Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series | "Attention and Being: Thinking About Electronic Media"

Speaker:  David McDonald, St. John's College Tutor

"Simone Weil equates attention and love. And, lately, much of our attention goes to our phones. What might we be loving when we attend to our phones? In this lecture, I characterize attention in terms of Walter Benjamin's notion of distance; and, in my account, distance becomes a precondition for attention. This leads into a consideration of the effects of electronic media (which reduce distance) on our ability to attend to beings. I conclude with reflections on how liberal education might take up the problem of modern technology."

This lecture is part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series - The theme of the series is “Liberal Education in the Age of the LLM.” Nearly every day brings news of “artificial intelligence’s” latest triumph or latest threat. Lost amid the noisy celebrations and denunciations – are the philosophical questions embedded in the very idea of an “artificial intelligence.” Can there be an intelligence that is “artificial”? And if so, how is such intelligence related to human intelligence and human thinking? This lecture series brings together a group of faculty at St John’s College, joined by a colleague in the Computer Science Department at the United States Naval Academy, to examine the foundational questions posed by artificial intelligence. St. John’s is a particularly fine place to host such a series because its program of study is steeped in reflections about the nature of thinking itself, from authors like Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz, Hegel, and many others. Indeed, St. John’s is uniquely positioned to contribute to and enrich the national conversation about artificial intelligence precisely because it offers an occasion for a reflection upon the foundational works – in philosophy, mathematics, and computation – that contemporary “artificial intelligence” has developed out of. The lecture series is, in that sense, an invitation to step back from news of the latest triumph or threat and to reflect more generally about human thinking and human writing and how it is – or is not – like that done by computers.