Punk, Tech & Care with drummer and philosopher B. Scot Rousse (Dreyfus, Heidegger, Kierkegaard)

追加: 2026-05-11

[00:00:00]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.

[00:03:08]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.

[00:04:34]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.

[00:10:09]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.

[00:14:42]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.

[00:16:20]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.

[00:19:43]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.

[00:21:51]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.

[00:22:02]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.

[00:25:06]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.

[00:27:50]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.

[00:28:42]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.

[00:28:54]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.

[00:29:58]We can have cares that you know don't fit together  um as as individuals as societies um all the time.

[00:30:04]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.

[00:30:16]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.

[00:30:36]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.

[00:31:12]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.

[00:36:35]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.

[00:37:16]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.

[00:42:03]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.

[00:43:48]And because in in designing technologies,  we're also designing ways of being human.

[00:43:54]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.

[00:44:51]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?

[00:45:02]They are right now. I'm sorry. You have to tell  them, please don't just try to be nice. But yeah.

[00:45:07]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.

[00:45:44]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.

[00:48:59]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.

[00:49:38]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.

[00:50:51]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.

[00:53:30]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.

[00:53:53]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.

[00:55:39]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.

[00:56:42]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.

[01:00:46]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?

[01:06:16]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.

[01:07:58]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.

[01:09:29]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.

[01:11:52]I'm I'm always in three bands at a time. Okay.  It's our way of it's our community service.

[01:11:56]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.

[01:12:06]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.

[01:14:19]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.

[01:15:45]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.

[01:16:05]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.

[01:16:31]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.

[01:20:36]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.

[01:21:05]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.

[01:21:33]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.

[01:22:06]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.

[01:22:32]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.

[01:26:01]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.

[01:26:33]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.

[01:27:26]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.

[01:29:38]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.

[01:30:34]The lifelong love of music has been something  different for me. Um, that's been fundamental.

[01:30:40]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.

[01:32:28]even playing cover songs, you learn you learn how  to mimic someone else's style of doing drum rolls.

[01:32:32]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.

[01:33:56]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.

[01:35:39]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.

[01:38:17]And um I'm writing about these issues a lot in my  Substack, which is called without.substack.com.

[01:38:24]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