Category Archives: philosophy

paradigms of attention

Attention as selecting information to accomplish a task

Imagine that you run a laboratory in which you give people or animals stimuli (for instance, showing them shapes on a screen or making sounds) and you record their responses.

Sometimes, your subjects miss things in interesting ways. For example, in the Invisible Gorilla experiment, viewers are told to count how many times players pass a basketball, and most fail to notice a person in a gorilla suit who walks across the court (Chabris and Simon 2011).

This general approach dates back at least as far as Wilhelm Wundt’s psychology lab in Leipzig in the 1880s. Since World War II, psychologists have often posed an analogy between their subjects and computers–specifically, the large class of computers called “von Neumann Machines” (van Neumann 1945). These familiar devices have components that collect data (keyboards, cables, cameras), components that apply stored instructions to process data, components that store data, and components (such as printers and screens) that output the computed data.

Von Neuman sketched the design of a “very high speed automatic digital computing system” and then directed the team that built a prototype computer at the Institute for Advanced Study from 1948-51. According to his sketch, this machine’s computing function, its command function, and its memory function would “correspond to the associative neurons in the human nervous system.” The equivalents of our sensory and motor neurons would be “the input and the output organs of the device” (2.6).

If indeed a person or an animal is like a von Neumann machine, and it fails to notice something, the likely causes would seem to be a limitation of sensory function, a scarcity of computing power, or a failure of memory-storage. For example, if we miss the guy in the gorilla suit–as I did when I was first shown the video–it’s either because something was wrong with my eyes, I was focusing all my processing power on counting the basketball passes, or (conceivably) I saw the guy dressed as a gorilla but I failed to remember him. Most explanations emphasize limitations in our processing power, or “information-bottlenecks.” Then “attention” is whatever process we use to direct our finite processing capacity.

Attention as care for another person

Now imagine that you are observing two friends in a conversation. One tells the other a sad story, and you think that she seeks an expression of sympathy or compassion from the other. But instead of displaying any emotion in response to the story, the other begins to talk about himself.

Here it is unlikely that we will think of a computer or an information-bottleneck. The problem is not that Harry is receiving too much data to be able to process Sally’s story. The problem is motivational. Harry does not care enough about Sally, possibly because he cares too much about himself.

Von Neumann machines have no motives and do not care. Their designers do. Engineers can make machines that scan patients to assist with medical care or that identify enemy soldiers to destroy them. Such differences are crucial, but they are not caused by the machines. They are encoded in the machines’ design, which could be different and which can be changed. Further upstream is an institution, such as a hospital or an army, that paid for (or ordered) the machine to be built. Behind the institution are the people who designed, supported, and led it.

Thus, when we think about this second case, we are likely to ask what Harry and Sally want and possibly what the culture and society have taught or encouraged each of them to do–not about their cognitive limitations.

In fact, people can overcome their inability to grasp or process another’s story by devoting more time to it. In lab experiments, reaction-time is often treated as evidence of attention, but in relationships, the time that we devote to attending anything or anyone is a variable under our control. Indeed, some people choose to devote their whole lives to attending to one thing.

Attention as respect for something beyond me

Another example comes from Iris Murdoch:

If I am learning, for instance, Russian, I am confronted by an authoritative structure which commands my respect. The task is difficult and the goal is distant and perhaps never entirely attainable. My work is a progressive revelation of something which exists independently of me. Attention is rewarded by a knowledge of reality. Love of Russian leads me away from myself towards something alien to me, something which my consciousness cannot take over, swallow up, deny or make unreal (2001, p. 87)

In his beautiful and important book, Shop Class as Soulcraft, Matthew B. Crawford quotes this passage and suggests that the same is true of “any hard discipline, whether it be gardening, structural engineering, or Russian,” when “one submits to things that have their own intractable ways. Such hardness is at odds with the ontology of consumerism” (p. 65).

In these cases, a person attends less to another human being than to a complex and integrated object, whether it is a motorcycle, a natural language, or a garden. Duration is a sign of attention. I am not attending to a foreign language unless I commit considerable time to studying it.

The important questions about attention

I have learned from the laboratory research on attention, and I am sure that I would learn more if I read more and would benefit from that study. But this whole literature seems only distantly relevant (if at all) to urgent concerns about attention:

What should we attend to?
Who should we attend to?
What should we do when we notice something about someone else?
Do we attend too much to some things? (Candidates: ourselves, our own pleasures and aversions, trivia, doomscrolling)
Do we attend too little to other things? (Candidates: nature, people who suffer)
Which actions tend to involve worthy attention? (Candidates: skilled manual crafts, “deep reading,” friendship, prayer)
Who and what affects our attention? Is their impact positive or negative?
How can we design contexts in which attention is more often beneficial?

Why the first paradigm came to dominate

Graham Burnett (2026) offers a compelling history of the idea that attention means selecting information to accomplish a task. He mentions that “a huge percentage of the laboratory research on human attention conducted in laboratories in the United States across the watershed decades of the last century was hot-war- and Cold War–directed inquiry into human abilities to track and trigger on a stimulus—work centrally concerned with military operations” (Burnett 2026). Partly due to funding from the Defense Department, but not only for that reason, psychologists used increasingly sophisticated tools for measuring responses to stimuli. I would also emphasize the powerful metaphor of von Neumann-style computers after 1945 and the genuinely fascinating, interdisciplinary field of cybernetics, which peaked in the 1960s. All of these factors help explain why so much research has treated attention as selection of data to process.

Burnett says, “if in the 1950s the entire budget of the U.S. Department of Defense had been rerouted to fund the attentional research of a set of Tibetan monks, we would surely have inherited by 2020 quite a different scientific literature on human attention. Probably less essentially ‘cybernetic,’ and, it stands to reason, less focused on a variety of operationally oriented ‘tasks.'”

As Burnett acknowledges, the fact that any body of research has contingent reasons does not invalidate it. Psychology labs have generated real findings about attention as a solution to cognitive limitations. It’s just that we need to understand other phenomena that also deserve the word “attention” and that seem barely connected to this experimental literature.

Weil’s alternative

Simone Weil (1909-1943) suggests a very different agenda. She begins her short essay (or long aphorism) on “Attention and Will” by announcing, “It is not about understanding new things, but—through patience, effort, and method—coming to understand self-evident truths with one’s whole being.”

As if imagining a psychology lab (although I doubt she had that in mind), she writes, “The will has power only over a few movements of a few muscles, associated with the model of moving nearby objects. I can will to place my hand flat on the table. If inner purity, or inspiration, or truth in thought were necessarily associated with postures of this kind, they could be objects of the will.” But the will is not what concerns Weil. “Attention is an entirely different thing.”

A bit later, she writes,

The poet creates beauty through attention fixed upon reality. The same is true of the act of love. To know that this man—who is hungry and thirsty—truly exists just as I do: that is enough; the rest follows of its own accord. The authentic, pure values ?of truth, beauty, and goodness in human activity arise from one and the same act: a certain application of full attention to the object. The sole aim of education should be to prepare for the possibility of such an act through the exercise of attention.

I conclude with a passage from the same essay:

Solitude: In what, then, does its value lie? For one is in the presence of mere matter (even the sky, the stars, the moon, the blossoming trees)—of things of lesser worth (perhaps) than a human spirit. Its value lies in the superior capacity for attention. If only one could be attentive to the same degree in the presence of a human being…

Sources: Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us (Harmony 2011); John von Neumann, First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC (1945); Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of the Good (Routledge Classics, 2001); Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft (Penguin 2009); Graham D. Burnett, “Human Attention as a Philosophical Problem: The Question, and the Nature of Questions,” Metaphilosophy 57:1-2 (2026): 3–22; Simone Weil, La pesanteur et la grâce (Librairie Plon, 1947).

ten thoughts about time

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[Caveat: there is a large literature on the philosophy of time that I have not investigated carefully. The following thoughts may be naive.]

Our habitat exhibits temporal regularities

Like all species on this planet, we evolved in an environment strongly marked by the regular movements of the earth and moon in the presence of the sun. Most species respond to these regularities–resting by night or by day, budding every spring, foraging at low tide. For species that are sentient, it pays to be aware of at least the most relevant regularities.

We perceive rhythms

Human beings can sense temporal regularities. We can notice that a frog is croaking at an even pace or that each day is about as long as the next one. We can also make rhythmic sounds of our own. My colleague Anirudh Patel shows that some birds experience rhythm much as we do, but that monkeys do not. As hard as they try, monkeys cannot predict the next beat. It seems likely that our ways of perceiving and creating temporal regularities are adaptive for us, as highly social creatures living on a planet with pervasive temporal rhythms. For one thing, music and dance strengthen social bonds. But different species have adapted to the same context differently.

Our ideas of time are deeply cultural

People are taught how to perceive time from a very early age. We learn words for minutes, days, and years. Our languages mark time in complex (but diverse) ways, such as verb tenses or adverbial expressions. We learn metaphors for time, such as the clock’s round face or a calendar’s rows and columns. And elements of time are deeply imbued with significance, sometimes even sacredness.

This inheritance makes it hard to tell whether individuals could perceive (or invent) temporal regularities all by themselves. When one of my daughters was about two, she went to nursery school every other weekday. She said that this pattern was a “stripe.” I don’t know whether she was reinventing the metaphor of time as a line divided into periods (in which case this metaphor could be hard-wired) or whether she was simply applying a metaphor that she had already learned from us. But at least some of our notions of time are cultural inheritances.

Our direct perceptions of temporal regularities are imperfect

We can perceive that a clock’s ticks are spaced evenly, but if the clock slows down very gradually, we will not notice. We can perceive that the seasons rotate through an annual pattern that takes hundreds of days to complete, but I do not think we would notice that a year took 350 or 400 days if we didn’t measure and record the passage of time.

We use tools to measure time

Because we can recognize temporal patterns, we can identify objects that are particularly regular and use them as measures by comparing them to other objects. For our ancestors, the regular motions of heavenly bodies provided reliable measures, and they erected objects that cast shadows to track these motions. Sometimes we simply perceive that something (such as water dripping through a narrow hole) is regular and use it as a measurement tool. But it is better to have an explanation of the object’s regularity. For instance, Newtonian physics can explain why the earth has rotated at an even pace during our recorded history. With modern physics, we can now invent quantum clocks. All of the objects that exhibit temporal regularities are consistent with each other.

These five background conditions encourage us to model time in certain ways

We pervasively think of time as a line (whether straight, circular or oval), with the present as a point that moves along steadily. We may think that only the present point is real or actual. The past has left residues in the present, including effects on our nervous system that we can summon as memories. And the regularities of nature allow us to predict the future. But all of our direct perceptions are of the present, which has no duration and turns instantly into the past.

Such models may be contingent on our background conditions: our physical capacities, which evolved for a particular environment, plus the tools and cultural apparatus that we have developed. A different culture–let alone a different species on a different planet–might grasp time in fundamentally different ways that would work just as well.

On the other hand, I would not quickly assume that a linear model of time is “Western” or “modern,” whatever those categories mean. Writing ca. 400s CE, the Buddhist monk Buddhaghosa introduces a simile of a chariot wheel that touches the ground at one point while it spins, saying that the “life-moment of living beings” is equally brief. Although we perceive a moving wheel as a continuous thing, Buddhaghosa wants us to see each instant as discrete.

Our sense of time causes distress

To varying degrees, we are troubled by feelings that time is running out, that we are wasting the present, that we would change the past if we could, that the future will be bad in certain ways, or that we wish we could directly experience what we did in the past (nostalgia).

A linear model of time might be the root of the distress

These feelings seem rooted in the class of models that I mentioned above, which represent time as linear with the present as a point.

Linear models do not describe our consciousness of time

A linear model of time works well to describe history or physical processes. It enables useful objects such as chronologies, calendars, and time-stamps. Because of its utility, we will always return to it. But it does not describe how we experience time.

As many have noted, if we only experienced the present, we could not hear a melody. We would only hear the current note or chord. We could not understand a sentence; we would only hear the word being uttered. And we could not catch (or duck) an incoming ball, because it would appear as a circle in our visual field. Evidently, we perceive objects that extend in time and change.

Kant thought that our perceptions were momentary, but there must be a persistent self that puts our perceptions together. William James disagreed that the perceptions themselves lack duration. “The practically cognized present is no knife-edge, but a saddle-back, with a certain breadth of its own on which we sit perched, and from which we look in two directions into time. The unit of composition of our perception of time is a duration, with a bow and a stern, as it were—a rearward- and a forward-looking end” (p. 609).

Edmund Husserl reached a similar conclusion, in a different way. I suspect that he and James were right, but their disagreement with Kant is relatively subtle. The main point is that mental models that represent time as a line, which we have developed to understand history and nature, do not reflect how we actually experience time.

It may be possible to experience time differently

If a linear model of time is highly useful and embedded in our language and culture, we will never just drop it. But if it is contingent on our circumstances and fails to describe our own experience, then it is not exactly objective or obligatory. We may be able to think in different ways, at least at times.

The great Zen thinker Dogen (1200-1253 CE) worked out a theory in which time is not separate from being, a vessel or dimension or space in which things occur. Instead, being and time are the same. “The way the self arrays itself is the form of the entire world. See each thing in this entire world as a moment of time” (p. 92).

I am not sure that his abstract metaphysics persuades me or communicates what he perceived while he meditated on time. I get more from his verse (p. 177):

For thousands of yards, the cold lake soaks up the color of the sky. 
Evening quiet: a fish of brocade scales reaches the bottom, 
then flits this way and that; an arrow notch splits. 
Endless water surface, moonlight brilliant.

Sources: Buddhaghosa, The Path of Purification, translated by Bhikkhu Nanamoli (Buddhist Publication Society, 2010), viii.7 (p. 476); James, The Principles of Psychology (Henry Holt, 1918); Kazuaki Tanahashi and Peter Levitt (editors and translators), The Essential Dogen: Writings of the Great Zen Master (Shambhala, 2013)

why the humanities could never be automated

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Sometimes, we want to answer questions to accomplish practical outcomes. For example, we want to know whether a vaccine works so that we can decide whether to use it. Or we may seek basic insights about viruses so that we can develop vaccines in the first place.

Sometimes, we want to know things because we are simply curious. It is hard to justify a lot of astronomy (for example) on the basis of its practical implications. But we want to understand the universe.

And sometimes, we want to understand people–and perhaps animals–because we are in relationships with them. When you ask friends how they’re doing, your motive may not be to solve a problem, nor mere curiosity, but care. You should give your friend your attention. The benefits are psychological, ethical, or spiritual–a change in one’s mind and in the relationship with the other person.

Friends may tell you things that you should believe for practical reasons or to satisfy pure curiosity. Someone might tell you that a vaccine works, so that you will take it, or that all the planets in our solar system could fit between the earth and the moon, because that’s kind of interesting to know. Paying attention means taking such claims seriously. But the main point of learning what other people think is not to find out what is objectively true; it is to know the other people. In fact, exploring the beliefs and values of a wide range of people can shake our confidence in beliefs, in general, and hence our feelings that we can and must get our own beliefs right.

Attending to a text or an artifact from a distant time or place is a little different from an ordinary conversation. For one thing, you cannot directly benefit long-dead or faraway authors by giving them your attention. Although we have ethical obligations to the dead, the influence is basically one-way. However, reading, listening to music, and viewing art are similar to regular conversations in important ways. They too are practices that develop compassion and reduce our attachment to our own prejudices and concerns.

While Michel de Montaigne’s married friend Diane de Foix was expecting a child, he sent her advice about education. He recommended foreign travel and conversation with peers. A youth should listen and appreciate, he said, not try to form and share beliefs.

And so should adults. Montaigne told de Foix, “In this school of human interaction, I have often observed this vice: instead of getting to know others, we only strive to give ourselves and are more concerned with using our own goods than with acquiring new ones. Silence and modesty are qualities very well suited to conversation.” A passage in the same letter could stand as a justification of Montaigne’s whole way of life:

This vast world, which some think is just one species in a larger genus, is the mirror in which we must look to truly know ourselves. In short, I want [our world] to be my student’s book. The variety of moods, sects, judgments, opinions, laws, and customs teach us to judge our own people soundly and teach our judgment to recognize its imperfection and natural weakness: which is no small apprenticeship.

If the purpose of the humanities–the disciplines that interpret texts and artifacts–is not to determine truth but to attend to other people, then we cannot outsource this thinking to machines or even to other human beings. The point is the experience, not the outcome.

Here is a complication: professional scholars in the humanities do pursue the answers to questions. At one extreme, they may seem much like scientists when they establish the date and provenance of a painting or correct a primary text. At the opposite extreme, they may offer highly creative or even counterintuitive interpretations, but usually they still claim to be telling us something valid about an object in the world. We can ask whether they are right or wrong, persuasive or unconvincing.

I think scholarship is very valuable, but it ultimately contributes to the humanities as experience. The point of watching or reading Shakespeare is to get out of one’s own head by attending to the author and his characters. The point of philological, historical, or interpretive scholarship about Shakespeare is to enrich performances and readings of the works.

Some of the scholarly labor can be assigned to machines. Because I cannot read Pali but I am interested in classical Indian philosophy, I have been very carefully using ClaudeAI to give me dictionary-type definitions of all the Pali words in select passages. This is an algorithmic task. Claude is probably using published Pali-English dictionaries, plus previous translations made by people who used the same dictionaries. A dictionary is also an algorithmic device, a kind of machine that generates a range of words in one language for each word in the other language. I believe that the first dual-language dictionary (Sumerian-Akkadian) was written more than 4,000 years ago.

Thus there is nothing fundamentally new about creating devices that automatically assist readers, listeners, and viewers of human artifacts. In addition to lexicons and dictionaries, we might mention grammars, concordances, indices, card catalogues, provenance lists for artworks, search functions for digital texts, and many other scholarly resources. LLMs can often do these things better.

The difference is that we were never tempted to view the tools as ends in themselves. They were meant to assist a reader in a practice that would enrich that person’s mind. Because the LLM’s speak in the first-person and purport to interpret and explain texts, it is tempting–and I feel this temptation–to imagine that they can do our reading for us. To use a simile that is becoming a cliché, that would be like getting a machine to lift barbells to save us the effort. This would not count as exercise.

Source: Montaigne, vol. 1, essay :26 (“Of the instruction of children”). I follow Screech in interpreting “que les uns multiplient encore comme especes soubs un genre” to mean that our world is one species in a greater genre of worlds.

effortful attention and moral responsibility

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When are we responsible for what we do, or for what we think and feel?

Some connect responsibility to the will and ask whether the will is free. In any given situation, a person (or a group, a non-human animal, or a machine) either has a will that is free or does not; this is a binary distinction.

Applying this distinction, we might think that some of our thoughts and actions reflect our free will, while others do not. Or we might decide that the free will is a myth, because it would be a magical exception to natural laws. Or we might think that everything we do represents our will. That is one way (but not the only way) to interpret Matthew 5:27-28: “Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery: But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.”*

Here is an alternative that avoids discussing a will at all. It is not original, but I have come to it by my own winding path.

We attend to things to greater or lesser degrees. Our attention represents more or less effort. We are morally responsible for how we allocate our effortful attention.

To continue the example from the Sermon on the Mount, if you happen to feel a private sexual response to someone, that is not your responsibility. Your mind is not under your control. But if you continue to think about the person in a lustful fashion, this sustained or repeated attention is your responsibility. And if you commit adultery, that reflects even more attention as well as more responsibility.

There is no binary here; the degree of effortful attention is a continuum. This also implies that there is no binary distinction between human persons and other creatures. I can hold my dog somewhat accountable (with appropriate allowances, and in a forgiving mode) for how he allocates his attention. When he is distracted by the sight of a passing squirrel, that just happens. But when he gives a lot of thought to stealing and ingesting a sock, that is on him.

Just as we can be held increasingly accountable for thoughts and actions as they consume more of our effortful attention, so we can be blamed for failing to attend to things that we should care about, such as others’ sufferings and injustices.

The advice that follows from this theory is familiar but, in my opinion, valid. When you have a thought or feeling that is morally wrong (aggressive, jealous, spiteful, lustful, or otherwise), let it go. Do not interpret it as a sign that something is wrong with you. That is just a way of giving unwarranted attention to the thought that happened to arise in your mind. As Gerard Manley Hopkins advises himself, “call off thoughts awhile.” But also — don’t fan the embers. If you dwell on a bad thought, your responsibility for it will begin to rise.

*Believers in predestination interpret such passages differently, saying that free will is incompatible with divine omnipotence, yet we are sinful by nature. I suspect the Gospels predate such concepts entirely.

See also: people as clusters of attention; freedom of the will or freedom from the will? (comparing Harry Frankfurt and Buddhism). The latter is from 2020, and I would not write the same now.

universities and newsrooms as laboratories or debating societies

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Higher education and the press are important sources of knowledge and insight in modern societies. I think that many people who are interested and concerned about these institutions view them as similar to either 1) labs or 2) debating societies. Both metaphors contain some truth but also mislead.

If you imagine an academic program or a newsroom as similar to a lab, then you will presume that its outputs are information and knowledge. You will probably expect the professionals (professors or reporters) to apply rigorous methods. Any good method counters biases, emotions, and other forms of subjectivity. For example, your own political views should not affect the results of a survey that you conduct if your sample is representative and your statistical techniques are appropriate. In this respect, sampling Americans’ views of Donald Trump is just like taking water samples to measure pH levels. Likewise, your opinions shouldn’t matter if you report on the municipal budget after interviewing a range of insiders and experts.

On this model, you would expect students and novice professionals to learn methods and to be aware of the best supported findings of previous research. Methods and findings should constitute the primary content of education.

When you see a professional consensus about a topic, that is a sign that its methods are working well. Disagreement is problematic, although you can hope that new data or new methods will resolve any temporary dispute.

On the other hand, if you imagine a college as similar to a debating society, then you will think first of a seminar room where there is a free-flowing discussion of a contentious issue (or perhaps a late-night argument in a dorm room). Similarly, you will think first of the op-ed page of a newspaper or a broadcast talk show.

Then you will expect to observe people expressing opinions. Disagreement is desirable–a debate is pointless if everyone agrees–and consensus can be a warning that the whole institution is biased. When someone makes an authoritative claim, along the lines of “We know that X,” you will be quick to suspect them of suppressing alternative views. Your evaluative criteria may include whether the expressed opinions are diverse, whether participants are appropriately open to alternative opinions, whether certain views should be excluded because they are out of bounds, and whether the institution reflects the range of opinions of some appropriate population. (For example, maybe a US broadcast network should present all opinions popular in the US electorate–although that claim is debatable.)

One drawback of the debating society model is that it overlooks the main activities of most professors and reporters: collecting information, applying methods, and reporting results. A session of a college course is much more likely to be spent discussing p-values or prosody than debating politics. In the case of journalism, the number of Americans paid to collect news has fallen by about 77 percent, on a per capita basis, since 1990. There may also be a declining public commitment to academic research across a range of fields.

Also, people who see universities and newsrooms as debating platforms may simply fail to reckon with stubborn information. Sometimes a professional consensus reflects facts, whether we like it or not.

However, if you assume that a university or a newsroom is like a lab, then you will not admit that any question pursued by a journalist or a professor reflects values–beliefs about what is important and why–and assumptions about which methods and sources are legitimate. There may be a neutral way to apply Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression to a dataset, but there is no such thing as a neutral dataset. Someone chose to measure certain things because they seemed important.

Instead of being willing to debate and justify your own values and hear critiques of them, you may try to claim that values are irrelevant to your professional work. You will be most comfortable with domains where methods and findings seem relatively uncontroversial, such as the natural sciences and certain kinds of “hard news.” (There either was or was not a fire on Main Street last night).

As topics become controversial, you will become increasingly wary of the observers’ objectivity. For instance, humanities scholars study religion without endorsing specific religions, but you may wonder why something as contestable as a religious belief is a worthy topic, let alone whether an interpretive scholar of religion can be reliable.

For people who see research as value-free science, ethics is unintelligible. It clearly isn’t like a lab science, but if it’s just a matter of opinions, then it isn’t a discipline at all. At best, ethics is a set of legalistic boundaries around the research enterprise, like “Don’t collect data without people’s permission.”

In the modern world, we are confronted with the challenge of navigating both facts and values when the two are deeply connected. We must respect both rigorous methods and free debates. We are trying to grasp truths and honor other people who believe different things. These combinations are difficult.

We might also remember that institutions that are a bit like labs and a bit like debating societies are also other things. Colleges are literal homes for resident students, large-scale employers, institutional investors, landlords, developers, performance venues, and gatekeepers to valuable credentials. Many news agencies are for-profit companies, employers, advertising platforms, and entertainers. Blindness to those realities can make us too comfortable with either model–the lab or the debating society.

Peter Levine

A Blog for Civic Renewal

Category Archives: philosophy

paradigms of attention

ten thoughts about time

why the humanities could never be automated

effortful attention and moral responsibility

universities and newsrooms as laboratories or debating societies