I get one?" And um the point the question reveals the actually the kind of disorientation of our times like getting a commitment to something you can order from Amazon or finding the direction of your life as something you can get learn about and a teacher can teach you what to do. Um and that shows a an orientation to life that looks at life like it's a menu of options to choose from.
you can stand back and choose your options like ordering something offline. And that is a that's a disorientation. That's a disconnection from um where you actually can find what to love and care about, which is throwing yourself into life, into your moment of history, into your moment and your city and your connection to your family, your technological moment of um immer technological disruption. what's going on in your life that that draws to you, that speaks to you, that gives you something to do. It's not it's not going to be the same for everyone and it's not something you can get by standing back and thinking about it. Thinking about it helps of course sometimes, but first of all, it's a matter of immersion and identifying what shows up as worthwhile in this moment, in your life, in this historical time, and to accept you might be wrong about that. And anyway, there there's some um uh some about care and technology. I think what you just said is so important in so many ways, but two that come up a lot relative to what we've been talking about is I think there's there are generations now, I'm not one of them. I don't think you are either but who did grow up with that very mentality that those students and I have this too from students you know where can I get it kind of thing or not really feeling comfortable being in their bodies in the immediiacy in which you described trying kind of always being a able to escape that or even never having actually had that kind of especially people who were you know in COVID kids and stuff that there's a difference right between what that's like to just be immediate and then to become thinking in your head and some people who have to deal with that. So I guess what I'm trying to link that to is that ambiguity and that indeterminacy and that tension and that being a generative kind of thing. I think this relates to punk a little bit because I'm thinking about you you're you're a punk musician for those who don't know you're a drummer and maybe we should talk about that a bit but that that spirit of disruption being not necessarily bad um depending on depending on how you are in your body and who you're with around you. I don't know if that if there's a link there at all but I just yeah put that out for now. Thank you. I and I think that um if there's one I do think uh well I was going to say if there's one lesson to come down on um and emphasize I I like how you're pulling out the notion of ambiguity and indeterminacy and the generative nature of the indeterminate and and uh and how it's not a bad thing to not have a full plan and a full certainty and a full problem solving menu of um how your life's going ago. Um, and to embrace the the the the indeterminacy and uncertainty as part of um what makes life meaningful. Um having everything um having thing everything easy and laid out in on a on a plan is um uh a lot of times what we're trained or what we're inculturated into thinking that's what we should be doing but you miss out on um what uh is there that doesn't fall in to the structure that you want to impose on it and um so I feel very worried if I hear about on the uh young people on the one hand they're the ones who are going to discover the new ways to use these technologies and innovate and practice but it worries me when you hear about people asking chat GBT what to say in a conversation with their friends or with their family and not being able to sit with the discomfort of risking something from yourself. The thing is like we don't know what we think beforehand. Um we have to take the risk of saying something out loud in the conversation. Often our thinking and our emoting happens in conversation happens by taking the risk of putting something into words and maybe noticing that's not quite how I feel. Let me try again or let me see how that lands on you. And sometimes your reaction helps me clarify what's actually going on with me. And it's so important to have that sense of um to be ready to have that um to deal with that discomfort and uncertainty of being in conversation and discovering and creating your sense of who you are and what matters to you and how you're feeling in the conversation with others and not not having a plan that's given to you by your AI assistant. Um because that's I think it is a skill and I think it is a um also uh something that takes practice. Yeah, it's a skill and it takes practice to to enter into conversation with that uncertainty and with that experimental way. Do you think it's okay to or not okay, but I can imagine that we could practice a little bit for those people who are really shy for for those who are really shy and and have trouble like throwing themselves into it and kind of lose the opportunity. Could they could they practice with the technology just knowing it's technology so they get habitually in their body the sense of how it does feel to do that but then the whole point is to really try and do that and not stick to the script. Does that make sense?
That does make sense. I think that would be a cool practice. It could be a very cool practice to design with your chatbot. And maybe there's some prompts you can give it to to encourage you to take the risk of saying something. But the point is the embodied interaction in real life with people, right? Not the Yeah. Not the script that you then are in your head when you're talking to people or something. Yeah. But anyway, you were going about uh care and punk and Yeah. Oh, yeah. Thanks. Yeah. So I I do think that there's we should be aware be aware of the the tendency to want to have to use like AI to like meticulously plan our lives and to have all the answers and that um for me then the there's the danger also of here the work of Jonathan height is really important of spending too much time just simply spending too much times on screens and media not enough time in face tof face um embodied interaction. Of course, mediation by screens also does a lot of great things. We're talking right now. Uh there's a lot of awesome conversations that have it in the mediation by screens, but there's something in the uh the sense of immediiacy of embodied engagement. And the reason I'm saying that right now is particularly to come back to my my lifelong obsession with punk because punk isn't really it's I joke to say that I play unlistenable hardcore punk bands. And for me, it's a joke, but it's serious because it's not really meant to be listened to. It's meant to be created in an experience that you share with other people in the moment. And the music is meant to be live and in direct contact and uh experience together.
What the audience does is just as important and how the audience receives it and interacts with the music is just as important as what the musicians are doing. It's something you're all creating together in the mo in the moment of controlled chaos. And it's punk is it's also a like I said earlier, it's an articulation of a sense of disorientation. It helps you it helps a lot of people focus why they feel like they don't belong in the world. What's wrong? What's wrong in the world? There's a lot of variations of punk. That's why it's so interesting. I mean, there's totally nihilistic um reprehensible punk. There's um conservative, religious conservative punk. There is political punk. There is all kinds of punk. But um the kind that I gravitate towards is the one that gives you an articulation of why you feel like you don't belong in the world, but also gives you a sense of hope and community that you create something together. So you create a bubble of belonging. It's like it's um it's a secular church of a certain kind. You have your devotional services, which is your shows. You have your communities. You all come together to share a moment of controlled chaos. But it's not just rejection of what's going on in the world. It's also a lot of coordination. All the conversations that happen to put on a punk show, to put out a record, all the all the the skill and concern and shared love of doing something together just because you love doing it, not because you get money, not because you get status.
I mean, within the punk scene, there's critiques you can make. There are people that are playing status games. You look out from the punk scene on the outside. Most of the people who look at punk don't consider those people to be high status. There's funny paradoxes there. But by and large, the punk attitude is doing something just because you love it and coming together to create something in the moment. Um, not necessarily even because it's all that creative. The songs we play, the same kind of songs that they made up in 1983, which is really the same kind of songs that the Beatles were playing. Very simple song structure. It's not about the particular brilliance. It's uh that goes into one song. It's about this combination of individuals in this moment carrying on the tradition, creating something together simply because they love it, doing it in the real world, and experiencing that moment of passionate connection and co-creation that I think um punk serves for me as an antidote to technological nihilism in that way. And I want everyone to have their version of being in a punk band. The internet helps, AI can help in its own ways. The question is going to be, how can you have your version of being in a punk band, doing something because you love it, coordinating with others, um having the experience of carrying on a tradition and doing it for the joy and the love of doing it. That's um connection to what matters. That is actually one of the most important things and I think what most a lot of people have expressed um even listeners as being what they're hungry for is a group of people they can explore um what doesn't necessarily have to sound good or look good or read well or whatever but do it out of passion and not be judged for it because that's always you know um but still be able to discuss it. So, it's wonderful to think about punk like that and whatever you said about everyone should have their own punk band even if it's not music, right? Like, yeah, that seems something another orientation technology could help us do and is in a way because there's so many groups and communities now that can form because of of technology. I have to ask you because having been around musicians and knowing drummers, how many bands are you in? Drummers are usually in like 10 bands or at least at least two or at least. Yeah, definitely.
I'm I'm always in three bands at a time. Okay. It's our way of it's our community service.
There's a drummer shortage. There always has been. Well, and they're so important. And yeah, I mean, you need the right drummer, too. So, it's also that like every band wants the right drummer.
But I'm thinking about mood and atmosphere a little bit and how when you were describing this and doing something the way for love, you you your body is in a certain atmosphere that gives you a way of knowing about life or being alive that you then know is possible. Does that make sense? Like can you imagine what your life would be if you hadn't had that atmosphere in your life through music? Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. I think that the the connection the connection between music and mood is so important. Mood is um a way of also being oriented to what matters in a situation. Mood is not just a feeling in your head or in your body. Mood is an attunement to what's going on around you. What's what's important now or what's relevant now? How do you relate to it? And um that's why the the mood of the mood of a good punk show is a mood of controlled chaos where you have a feeling like something crazy could happen at any minute but then nothing too crazy happen that somebody gets hurt and you have this heightened sense of uh but you're also the sense of that we're doing something crazy together for the sake of doing it. That's a certain mood of joy. Joy is this sense of uplifted collective upliftedness um for its own sake. uh that is um a really important mood that music can connect can connect us to. It's wonderful you say that because when I think about care in some other writing I think about it through that ambiguity we were talking about. That's what I write about like the awe of ambiguity, but also like a juance or a kind of joy or a kind of release or a kind of overflow that I think is also very important for that that that caring that we were trying to talk about as as as so pime primordial, right? And an almost hands kind of way. But I I'm thinking about that what you just brought up and also in terms of the other kind of ambiguities that we were were talking about and how punk can also give us a way to or not even just punk but these kind of situations where there's um a little bit of entropy that also feels like something that's only alive or a living interactive kind of thing.
uh which we train seem to be trying to control with our technology but maybe we don't want to control it all or Yeah. Yeah. I like that. And actually even there's a funny analog to the uh the way that the large language models are trained and or deployed and because they can and even sometimes in your settings you can have them to be um more adventurous and more more randomness and their replies or more controlled and and bound by their reinforcement learning. And so there's something to say there about the the generative the generiveness of of entropic chaos of the of the paradox of the tensions of the uncertainty of the unsettledness that it's also connected to how um these machines speak speak their language which is pretty cool. Yeah. And this paradox of technological caring that you bring up sometimes too, I think is um that the paradox itself in whatever way speaks to the fact that we don't have everything under control and that there's something generative about that that we also you know it's an ongoingness in the way you said like there's no one answer and there's something about how do we find ways to go through this together in the way that you were talking about with the punk. I don't know. But in all the worlds that you've been in, I suppose that you've felt that tension and you've maybe felt these different moods and atmospheres and caring and all the stuff we've been talking about in a lot of different ways.
I wonder if that's ever been overwhelming or if if you've been able to stay in that kind of pocket that it sounds like you were in when you were describing Drifus. That sounds like a little bit like your life too that you were when he was just going with what he cares about and and you know being awake and alive to it and and and taking the opportunities but also through care.
Does that relate to the way you've been in in the world too with all these different worlds and your trajectory? Yeah, definitely. It feels like that like the um the decision not to be to do a PhD and then not to do a traditional academic career was this moment of um recognizing that here I was um I had this opportunity to to stay working with Bert while he was teaching at Berkeley.
And here was this mysterious um figure, Fernando Flores, who came into my life through Berts and um was offering me a job to work with him in in his consulting and coaching company. And and I was like, how am I going to say no to this? I mean, yes, I'm giving up I'm giving up on the the structured well, what the academics like to believe. What gets a lot of them into it is the idea actually that you can have this kind of safe structured life and you have a path and you get tenure and then you're set and you don't have to worry about it which is a funny version of this definitely not true and it is a funny version of you know getting you know abdicating the uncertainty endemic to life and looking for this problem solving plan but it gives you the space to think which is got its own benefits but um but I yeah I had this moment of just giving up or deciding to bracket the traditional academic path and just say yes to what life had presented which was this other kind of adventure of going out to to be a philosopher in the wild or to be I sometimes joked um a working philosopher. Yeah. And to learn the relevance exactly and um and uh so it's it's like um at the same time uncertain and scary. And right now I'm in a big transitional moment where I I decided a year ago that whatever I've got to do is to bring my philosophical training and tradition to the current AI conversation. I don't know where that's going to take me. I don't know how I'm going to pay my bills. Um I'm I'm floating. I'm raising money here and there. I've got um institutional affiliations that sometimes support me, research funds that sometimes come my way, but I'm navigating and I'm making it up as I go along. but in the conviction that um these conversations really need to happen and that I've got um from my um ambassadors of possibility before me and my mentors and my training and my convictions that um I can help um help people um think about this stuff and be aware of the stakes of the technologies we're living through. Well, I mean B you are and I think it's very interesting. I I had thought about it before you even said any of that, but you know, something is happening around you and with you and you you know, it's it's interesting that suddenly these people just sort of become I I kind of want to say a teacher in a sense of because I think all the stuff we've been talking about with care and maybe even all this training you've been doing in all these different ways, you're there it feels like there's a kind of teaching in that in a sense of um you know what Drif has meant to you or or why it matters to be doing philosophy at all. Uh I don't know if that makes sense to you. Um but I I'd like to hear before we go just how I think a lot of people are in a situation like you now and in a way it's becoming the modern situation because all older kind of scaffolds are are changing and nobody's really in a state that's not precarious. Um and yet there's so much opportunity. So it can be overwhelming to figure out what to do. I mean um but before we go I want to hear about teaching just you know and how that relates to care or how that feels for you if you how you feel that in your body and also we have to talk about love just a little bit like if you have anything about love you want to share Thank you. Yeah. Um about teaching uh I have two paradigms or two great mentors of teaching that have been in my life and one of them was Hubert Drifus and the other one was Fernando Flores. And with with Bert um what you he was the most inspiring teacher. And people love taking his classes because you had somebody on the one hand up there defending a view. He wasn't just up there um reading a text and kind of summarizing. He had a he saw the he had a way of articulating the philosophical position in a way that connected to life and that he was up there to defend and explain um and make matter.
But at the same time he was always teaching at the edge of his own understanding. He would not teach something that he understood completely. He always wanted to teach the stuff that he didn't understand. If he was coming back to H Highiger for the hundth time, he would be want to focus on the places that he was unsteady from last time. That's why he always recorded his lectures there mostly for him. He did put them on the students reserved for the students, but he wanted to listen to what he said last time and figure out how he could understand it better where he was confused.
So he in his own articulation he was always teaching at the edge of his own understanding and that created a sense of adventure of shared adventure of shared inquiry that the issues aren't settled. These issues aren't going away. These past philosophers have dealt with them in their way and set us up to think more about them. But the questions of what it means to be human are always changing because our technologies are changing, our political intuitions are changing.
um the historical craziness that um happens all around us changes the stakes of in the questions that we have. So we're never done in these philosophical reflections. And so, um, that was something that that I was inspired from BERT to to to be to see teaching as a a shared inquiry and that an immersion in that perplexity and uncertainty and indeterminacy where the where the real thinking can happen and where the real issues of being human can be um can be dealt with.
Um from Fernando I learned that um teaching isn't teaching is more important to um not to teach content or like a theory to somebody but to teach them skills for living in a richer ontology.
So Burr was still a university teacher and would still kind of help people develop arguments and think systematically about how to read Kirkagard or how to read Haidiger and write a paper about an issue of philosophical importance. You were still learning a kind of theoretical skill. Even though it was grounded in this existential concern and this this immersion and the indeterminacy and perplexity, it was still supposed to resolve into a paper with an argument and a thesis and so forth. Um so Fernando was uh not a university teacher. He taught he had a consulting program, consulting company and a coaching kind of life coaching approach. And he had a way of um locating the ontology that somebody lives in and helping them break out of it or have a richer ontology. What does it mean to live in ontology? It means to have certain habits of conversation and habits of what you notice. So the engineering, this is a one that we spoke about earlier. Engineers live in an ontology of problem solving. They live, they see problems, they want to have the procedures to solve them and they go after them. That's what they notice in life. That's what they're good at. That's what they're attuned to. They live in an ontology of problem solving. Um and but that then the in the Fernando approach he says he helps people see that they live in an ontology and then he helps them realize that uh you as a conversational being and a moody being you have the capacity to learn new conversational skills uh to not just be stuck in the problem solving way or transmitting information but to awaken to your capacity to coordinate to co-create a world with others in conversation and to focus on um uh there's a variation on this to focus on what matters to you and what your dream of life could be and to coordinate with others to create it. So he wanted to bring he sometimes called this the ontological detox. You have to show people that they live in an ontology that kind of prevents them from seeing the full richness of being human if they're always looking for problems to solve. if they're always looking for information and procedures and uh instead help them develop the skills to create relate to life as an adventure but one that has a structure of conversation and of paying attention to the moods that you live in and the moods of the organization that you work in and to know that moods shape our possibilities. You're if you're in a mood of resignation, you don't see possibilities. That's what that's what the mood of resignation is. Everything feels overdetermined and there's nothing you can do here. But a mood of ambition is a mood where you don't where you see challenges as opportunities to prove yourself and to test yourself and to test your community to overcome. So um helping people see that we live in moods and that we live in a conversational that we can develop our conversational skills for um making better offers, making better requests, making declarations in our communities about the concerns that we're going to take care of. Um and uh yeah and in that general sense waking up to the joy in the mystery of life and um going for it those that's um the one of the ways I learned about teaching from Fernando. I have to say that reminds me of something you said about nature which I don't remember exactly but or maybe it was even Drifus but it comes from this tradition of there being meaning. Nature is meaning in a sense.
And I don't know why it reminds me of that, but it had something to do with the the tangling or it seems to me that what you just described when you put all of that together with the sense that there's already that we're immersed in meaning and all the stuff that we've been talking about with caring, then that's a different kind of um that's a that's a kind of gift, right, that you can maybe uh express for other people. That seems pretty important right now. If that makes sense. Yeah.
Yeah. I like that sense that that the meaning meaning is out there, so to speak. It's not in your head. You don't have to make it up. You don't have to decide it. There the meaning meaning of life is out there in the issues that matter in our world now and in the relationships that you have and in the strange history, the unique life life history that each of us is um in the historical moment that we all live in that the meaning is meaning isn't just in the head. It's in the this kind of social historical space that sets up some issues as important and some issues as irrelevant and um given your history can attract you, pull you, grab you. That's the way Bert liked to talk about it. Something grabs you. But then you al yeah you have the the the wherewithal and the the the sense of adventure enough to to allow yourself to be grabbed sometimes without a plan.
how to be strong enough to again it comes I mean it's just because I think about it all the time but it's that holding that tension and that paradox learning how to do that together learning how to help each other do that and also when you were talking I was feeling like that the body's power right the power that we that we are as living beings and how much amazing stuff we could do if in your term in the way you've said it um we started thinking about technology to as enhancing that that caring and that sensuality and that beingness uh it feels like whoa that's a whole really beautiful way to think about the future. Yeah. Yeah. That is the the most important issue of our times is how to design and then create ways to use these technologies to enable us to keep in touch with these capacities for for caring and for taking care together. Caring means discerning what matters. Discerning what are the significant issues in life for us at this moment and in your own life. And then taking care. What are the practices and skills you need to take care of what matters to you? Um to tend to what matters to use David Spivox's phrase. Tending to what matters is an activity. Caring is an activity. Mattering is a way of being like we were talking about earlier, but it's something we do together. It's not something we do alone. Yeah. We're making care all the time, literally. So maybe if we think about that and notice that differently, it changes it. I guess we've been talking about it all the time in some way. But the but love uh I want to ask you I always ask at the end if there's any experience of love that you would like to share relative to basically anything. It could be love of knowledge or something you know love of your teachers, love of punk, I don't know just that word if what it means. We've already mentioned it quite a few times in important ways but if there's any other thoughts or experiences you want to share. Well, I'm I'm definitely a pluralist about love. I think there's many loves and many way and loving is a way of being. It's also again not just a feeling. It's a way of being. And there are many loves that happen in life that have different structures. There's this kind of teacher mentor mentee love. There is the parent um um child love. There's sibling love.
There's romantic love. There's um love of your um punk bandmates. There's love of art. Um and uh what's the striking thing about love too is that it's not under your control. And it's the things that are not under your control that also yeah make life meaningful if you can be in the right relation to them. And so love is not under your control. Uh it's risky, it's terrifying. Uh but it gives life color. And um I would say that well I'm compelled to say that uh my lifelong love of music has been there together with me with my lifelong love of um well the discovery I made of thinking and reading and teaching and being involved in intellectual inquiry.
The lifelong love of music has been something different for me. Um, that's been fundamental.
That has been, like I said, a source of community, a source of um, creative expression. Again, without the pressure of having to do something radically new or innovative. We're doing the same songs that they did in 1983, um, with different variations. Uh, it's embodied. It is moody and it gives you a refuge from everything else could be going wrong in life. Everything else can be crazy in the world. But you have the moments of the long practice of your embodied skill, of your community, of the um co experience of co-creation with your bandmates. And this is existential salvation. This is the experience of love um in its best sense. That's beautiful. I think music really is very close to what we try to gesture with gesture towards with words like love. Also, I was thinking about as a drummer, the way you use your body is so amazing because you're using your feet and your hands and it's such an embodied um it's almost a way of thinking without not thinking but it's so cognitive and so bodily and so immediate in the ways that we've been talking about. Yeah. Yeah, you have all kinds of problems in a certain sense like creative problems to solve. How do you fit this drum roll into this part and how can you get your body to move in the right way? Yeah. And also being aware of all the other instruments like the space you're you're sort of Yeah. It's really I mean you could write a book just about that. Yeah. And I think it's also very the embodied part is very important. The skill part is very important that you're always writing a new song is learning a new skill. You're always expanding your repertoire of skills.
even playing cover songs, you learn you learn how to mimic someone else's style of doing drum rolls.
You expand your repertoire of intuition. You expand your repertoire of skill. You're expanding your agency. And uh the other thing that's important that I mention that I want to mention in this context is also inheriting and transforming a tradition. You feel like you you have a sense of longer term, longer horizon belonging, which is also a nice thing to have. More than a nice thing to have. Yeah. Uh, I think there's all kinds of ways we reproduce is a weird word, but continue things through the world. I really think music is one of those and ways we don't quite understand, but that has a lot a lot a lot of resonance, dare I say. Um, exactly. But is there anything that we didn't talk about that you want to talk about? I really really love this. I loved everything you said. I think there's just some beautiful things in that. I yeah I feel like our the conversation um hit its stride um talking a lot about the the music issues and the the being inspired by certain teachers and those experiences and because those are those are the concretizations of the abstract stuff about care and love that we were starting to talk about at the beginning in a theoretical way and I was trying to say yeah for high deg care isn't just a feeling it's a structure of being where you live in a space of meaningful distinctions And you clarified that that's not just at the level of thinking. It's a level at this embodied immersion in your situation.
What the affordances that are there for you is a reflection of what you care about and the stand that you are in the world. And all of that's nice to say at a theoretical level. And it's important to um use that to argue against um conceptions of agency that are overly rationalistic or overly naturalistic like later Harry Frankfurt stuff is. And it's important to bring this theory to bear for people who are thinking about what's the nature of intelligence to say that intelligence isn't we it's wrong to think of intelligence as a a disembodied capacity to solve problems or even to learn how to solve new problems. This is a kind of common definition of intelligence in artificial intelligence research. It's very important that we if we're going to build systems that are going to integrate into our lives that we're going to share the planet with that we realize that intelligence isn't a free floating capacity for problem solving. It's intelligence is bound up with our capacity to care because it's our capacity to care that sets up which problems are worth solving what the priority is. um and caring, problem solving and intelligence without caring will be um a disaster, will be very dangerous, will be dehumanizing. And it's a strong temptation in this age to also think that AI will be able to solve all of our problems. And there's a lot of there's a one of the ethos that you have out there of the sense of mission that people have is to create a super intelligent machine that can then solve all of our problems. Ask it a question. It will give you the optimal solution for how humans should live together and solve our problems. But this would be to give up on the project of being human. This would be to give up on the project of attuning to what's worth caring about and and loving and living for in this moment.
Um, so reminding the this it's important to remind ourselves at this moment that intelligence is connected to our capacity to care and not our problem solving capacity and that the dream of solving all problems and to looking at life like a series of problems to solve forgets to ask the question for the sake of what and um that's a question about what is worth caring about that always needs to be raised a new by each person and each generation. And that's what I'm here to keep thinking about. I was thinking about nihilism as a word that comes up a lot and that I think you're also talking about sometimes in your work, but how everything you just said is what we really need to hold in mind, right? When when because there is that nihilistic push now too connected to what you just said and that makes all of what you just said even more important for us to find ways to share with all these different generations. um and creators and users of technology and does that make sense to you? Nihilism being and it connects to the punk and the ambiguity and everything too somehow. Yeah. Nihilism is two two things. On the one hand, it's a cultural condition in which we lose track of the project of love and care and we get sucked into efficiency and optimization and and look at life like a series of problems to solve and and um optimization for the sake of optimization. That's the space in which the question of what is worth caring about can't arise and the the question of of living in in in pursuit of or in service of what we love and care about gets dissolved or subordinated. And that's a sense of meaninglessness. It's a and why would you want to live a life like that? And you see a lot of people with a sense of disorientation today. That's the context that they're thrown into. And they're like, "Okay, computer's going to do all the jobs. Uh the computer's going to make all the political decisions. the the world's at war. I mean, what am I even here for? What's the point? That that's the second nihilism then as a personal reaction to all of this. Like, what's the point of all of this? Why this this um visceral sense of um of feeling like you there you can't belong here? That the world is hostile to to meaning and involvement and care. Um that's that's the other register that nihilism hits. And again, I mean, that's when I come come back to needing to um revivify, resuscitate, revitalize the capacities for for care and the way that the conversations we that we've been exploring. So, well, thank you so much for having wonderful. Yeah, I really enjoyed that.
And um I'm writing about these issues a lot in my Substack, which is called without.substack.com.
And I'm I've got an aspiration to put more content on my YouTube channel because I know that people aren't reading as much and conversations are happening um a lot with uh video formats and I want to do what I can to help these kind of conversations happening and that's why I admire a lot your project and I appreciate that you invited me to be on here. I taught Haidiger's being in time at UC Berkeley last summer. I recorded it and I'm doing I'm putting I'm editing the videos and I'm going to put them on my channel as another project that I have and so I invite people to find me to please send me a message if you want to um think or talk about any of what we've been saying today. That's great. And also send it to us or send it to me or send it to to Love and Philosophy and Love link to it and we'll also we can highlight your if you make a playlist or something we can highlight it and Cool. Yeah, because I love it and I I did watch uh you you have some lectures on there that I that I put in my list to watch and I think a lot of people will like it. And also the Dreyfus, right? So that's all like a big wonderful treasure chest, you and Dreyfus. And we could probably make a whole little list of that. Exactly. Yeah. Well, thank you. thanks for what you're doing and I'm excited to see where it goes and it's wonderful to talk to you and of course I love your all the work you're doing uh relative to care and I hope we can work together on whatever in the future or just Thank you. I'd love to join forces. Yeah. And I'm going to stop this now but I I also want to tell you that um
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