Attention as a First Principle and First Value

About this episode: We all feel our attention is under constant attack. But what if this digital war for our attention is a battle for something far more fundamental than our productivity? What if attention isn’t just something we do, but something the universe is? In this dialogue, Dr. Marc Gafni and Dr. Zak Stein introduce attention as a fundamental quality of the Cosmos, intrinsically linked to the First Values of Uniqueness, Eros, and Intimacy, noting that the universe itself evolves towards organisms with ever-greater capacities for attention. They identify how “joint attention” is a uniquely human capacity that gives rise to language, story, and culture, and therefore, they argue that the problem with the modern “attention economy” is that its stealing and hijacking of human attention is a violation not merely of a cognitive faculty, but of a fundamental value that gives rise to an Intimate Universe. Note on Source Material and Citation: The material covered in this podcast is drawn from two forthcoming volumes published by the World Philosophy and Religion Press: * Attention: First Principle, First Value, and Human Right * Reconstructing Value & Preserving Human Freedom in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: Exit the Silicon Maze, Vol. 1 For citation of this episode, please use the following reference: Temple, David J., Conversations with David J. Temple, World Philosophy and Religion Press, October 2025, Episode: “Attention as a First Principle and First Value.” About the Authorial Voice of David J. Temple: David J. Temple is a pseudonym created for enabling ongoing collaborative authorship between Dr. Marc Gafni, Dr. Zak Stein and Ken Wilber at the Center for World Philosophy and Religion, a leading international think tank whose mission is to address existential risk by articulating a shared universal Story of Value for global intimacy and global coordination. The Center focuses its work on a world philosophy, Cosmo-Erotic Humanism, as the ground for a global vision of value, economics, politics, and spiritual coherence. The Center for World Philosophy and Religion is a community-driven publication. You can subscribe for free to receive updates. To support our work, consider becoming a paid subscriber for only $9/month. Chapters: 0:00 — Introduction 0:49 — Context Setting 1:37 — The Attention Economy 3:10 — The Problem with Stealing Attention 5:08 — The Value of Attention 5:34 — Attention in the Interior Science Equations 7:04 — Attention as a Core Structure of Cosmos 8:02 — The Evolution of Attention (Pre-Modern, Modern, Post-Modern) 9:27 — Attention in Post-Post-Modernity 10:20 — Attention in Evolutionary Science 12:00 — Attention in the Human — Joint Attention, Semiotics and Language 16:28 — The Universe Values Attention 18:14 — The Anthro-Ontological Realization of the Value of Attention 19:14 — The Relationship Between Love and Attention 20:19 — Invitation to the Academy 20:55 — The Continuity and Discontinuity of Attention 23:27 — Attending Beings vs Reliably Differentially Responding Beings 25:05 — The Distortion of Love and Attention 28:47 — What’s Missing in the Discussions About Surveillance 31:57 — The Conditioning Chamber as the Infinite Absence of Intimacy 34:13 — The Need for Attention Episode Transcript: Zak: Yeah, so David J. Temple is probably not going to show up again today. Marc: He’s not coming? Zak: That’s the impression that I get. And so, he asked us to record again in his interest. So, yeah, Center for World Philosophy and Religion, content meeting. I don’t know, 1,002? Marc: We’ve been doing this for a bunch of years. Zak: So, yeah, now we’re getting another record for David J. Temple, and wherever he is, may he receive this recording. Marc: Yeah, I guess he needs it for the writing. Zak: He needs it for the writing. Marc: Okay. Maybe let’s talk about attention. Good. Because we’re right in the middle of writing on attention. And I hope this works for David, we’ll do it the way we’ve done it for the last seven, eight years or so. As you know, I’ll lay out a whole thing, you lay out just whatever’s on our mind on attention. The Attention Economy Marc: There’s this movement to this attention economy that we’re all familiar with. That, in some sense, you could say data is the new oil, and data is gained online through the grabbing of attention. So the online structure grabs attention or even hijacks attention, and that’s the critique of the attention economy. This is all stuff that, at least within a very small circle, people are familiar with. There’s been this grabbing of attention, this hijacking of attention in order to keep people online and engaged. Engagement is a kind of euphemism for addiction. And so, the business model of the attention economy is to keep people online long-term, return, repeat customers for as long as possible, for as much time as possible. It took people a while to figure out why that was true. When you read books like Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows (2010), or even Yuval Harari’s book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century in 2018, they didn’t actually get the business model straight. Their descriptions of the business model were wrong. They assumed this was in order to get more eyeballs for advertising, which is only one dimension, but we both understand, that, of course, the real issue is digital exhaust. And the real issue is gathering data in order to create the possibility of micro-target personalization with all of its deleterious effects, kind of undermining all these goods. What I want to focus on is three things. The Problem with Stealing Attention Marc: First off, and this is the big problem, which we talked about four or five years ago when we started this techno-feudalism conversation, what’s the problem with stealing attention? “Who the f**k cares? Take attention.” And we’ve talked to several people who are key figures in the economic world, in the libertarian world, who basically said: “taking people’s attention? That’s your right to do.” So, besides the fact that this is completely different than print or broadband advertising, because it’s micro-targeted and personalized and because you have the asymmetrical power of machine intelligence arrayed against you—besides that distinction, which is, of course, true—there’s a bigger issue at play, which is: What is the actual problem taking someone’s attention? Why is that a problem? And when you read the people who are really—some really good people, and some that we know and like and love—who’ve done fantastic work on pointing to the fact that you have these Persuasive Technology Lab via B.J. Fogg’s. And one of his students Nir Eyal writes his book Hooked, which is all about the hijacking of attention. But in the great objections to it, no one actually tells you why it’s a bad idea. There’s this skirting around it, and that’s true in Surveillance Capitalism and Zuboff’s great work, but it avoids: What’s the problem with stealing attention? But it’s also true in a book like Stolen Focus by Hari, which is also a great book, great job, in 2022. And there’s a whole other set of literatures. There’s a book, Z, that we haven’t gotten to talk about called Thoreau’s Axe by Caleb Smith at Yale, which is about attention. Another book by a woman named Kreiner called The Wandering Mind. So there’s this whole slew of books. And there’s another book called The Loop by Ward, which kind of deals peripherally with this. But they’re all kind of crying in different ways about attention, and they’re saying “you have to value attention.” The Value of Attention Marc: And the first thing that we want to say is: there’s no reason to value attention, ultimately, unless attention is a value. There’s no reason to value attention unless attention is a value. If attention is not a First Principle and First Value, there’s no reason to actually be exercised at its violation. That’s the first thing. Attention in the Interior Science Equations Marc: And in the interior science equations that we formulated in CosmoErotic Humanism, there are three equations, one of them which explicitly talks about attention, which is the equation about the irreducible value of uniqueness. Uniqueness is both unique quality of attention and your attention on that which is unique. That which is unique demands attention, and we have unique qualities of attention. And my unique quality of attention is part of my unique personhood. Meaning, I both demand, in my unique personhood, the unique attention of reality, the personal address of reality, and my irreducible uniqueness enacts my possibility of placing my unique attention on reality. So attention is an intrinsic part of uniqueness. It’s an intrinsic part of the core quality of Eros. And then the Eros equation, which is the experience of radical aliveness desiring: ever deeper contact, which involves the placing of attention, and ever greater wholeness—separate parts place attention on each other and then generate something larger. And finally, it’s an intrinsic part of the intimacy equation: Intimacy equals shared identity in the context of relative otherness. Shared identity comes from: * Mutuality of recognition, we place attention on each other. * Mutuality of pathos, we feel each other. * Mutuality of value, we place attention and/or we speak from within a field of shared value. * And then mutuality of purpose, we place attention on an intention. Attention as a Core Structure of Cosmos Marc: So attention is this core structure of Cosmos. And let me just say one last thing and give it to you, which is: A) we have to reclaim the First Principle and First Value of Attention.B) we can’t do that without First Principles and First Values. Without there being a First Principle and First Value, there’s nothing that’s being violated.C) it’s implicit in uniqueness, in Eros, in intimacy, but really in everything. In other words, all of the equations assume, the First Principle and First Value of Attention. By saying First Principle and First Value of Attention, what we mean is that attention itself is a quality of Eros, of love. It’s a quality of Cosmos, and that attention goes all the way down. Then, in some sense, protons, neutrons, and electrons place attention on each other. And all the way up the evolutionary chain, there is this increasing process of attention, until we get to the human level, the depth of the self-reflective human. And the self-reflective human is the history of humanity, the history of the evolution of attention. The Evolution of Attention (Pre-Modern, Modern, Post-Modern) Marc: Last piece, we could actually look for a second at pre-modern, modern, post-modern just in terms of attention. The pre-modern mind places attention, but it places attention for the sake of a religious action, which is usually some form of union with the Divine. So, I have to place my attention in order to create union, in order to kind of not be distracted by this world. The modern world kind of rejects that. Modernity rejects that for partially right and partially wrong reasons. And modernity places attention on the sciences and pays attention to the natural world. Let me measure the natural world, which is a way of placing—measurement is a form of attention. And let me place attention interiorly, in my own psychology. So, there’s this movement of attention. And then post-modernity comes along and says, “Actually, there’s nothing really to place attention on.” Zak: Hmm. Marc: See that? That’s why the attention economy emerges out of this post-modernity, because nothing’s actually real. Zak: Who cares? Right. Marc: Who cares? What’s there to place attention on? Therefore, the post-modern mind is exteriorized in the structure of the internet in which there’s complete interrupting of attention. The structure of the internet is the scattering of attention in every moment, because attention is no longer a value. The process of attention is no longer a value. Attention in Post-Post-Modernity Marc: Then post-post-modernity, in this new world, in this new story of value in response to the meta-crisis, we’re saying, “No, no, no. Actually, attention is at the very center, it’s actually the center of ethos. It’s the center of Anthro-Ontology.” The ability to turn inward and place attention on my interior, actually is the way that I impact, that I formulate ethos. It’s the way I formulate law, because, actually, the mysteries are within us. Infinity is within us. We participate in the field, and that participation happens through the placing of attention. So, we actually reclaim attention in this very, very dramatic new way. Emergent from the best strains, I would say, in pre-modernity and modernity. Okay, that takes us into attention. Zak: Get it going. Marc: Yeah. It’s exciting. Zak: It’s exciting. And the idea that the Cosmos, or the universe values attention. Attention in Evolutionary Science Zak: The evolutionary morphology that evolution itself moves towards structures that have more capacity for attention. This was part of Teilhard’s hypothesis about celebralization. The idea that, if you look at the evolutionary record, it’s building bigger and bigger nervous systems, and it’s making the organisms dependent upon the ability to pay attention or die. It’s one way to think about it. So, even from the perspective of Neo-Darwinian evolution, you get a situation where the organism’s ability to pay attention to its environment is the thing that gives it selective advantage. Marc: Yeah, beautiful. Zak: And it didn’t have to be that way. There’s plenty of processes in the Cosmos that work really well without things that look, from our perspective, like a lot of attention being paid to them. Even insects are an interesting example, where the amount of attention that an individual ant can pay, as opposed to the total unified attention, let’s say, marshaled by the entire ant colony, right? And then you get the attention of a single hunting lioness. Watching for hours the gazelle pack to look at the one who’s injured, to wait for the right moment. So there’s all of these places in biology where the attentiveness of the organism itself is what is selected for evolutionarily. So we’re looking at a situation where we’re growing these organisms, and they’re adapting to become more attentive. Attention in the Human — Joint Attention, Semiotics and Language Zak: And then, of course, you get the human. And the human—and this is where I’ll start looking at books—you look at the work of Michael Tomasello who is a comparative psychologist at the Max Planck Institute, and he’s looking back at the American pragmatist tradition, and specifically George Herbert Mead. George Herbert Mead was one of the first people to talk about semiotics. He picked it up from Peirce, and he was talking about the fact that we use signs in a way that other animals don’t. So one of the things animals pay attention to, and have to pay attention to, are the signs that their species put out. Mating signs are the most classic ones, but also hunting signals from pack animals that coordinate, and then the signs that other animals leave. And then, of course, the vocalizations of animals are essential to their living. We vocalize in a very different way, and it has to do with this—what’s called the joint attentional situation—which is the way that we attend to together. Not attend alone, one-on-one with an object, but attend to me and you looking at this thing together. So the joint attentional situation allows us to understand our complex vocalizations in a much more dramatic and useful way than any other vocalizations that animals make. And there’s a whole field of sociology called symbolic interactionism that emerges from this approach that Tomasello locks in. But basically, he proves that, like, monkeys don’t do this. No other animals do this. Humans spend a tremendous amount of time in very complex joint attentional situations where we are able to create, draw from and learn from the world together in real-time. And one of the main places that happens is in intergenerational transmission. That’s the kids with the elder, sitting down, exploring the world together, holding attention together for an extended period of time while looking at how a tool is made, or holding attention together for a long time while looking at how food is prepared. What Tomasello is basically saying is that there are many traits that humans share with other animals, but if you’re looking for those traits that might be the ones that are candidates for the differentiators—the traits that we have that could explain the difference, the obvious difference, like we build hospitals and other animals don’t build hospitals, and we go to the moon and all of that. So how does that all get started? His argument is that it has to do with this capacity for joint attention, which he doesn’t say, but which, I would say, which is the outcome of a universe which is pushing towards greater and greater capacity for more and more intimate and complex forms of attention. And so the idea that the distinctly human thing, which would give rise to what we think of as language and story, which would just say: so me and you together looking at the world, what do we do? We tell the story about the world. Or me and you together talking about other people. So the equally primordial emergence of humanness with language, story, and joint attention—that’s what Tomasello is basically proposing. And we’re proposing that more or less also. Saying that, “Listen, one reason, strongly, to say that you have to value attention is that it is not a secondary quality of the universe.” That’s basically what they’re arguing. So, like, most technologists wouldn’t say you could ignore gravity. They wouldn’t say you could ignore the laws of thermodynamics, or you could ignore the laws of electromagnetism. These things you respect, but the idea that there are limits on human nature, that there are ways that the human mind, psyche, soul works, which if you transgress or trespass certain limits, it won’t work anymore. You can break it, just like you can exhaust natural resources. You can exhaust all available attention. And just like you can cross thresholds with pollution, you can cross moral or ethical thresholds. So it’s just putting on the table, and then I’ll throw it back to you, that indeed the universe does seem to be pushing towards attention. The human being, in one sense, what defines us as human is a unique capacity for a certain type of attention. And so therefore, the preying upon or degrading that very thing which separates us and unites us to the universe—because through the joint attention, we can tell more complex stories about the universe and understand it better—is a fundamental transgression. The Universe Values Attention Zak: So you’re tinkering with something very, very fundamental when you’re tinkering with attention, akin to a law of nature. So to devalue attention in the human is to transgress. It’s basically to push against the flow of the universe, is to say. We value something that, or rather, say we don’t value what the universe values. And that’s a— Marc: Yeah. It’s great. I want to come back to joint attention, because that’s so big. Because joint attention, as you described it, is an expression of how this quality of attention, which we’re now establishing as a First Principle and First Value of Cosmos, emerges uniquely at the human level. Zak: Right, exactly. Marc: Which is, as we point out in lots of our conversations. And I think, David talks about this in the First Principles and First Values book, that every First Principle and First Value, I think he writes, has continuity and discontinuity. Zak: Right. Marc: So continuity is attention all the way up and all the way down, and then there are unique qualities of attention that emerge at each level. So let me just kind of go back for a second, just kind of riff with you for a second. So, one of the things that David talks about there is that—and we’ve talked about it many times, is that you only arouse, what Zuboff calls, appropriately, astonishment and outrage. Zak: Right. Marc: If you’re violating a value, or you arouse communion. You arouse political will, moral will, economic will, if you’re going to support a value. And this is exactly what we’re pointing to. Zak: Right. Marc: If attention is not a value of Cosmos, there’s absolutely no reason that you should be concerned with its hijacking. And indeed, the entire structure of techno-feudalism basically says, “Well, there’s no law against this.” Law, as we’ve talked about many times, has gotten dissociated from value. Zak: Right. Marc: And so, why not do it? So that’s one. But let’s go even deeper. The Anthro-Ontological Realization of the Value of Attention Marc: It’s very beautiful that the very nature of reality itself, in the interior sciences, and you can get a deep sense of this realization in your own interiority—anthro-ontologically, by anthro-human-ontologically, as we always say for realness—you can get this. You can get an interior sense of this. What reality is, is that the Infinite places attention, and that placing of attention manifests the finite. So really, when you read, for example, Genesis, vayar, divinity looked—Infinity placed attention on the finite. And we’re trying to formulate together, brother, this. Whenever you do a new Story of Value, you want to articulate a new world religion as a context for our diversity, you have to try and find in your own realization the new name of God. So we’ve talked about this new name of God together, as God is the Infinite Intimate. And what the Infinite Intimate means is that the Infinite is being intimate, meaning the Infinite is placing attention. The Relationship Between Love and Attention Marc: So, attention is: A) an act of intimacy. It’s an act of Eros. B) it’s a creative act. Attention blooms reality. It manifests reality. Attention births. And really, when you think about it, what is the act of loving? To love someone is to place my attention on them. And we talk about a lot in CosmoErotic Humanism, we try and distinguish between love and sexuality and Eros, and our point is that it’s really not about sex. That the sexuality models the erotic. In what sense? Because sexuality is the placing of attention. That’s what it is. Zak: Right. Marc: We begin to get this notion that love and attention, love and creativity and attention, are actually utterly related to each other, inextricably related. And that all of personhood and all of intersubjectivity is about the unique placing of attention. So, if we hijack attention, we’re actually deconstructing the very interior structure of reality. Zak: Totally. Yeah, there’s a couple of things to say. Marc: Please. Get the book: In 2024 David J. Temple published a book called: “First Principles and First Values: 42 propositions on CosmoErotic Humanism, the Meta-Crisis and the World to Come”. It’s the go-to place to dive deep into many of the themes being explored in this podcast. In forty-two propositions, David takes on the challenge of articulating a new grammar of value—a core set of frameworks that provide a new source code for the future of planetary culture. Rooted in eternal, yet evolving First Principles and First Values, this grammar is broad enough to provide a context for our diversity and deep enough to address our most pressing existential risks. Join us in articulating a new, shared vision that can act as a bridge to enable global coherence and coordination. The Continuity and Discontinuity of Attention Zak: Just to get the continuity/discontinuity thing in a couple of ways. An early evidence that attention goes way down is plants. Right? Plants attend to the sun and to moisture in the soil. The roots grow in the direction of moisture. Leaves and whole structures of a thousand-pound limbs will reorient to the sun. And there are some plants that do it drastically, where they come out, and they close again, and they come out. And so there’s an attentiveness that the plant has. But then, of course, it doesn’t have a nervous system, and it certainly doesn’t have the things that we most associate with attention, with your eyeballs. There’s a whole world of attention in the universe, which includes jellyfish and other stuff which do not have eyeballs but which are constantly attending to the world. Then you get this whole world of things with eyeballs that are looking at stuff. And that’s what we associate with attention. “Pay attention!” Like, “wake up, open your eyes.” So, then there’s this whole world of attention with eyeballs. And just to get that, that’s an example of continuity/discontinuity. There’s the turning towards, there’s a tending to, there’s the moving towards, but then there’s the having visual capacity, which opens up this ability to be intimate with things that are much farther away, in one sense, or at least to see these things. So it’s worth noting that we live in this world of attention where it’s eyeballs and eyeball capturing, but that’s stacked on top of this whole complex compound individual of attention that goes back down to the responsiveness of the plant tissues. And that’s just kind of gorgeous, just to sit in. Marc: Yeah. Zak: And you have that whole stack—your body is responsive at the level of a plant to the sun, and you get goosebumps and things occur that you can’t even control in your body, that have to do with your body attending to itself or the environment. That kind of continuity of attention is a way of thinking about the spectrum of consciousness and the differences that move with the different types of affordances that organisms evolve. And many people think, when they think of the plant turning towards the sun, the instinct is that the plant loves the sun. So, the way you describe the plant turning towards the sun, and the way many things attend towards things, it is as if through that attention. I want to make one final point, which just to maybe to complexify a little bit: and then you get the digital. Attending Beings vs Reliably Differentially Responding Beings Zak: So there’s the whole “digital capturing our eyeballs”, which is “great”... But then there’s the digital has eyeballs. So, sensors, sensor networks. And what’s weird about this is that there’s a way that something can be reliably differentially responding. So it’s a sensor, but it’s actually not attending to you. Right? Marc: Right. Zak: And this is very important to get this distinction. It’s a subtle philosophical distinction, and it’s made in Brandom, and it’s made in Sellars and a couple of other analytical philosophers. And it became part of the philosophy of mind and up into cognitive science. But the difference between an attending being and a reliably, differentially responding sensor is something that needs to be worked at. So, imagine you go to a door, and it’s one of those doors where as you approach it, it’s got a sensor, and the door opens. Another door, you walk towards it, and a human being opens it for you. Marc: Not the same. Zak: Not the same. In one sense, identical, especially if that guy’s hired to do that. And every time you walk towards a door, he does it exactly the same way. In one sense, the same, and in one sense, not the same at all. And so this is the case as well with, let’s say, a chatbot. The experience of being in conversation with someone—even on text, when you know it’s another human, and there’s “...” on your screen, they’re texting you—is the experience of “they’re paying attention to me.” The experience of being on with a chatbot is the experience of something paying attention to you when actually nothing is paying attention to you. You’re dealing with a reliably differential responder, but not an actual attending being. You’re dealing with a language bot, but not a language user. The Distortion of Love and Attention Marc: It’s the difference between a stalker and a lover, in some sense. In other words, every move you make, every breath you take, I’ll be watching you. But that’s exactly not placing attention. And it’s paradoxically there. It looks like I’m placing attention, but actually I’m not. The placing of attention is intimate, and intimate means we have a shared identity. There’s a context of otherness in the intimacy equation that’s laid out in the First Principles and First Values book. And then there’s a mutuality of recognition. There’s a mutuality of feeling. There’s a mutuality of value, there’s mutuality of purpose. So surveillance and stalking is not the placing of attention. The placing of attention is, by its nature— the Hebrew word for attention is sim lev. Actually, in the army, “Attention!” Attention means something of gravitas is happening. So sim lev means the placing of the heart. Zak: Totally. But even unethical attention is attention. I mean, it’s not that the only time we call something attention is when it’s the right type of attention. Marc: Well, let’s think about it for a second. So, love and attention are kind of inextricably bound up at their best. So love can be distorted. So, for example, when love gets distorted, it becomes hate. Hate actually has an obsessive placing of attention. Zak: Mm-hmm. Marc: So it actually, paradoxically, it is a kind of obsessive attention. So I guess we could talk about the stalker as a kind of— but it’s precisely an objectifying when you can’t be felt. When someone places attention on you, and that placing of attention is an expression of Eros, because attention and Eros are intimately related then you’re bloomed. It’s why we feel violated by surveillance. Because it’s actually a distortion, a degrading of the quality of attention, which is, by its nature, intersubjective. Meaning, I’m actually feeling you. So when Infinity places attention on reality, it’s an attention, which is an erotic attention. Its insides are aligned with love. It’s an Intimate, Erotic Universe. When that attention is hijacked and distorted—that’s exactly what you were saying before. So when you’re being surveilled, when you’re not only looking at the Internet, but the internet’s looking at you, and it’s a machine being. So we’d say that’s not attention. When a human being is obsessively looking at you, and it’s for the sake of killing you, or it’s a stalker, there’s something deficient in the quality of attention. Meaning, if you were really paying attention, you would actually see my interiority. If you’re really paying attention, you wouldn’t be reducing and objectifying me. You wouldn’t be degrading me. Zak: Right. Marc: So you’re paying a level of attention. You’re seeing something about me, but you’re actually not placing full attention. In other words, the act of, for example, demonization, Joseph Berke points out in his book Tyranny of Malice. That the way malice works is you place attention, but it’s distorted attention, where you kind of identify some deficiency in the object of your attention. Then you magnify it, distort it, then you occlude from your field of attention all of the good, and that becomes hatred. Hatred is a degraded form of attention. Something like that. Zak: Something like that, yeah. And that’s all attention paid by humans to other humans. Marc: Right. Zak: And then there are the sensor networks, where you have whole complex things happening without any human in the loop. What’s Missing in the Discussions About Surveillance Zak: And so I think this is one of the important things to think about with what’s wrong about the framing of surveillance is—and the reason we would not succeed with some techno-feudalists and raising the argument, because they’d be like: “But it’s not that, it’s not that there’s someone looking at you. It’s precisely, there’s precisely no one looking at you. It’s just like the door opening when you leave the grocery store. It’s just a sensor. There’s nobody looking in your house or looking over your shoulder at your web browsing. No one ever will. There’s millions of people doing it. How could we possibly look at your web browser? It’s just an algorithm that happens to know everything about you well enough to advertise to and to direct your behavior and all of that stuff.” So the creepiness factor of surveillance, the idea that the KGB is tapping your phone, or they’re looking in through here with binoculars, or something like that, that’s actually not what’s occurring. And that’s important to get which is why the frame of surveillance, I think, is less useful than the frame of operant conditioning chamber. Marc: Right. Skinner’s Box. Zak: Which, of course, involves surveillance. But a whole bunch of other stuff. And so the idea that the apparatus is surveilling you, but it’s not actually creepy in that sense. It’s creepy because it’s controlling your behavior. It’s shaping your preferences, and it’s degrading your attention to the point where you don’t even know that it’s degrading your attention. Marc: So this is very important, actually. This is a distinction that we’ve talked about a lot, between surveillance being the problem, which is actually itself problematic, and it’s one of the reasons it’s ignored by techno-feudalism. Zak: Because it’s not your dad’s surveillance, right? Marc: It’s not that kind of surveillance that you’re describing. And it also can be munificent. Let me go slow for a second. Surveillance is a form of attention, in that, the surveillance that happens through the first wave and second wave of AI. Let’s just say first wave AI—social media, being fed into machine intelligence and then being turned into data. And then the Internet of Things, and the ability to kind of turn what they call dark data into kind of usable data, which then creates this kind of personality profile about you. That is actually an evolution in the structure of reality, in that it allows reality to pay attention to you in a way that you are actually unaware of, in a certain way. And it could do that in a very, very benign way. Wow, we’re concerned with existential risk, and we need to, as Bostrom says in The Vulnerable World Hypothesis (2019), we need to keep our eyes on everyone, because we’re afraid of a particular kind of black ball that can actually be wildly destructive. So we do surveillance within the context of First Values and First Principles. In other words, we’re not looking to control you. We’re just simply creating a thing which is held by some sort of responsible structure in order to be aware if there’s actual existential threats that are actually real. So I’m doing this limited surveillance, limited in what I do with it for the sake of love, of Eros, of protection, of etc. A Skinner’s box, an operant conditioning chamber, mean: I’m paying attention to you in order to manipulate you. In other words, I focus on everything that’s observable about you in order to create a pattern which allows me to control you. That is attention which fundamentally degrades. The Conditioning Chamber as the Infinite Absence of Intimacy Zak: It does. I may need to wrap here. But I would go so far as to say that no one’s paying attention to you in the operant conditioning chamber. That’s the saddest— Marc: No one is paying attention to you. Zak: To you, that’s the saddest thing. That goes back to what we said before. That’s that saddest thing about it. In fact, only if you were important enough to actually be surveilled. But you’re not, you’re basically an anonymous, predictable agent within a system of control, being treated as a class of person. And so therefore there isn’t anyone anywhere. Marc: It’s the opposite of divine providence. Zak: It’s the opposite of divine providence. Marc: Precise opposite. Zak: Where they’re paying attention to every hair on your head. Now, the irony is that you’re being surveilled to the level of your hair. And yet, there’s no one actually watching. So this is where it gets kind of weird. We just went into, like, a dark mirror. Marc: In other words, this is the God’s eye view that’s described by the MIT Media Lab and by Skinner, which is digital omniscience, which is the precise flip opposite of Providence. Zak: Exactly. So, digital omnipotence, in which there is no actual care or attention being paid. Marc: There’s no Infinity of Intimacy. Zak: There’s no Infinity of Intimacy. There’s an infinite absence of intimacy. Presence of control and manipulation. And that’s terrifying. They capture your attention, isolate you, don’t pay attention to you, while simultaneously manipulating and controlling behavior. And the way the whole thing hinges is the vulnerability of the attentional system to capture. So this is back full circle. Evolution built this incredibly complex thing, which was built to be hyper-aware and attend to its environment, and then we spend billions of dollars figuring out how to hack that thing to capture the attention, to make it manipulatable. That notion of hyper-stimulus you already mentioned—basically engagement as a euphemism for addiction. A whole bunch of things are going on here, which are leveraging the beauty of what evolved as the most complex attending organism, is just being… “Degraded” is too weak of a word when you think about what’s happening to the youth, in particular, with regards to the addictiveness and stickiness of the technology. Marc: Right. Yes, yes, and yes. Last point on my side. The Need for Attention Marc: Something which is a value I have a need for and I desire. So there’s a First Value and First Principle of Eros. So I need Eros. I have a fundamental set of Eros needs, and I desire Eros. * I have a need for intimacy. I desire intimacy. * I have a need for uniqueness. I desire uniqueness. * I have a need for transformation. I desire transformation. So, attention, which is built into all of these, so I have a need for attention. I have a need to be personally addressed by Cosmos. And Anthro-ontologically, that’s how I know that I am personally addressed. In other words, when there’s a fundamental need to be personally addressed, there’s a fundamental—to close here on my side, you remember that line in—we were in high school. We were reading Arthur Miller. And Willy Loman’s wife in Death of a Salesman. She says, “Attention must be paid.” We have a fundamental need for attention, not because we’re psychologically, you know, somehow degraded—no—but because the essential nature of reality is that placing of attention on us and our capacity to place attention in a way in which we’re not degraded. We have that capacity to place attention, which is basically the need to be loved and the need to love. That is a fundamental human value, and to degrade that is the death of our humanity. That’s the death of humanity. Zak: Right. Marc: That’s a big deal. Zak: Yeah. On the record for David. Marc: On the record for David. Mentioned Sources: * Carr, N. (2010). The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. W. W. Norton & Company. * Harari, Y. N. (2018). 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. Spiegel & Grau. * Eyal, N. (2014). Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. Portfolio/Penguin. * Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. PublicAffairs. * Hari, J. (2022). Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again. Crown. * Smith, C. (2023). Thoreau’s Axe: Distraction and Discipline in American Culture. Princeton University Press. * Kreiner, J. (2023). The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction. Liveright Publishing Corporation. * Ward, J. (2022). The Loop: How Technology Is Creating a World Without Choices and How to Fight Back. Hachette Book Group. * Berke, J. H. (1988). The Tyranny of Malice: Exploring the Dark Side of Character and Culture. Summit Books. * Bostrom, N. (2019). The Vulnerable World Hypothesis. Global Policy, 10(4), 455–476. Mentioned People & Institutions: * B.J. Fogg (1963—) & Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University * Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955) * Michael Tomasello (1950—) & Max Planck Institute * George Herbert Mead (1863–1931) * Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) * B. F. Skinner (1904-1990) & MIT Media Lab Go Deeper: If you’re enjoying these deep dive conversations with Dr. Marc Gafni and Dr. Zak Stein, then we have an epic opportunity for you to deepen your learning process and bring these teachings into your daily life! In the World Philosophy and Religion Academy, we’re building an evolutionary community in response to the great calling of this moment of meta-crisis. We bring together daily practice, weekly study sessions with Dr. Marc Gafni, exclusive courses and more. Join us in this movement and transformation into being and becoming Homo Amor. Get full access to Center for World Philosophy and Religion at worldphilosophyreligion.substack.com/subscribe