Punk, Tech & Care: B. Scot Rousse on Being Human in the AI Age
with Hubert Dreyfus, Fernando Flores, Heidegger, and Kierkegaard
Love and Philosophy, B. Scot Rousse, and Andrea Hiott
Apr 27, 2026
B. Scot Rousse (“B”)'s substack, "Without Why," focuses on what it means to be alive in an age of intelligent machines. He is philosopher in residence at Topos Institute and visiting scholar in Philosophy at Berkeley. He also drums in 3 punk bands.
Andrea Hiott has a conversation with philosopher B. Scot Rousse (“B”). B is an Oakland-based, Berkeley-affiliated Heidegger and phenomenology scholar focused on AI’s effects on our capacities to care. He is also a Topos Institute affiliate and a punk drummer.
Andrea and B discuss Heidegger’s care as living in “meaningful differences,” embodied affordances, moods, and existential orientation. They explore how AI risks compulsive optimization and an overly narrow picture of the role of language in human life. B argues that technologies design ways of being human, urges users and designers to ask “for the sake of what,” articulates punk’s embodied, communal, joyful “controlled chaos” as an antidote to technological nihilism, and celebrates love and care in their visceral, pluralistic, and risky uncontrollability.
Along the way, B traces a path from growing up Hare Krishna in Florida, to an encounter with a philosophy teacher who encouraged his transfer to UC Berkeley where he came under the mentorship of Hubert Dreyfus, whose teaching and critiques of symbolic AI shaped B’s work.
B also shares about his work with philosopher-entrepreneur Fernando Flores (thanks to an introduction by Dreyfus), who applies philosophy to organizational “networks of conversations” that coordinate commitments and care for customer concerns, drawing on his experience in Chilean political history and ontological reinterpretation of entrepreneurship. In all of these experiences, B focuses on an abiding and urgent question: How do we protect our capacity to care in an age of optimization? How can you create, in your life, your version of the worldly joy and shared meaning of being in a punk band?
B’s substack is Without Why. He currently drums in the bands Realistic, Vexxyl, and Wildfire.
Subscribe to B’s YouTube channel here. Support the Hubert Dreyfus Audio Archive Project here.
00:00 Welcome and Care Question
00:36 Meet B Scot Rousse
04:31 Highlights and Themes
07:08 B Introduces Himself
08:14 From Krishna Roots to Philosophy
10:27 Teacher to Berkeley and Dreyfus
12:01 Ambassadors of Possibility
13:16 Dreyfus Mentorship Years
14:52 Fernando Flores and Careful Organizations
18:40 Heideggerian Care Meets AI
23:56 Care and Agency in Analytic Ethics
30:04 Mattering and Affordances
33:13 Dreyfus on Technology and Optimization
38:00 Language as Commitments Not Info
39:02 Language as Commitment
40:54 Why LLMs Aren’t Human Language
43:18 Training, Deployment, Disembodiment
45:22 Languaging vs Symbol Systems
49:44 Care and Ontological Design
52:41 Compulsive Chatbot Loops
55:30 Disorientation and No Recipes
01:02:10 Kierkegaard and Commitment
01:11:35 Practicing Conversation with AI
01:14:38 Punk as Embodied Community
01:17:46 Punk As Belonging
01:18:50 Drummer Life And Community
01:19:14 Mood Joy And Chaos
01:21:10 Entropy And AI Randomness
01:23:19 Choosing The Wild Path
01:27:01 Teaching At The Edge
01:33:01 Meaning Is Out There
45:45 Care As Human Intelligence
01:36:24 Many Loves Music Refuge
01:43:19 Nihilism And Reviving Care
01:45:21 Closing Links And Thanks
TRANSCRIPT
Andrea: Hello everyone. Welcome to Love and Philosophy. This is Andrea Hiott. I'm a philosopher who's also trained in neuroscience, exploring how we might move beyond either/or and towards constellations of care. Thank you for being here. Thank you for your support.
What does it mean to care? And when I say care, I do not mean it only as sentiment or something sentimental. I really mean it as the very structure of — or dynamic tension that is structuring — life itself. That is being alive. That's really the question at the heart of my work and a lot of these conversations, but really of this conversation today with the wonderful B. Scott Rousse, a philosopher who has spent his career really living this question in a way that I think will appeal to a lot of you, because he has definitely been in interstitial spaces — in a lot of different spaces that really span a lot of your interests.
He was a philosopher in the wild, far beyond the walls of institutions, but he's also affiliated with Berkeley now. He has a very interesting trajectory, which he will tell you all about, including that his name is B — just the letter B — which is short for Bava, a Hare Krishna name. He comes from an interesting constellation himself, which gave him an early interest in really thinking about the ways we live in the world and how they're different depending on where we come from and how we're raised.
He had a kind of phenomenological instinct long before he heard the word phenomenology. He did end up at the University of California at Berkeley through a very interesting encounter with one of his teachers in Florida. Teachers once again become the heroes here, which often happens in these conversations. He ended up meeting Hubert Dreyfus. If you've not heard of Hubert Dreyfus, I really want you to read the beautiful essay that B just wrote about his teacher. Dreyfus is really one of those legendary lecturers in philosophy. He had a lot to say about a lot of issues we're dealing with now, and he gave some wonderful lectures about phenomenology.
I don't know if you listened to the conversation I had with Ava Noah — he was also a student of Dreyfus and worked with him on a lot of his work. So Dreyfus comes up often here on this podcast. I really recommend his lectures; they're just wonderful. B was one of his students, and Dreyfus was also one of the earlier, more powerful critics of a lot of the assumptions we're dealing with now relative to artificial intelligence research — thinking about embodied action, skill, care, all these words that are so important here.
So Dreyfus was not just a mentor for B, but really his collaborator, and he was truly an ambassador of possibility. As B says — I really love that phrase — because he opened B's life up in so many ways, as wonderful teachers do. He even introduced him to the philosopher-entrepreneur Fernando Flores, who has a lot of connections with people like Maturana and Varela, who you also hear me talk about a lot here. So there are all kinds of wonderful threads weaving together.
B is also affiliated with the Topos Institute and David Spivak, who I think we've also talked about here before, relative to category theory and mathematics. So this conversation brings a lot of things together. But honestly, it's just a really good conversation with a really good person I'm happy to introduce you to if you don't know him yet.
His philosophy is really interesting. He's actually writing about care and technology — and of course, coming from the phenomenological tradition, he is also a punk drummer — a great punk drummer — and we do talk about that too. But he really brings this conviction that philosophy, and especially phenomenology, has something very urgent to teach us, or to say, or to help us notice right now in this very moment as we're building and as we're coming into, I suppose, the age of AI. At least we're trying to understand what has hit us, what is possible, and how to do the best things we can with these new possibilities and technologies. Asking: What are we building for? What do we want to build for? How does care play into this? How do we really think about what we care about and what we really want our technologies to help us care more about? That's an incredibly important question.
Just a few highlights: We talk about how everyone should have their own punk band, even if it's not music. And though we don't say it directly, I was thinking about how I always had a lot of friends who were older than me when I was young and how important that was — and also how, as you get older, it's important to have friends who are younger. That sort of intergenerational real friendship can mean a lot, the way that B was friends with Dreyfus, for example.
I'm also talking about mattering here, and I really mean it as a verb — matter coming into itself, the very action of matter mattering. This sort of beingness — and I mean all of matter, even the body — just the pulsation of mattering. I don't think that really comes across in what I was trying to say, but I'm really thinking of it as a verb. You'll know what I mean when you get to it.
And what else? Meaningful differences — that's a phrase said in here that's really important. There's also a wonderful quote from Kierkegaard about love and how it can stand in relation to anything which an individual concentrates on with his or her whole life's reality. B will tell you the proper quote. We talk about teaching at the edge of understanding and meaning being the real reason we do philosophy. And there's something really wonderful that B says at the end: it's the things that are not under our control that make life meaningful. I hope you enjoy this conversation.
Andrea: So here we have B. Scott Rousse, who's a philosopher and a drummer. He brings a sort of open, caring attunement to this podcast and the conversation we've been having here now for about two years. It's just a wonderful addition to that. I look forward to working with B more, and I hope you will check out his Substack and his other talks and lectures. And also don't forget about Dreyfus — B will tell you in the conversation, but there are a whole lot of new tapes and videos of Dreyfus's lectures that have been found. If you want to help people get those out into the public, do reach out. And you're always welcome to support Love and Philosophy in any way you might wish. I also have a couple of books coming out in the next couple of years, so buy one of those — that helps a lot too. All right. I'm really glad you're here. I hope April has gone well for you and you're enjoying spring wherever you may be, or that spring comes soon to some landscape of your life.
B. Scott Rousse: My name is B. Scott Rousse. My friends call me B, and my Scott has only one T.
Andrea: I love your name. It's really very challenging and wonderful in a way. It's so cool to be called B too.
B. Scott Rousse: It's a funny way that what you get named can end up indicating something significant about your life. Having become a Heidegger scholar — being "B" — yeah, exactly.
Andrea: Wow, that's really amazing. So, B, it's so wonderful to meet you. Thank you for coming to join us on Love and Philosophy.
B. Scott Rousse: I'm delighted to be here. Thanks for the invitation.
Andrea: So you're a philosopher, but you're a very interesting philosopher. You've done all kinds of things outside of the university walls, also within them. Just to get started, maybe you could tell us a little bit about yourself and how you came to philosophy.
B. Scott Rousse: Wonderful. Thanks for the opportunity to think out loud about this. My friends call me B, and the story of my name is also, I think, fundamentally connected to the way I came to philosophy. My parents were Hare Krishnas, so I grew up around a Hare Krishna temple and was raised a vegetarian and was given a name from the Hare Krishna tradition — Anava, and B is short for Bava. My parents always called me B. Bava 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.
What's significant here is that when you grow up in something like an alternative religion or an alternative spiritual tradition, and you're a vegetarian and everyone else around you is not, you're different. 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 — the taken-for-granted ways 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 our fundamental picture of reality is contingent. 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 in history you're born. And that brings you to philosophical reflection pretty quickly.
Andrea: Did you decide to study philosophy because of all of that? It resonates with me in a lot of ways — I moved a lot as a child, and that's been a big theme in terms of what's oriented my interests, in a very similar way to what you just said. Noticing — because you go to a new school and things are completely different: what's cool in one is not in another, and all of that.
B. Scott Rousse: Exactly.
Andrea: Did that get you reading philosophy — actual academic philosophy or other kinds?
B. Scott Rousse: I think it predisposed me to philosophical questioning. I didn't care about reading until I got myself into college and then realized that college was my way to get out of Florida, which is the state I grew up in. I had one teacher at the University of South Florida, where I started my first two years, who took me aside and said, "What are you doing here? You should get out of here. You should go to Berkeley. I'm going to help you." She boosted me up and helped me get into Berkeley. So I went there as a transfer student, which is where I met Hubert Dreyfus, and became very interested in Heidegger and phenomenology.
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 — of noticing what you don't normally notice. And so I think my upbringing in the Hare Krishna way, and my connection to being a musician in the punk rock scene, both very much predisposed me to that kind of philosophical reflection.
Andrea: It almost sounds like it happened by accident, but I imagine this teacher saw something in you, as many teachers do. She saw this person — but it almost sounds like you were in a certain kind of flow, that this kind of happened. Were you actually wanting, really wanting at that moment, to get out of where you were?
B. Scott Rousse: Yes, I was. And she appeared to me as somebody that Fernando Flores — someone I work with, and worked very closely with for many years — he came up with a phrase for these people who come into your life and open new doors for you. He calls them an ambassador of possibilities.
Andrea: Oh, that's beautiful.
B. Scott Rousse: 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 someone who helps others. Every now and then these people come into your life who are able to show you a different path, or show you possibilities that were there for you that you didn't see.
Andrea: Oh, yes. It's so wonderful to have someone else seeing the landscape, noticing you and caring about you, and offering something. I can't tell you how many people I've talked to who have really done good things in the world and who talk about one teacher who did that. I just note that. But another ambassador in your life who opened possibilities was Dreyfus.
B. Scott Rousse: Dreyfus, yes.
Andrea: Do you remember first meeting him? What was that like? Because I know for all the nerdy phenomenologists among us, that's a very interesting time to have just walked into.
B. Scott Rousse: It was one of the very most lucky encounters. It was from meeting Bert — that's what his friends and family call him — that I fell deeply in love with philosophy and phenomenology. Through his encouragement, I went to graduate school, and then through him I met Fernando Flores. I also met, through Bert, his brother Stuart Dreyfus, who has become a dear friend of mine and a collaborator. He's 94. I just had lunch with him yesterday and helped him be interviewed by someone working on an intellectual history project about the philosophical scene in the Bay Area in the seventies and eighties.
What was special also about this is that I ended up writing my PhD at Northwestern and then came back to Berkeley to actually write it — to come back and work with Bert again. It was this moment in life where Bert was in the last years of his life and I was just finishing my PhD. I stayed around, helping him teach the last courses he was to teach for the last six or seven years or so, and also working with Fernando and his family consulting and coaching company.
Andrea: It's interesting that you were already doing both of those different things. A lot of people in philosophy are starting to take new paths now that might involve, for example, working and consulting, while also still trying to be academic. You've mentioned Flores a few times — why don't you say a little bit about who he is? He's been an important person in your life.
B. Scott Rousse: He was also a major ambassador of possibilities for me, and one of the people who really showed me that philosophy makes a difference to the lives of real people. Bert already had that. That's one of the things people loved about Bert's style of doing philosophy and his style of teaching — he saw that the arguments of phenomenology and existentialism were relevant to the arguments and assumptions being made in the early waves of artificial intelligence research.
Fernando took that even further. He was someone who used his philosophical training to create a picture, a framework for how organizations work and how people work well together. He was the Finance and Economics Minister of the socialist government in Chile and was responsible there for something called Project Cybersyn, which was one of the first times information machines were networked. Then he spent three years as a political prisoner and came to the US in 1976 to Stanford University. That's where he met Terry Winograd, who introduced him to Stuart and Bert.
Fernando never wanted to be an academic, but he wanted to make a difference in the world and in the lives of people. So he became an entrepreneur. He and Terry Winograd and their team developed a software program based in speech act theory in the eighties and early nineties. He founded a business consulting company and had a whole framework for coaching and consulting and helping organizations work well together.
The basic idea is this: an organization is a network of conversations oriented toward taking care of the concerns of a client or customer. "Client or customer" is a formal category for anyone to whom you can make an offer, anyone for whom you can make a difference. And so an organization is a network of conversations oriented toward taking care of the concerns — or making a difference in the lives — of your customers. Mostly those are conversations that involve offers or requests, but there's also a lot connected to declarations, and a lot of work that involves listening to the concerns of people so you can make sure your offer is relevant to them. And there's an ethos of taking care, of these conversational skills through which work happens.
Andrea: You've mentioned care a few times, and this feels like 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 is part of that. There are so many questions I want to ask you, but I'm really interested in care, and also in thinking about Dreyfus, about Flores, about Heidegger. I wonder when you came across Sorge — Care — whether that was through Dreyfus, through Flores, because it sounds like they were both very concerned about it, and maybe Heidegger was even the link. And then also technology, because that's also Dreyfus, and that obviously connects to Flores. Let's think about those two things — how did they come together, or start to stand out for you?
B. Scott Rousse: I believe that Heidegger's work is the root of my particular interest in care — and the way I am inheriting the project of talking about care as an important phenomenon for being human in a technological age. I saw a need to help bring richer philosophical resources to today's conversation about artificial intelligence and about being human in an age of rapid technological change, with new tools and technologies right before our eyes changing how we think, how we write, how we make decisions.
I realized that one of the things I can bring to the world is an articulation of these concerns from the perspective of the phenomenological tradition. It is a carryover of the tradition of my mentors and my friends and my ambassadors of possibility. And so it is very much in the sense that when Heidegger says Sorge — Care — is the being of Dasein, the most fundamental way to talk about the nature of human existence, he doesn't mean that we just like stuff, or that we have affection for something. He means that we live in a space of meaningful differences where some things can matter to us and other things can be trivial to us. We live in a space of meaningful differences that is connected to our sense of what is important, and to our communities for taking care of what is important together.
From the Fernando side, this is something to pay attention to in the conversations you have with others — for making sure you're taking care and committing together. From the Dreyfus side, what I learned from Hubert and Stuart about skill acquisition and the pre-reflective capacities for gaining new skills — when you read Being and Time, it's a really dense, unforgiving text, but once you get used to it, you realize it's showing you something that feels already so familiar. You can read this text and it's saying something 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 at the core of what Heidegger was doing — taken up by Dreyfus and Flores in different ways — was that we live in a space of life determined by what matters to us, not just by our ideas. This is what Heidegger was doing: overcoming the Cartesian tradition that thinks the most fundamental thing about being human is to pay attention to the ideas in your head and how they map onto, or fail to map onto, the so-called external world out there. He wants to say: let's not get bogged down in this epistemological relationship. Let's not assume that the primary way human beings relate to the world is an 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 live in distinctions between what's worthwhile and what's trivial — a space of meaningful differences.
That was already something in my early philosophical work that I, inspired by Dreyfus, wanted to say: this is really important, and 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 is find your dialectical opponents. Especially when you're trained in the Dreyfus tradition of phenomenology scholarship, you see the relevance of what Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty are talking about to contemporary debates in analytic philosophy. So I was really concerned to talk about how what Heidegger was doing about care and concern and being-in-the-world illuminated debates in analytic philosophy of identity.
Bringing his notion of care — 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 — into conversation with a philosopher named Harry Frankfurt, who in the analytic tradition is one of the most important people talking about care as well. He has a beautiful little essay called "The Importance of What We Care About" — an elaboration on some of his earlier work in the philosophy of agency. He's the one who makes the distinction between lower-order desires and higher-order desires: wanting something, and what you want to want. Noticing that human beings have the capacity for this higher-order wanting — what we want to want has to do with the kind of person we aspire to be, the kind of motivations we want to have.
His earlier example is the unwilling addict — 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? Do they think that's cool and it fits with their lifestyle and the kind of person they want to be? Frankfurt eventually took this higher-order desire picture and, through the conceptual difficulties he was working through, ended up thinking about it in terms of care.
So I wanted to think about how the Heideggerian picture of agency — connected to a deep conception of our historical way of being, our social way of being, our moody way of being — can relate to what was going on in the people worrying about Frankfurt's conception of agency. At the same time, I brought Heidegger into conversation with contemporary ethics through the work of Christine Korsgaard — a very interesting Kantian who teaches at Harvard — who also gets very close to noticing that what makes us human is what she called our practical identity: those identities that make a difference to us, that make us who we are. Being a drummer, being a thinker, being a neighbor, being a family member, being a lover — those identities and connections that shape your whole way of being.
So in that technical, philosophical work I developed in the first ten years of my professional life, those were the kinds of issues I was dealing with. And that's what set me up to say — when ChatGPT came out, and even leading up to that, with the amazing developments from Google DeepMind, as we started to realize the AI age was turning into something historically important — that this philosophical perspective has a difference to make and has a contribution to make.
Andrea: I just love that. Frankfurt also had that book about love, didn't he?
B. Scott Rousse: Yes — Reasons of Love. It's a beautiful little book.
Andrea: We need to revisit that. And I love that you were already in dialogue across what were often thought of as combative traditions. But I think you're actually opening up a different space by bringing those into conversation. One thing that feels really important in that is what it means to be alive, what it means to be human. This goes to the phenomenology, but also to Frankfurt's work, to Korsgaard. I want to hear about that, because I think it gets lost sometimes. 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 what it means to be human, how that connects to this definition of care that's not just affection, and how that matters right now in a new way.
B. Scott Rousse: I think here's one of the ways I think about the stakes of this. There's no particular content to caring — caring is a way of being, a way of being oriented toward things, concerns, relationships, ideals that solicit you, that grab you as worthwhile and give you a sense of what you have to do. And by the way, that doesn't necessarily mean it's morally good. I think there's a tragic dimension to being human: people can care about things that are also destructive or morally repugnant.
Andrea: That's actually an important point. Caring for something doesn't necessarily imply a certain normativity of good or bad. We tend to associate care with good, but what we care for is actually an important question.
You often talk about caring as tending to what matters — but what matters from a particular position, right?
B. Scott Rousse: Exactly. Tending to what matters — I think this is a phrase I got from David Spivak, a mathematician at the Topos Institute in Berkeley, who I've been collaborating with on a paper about care. We're developing the notion of care in contrast to the notion of values that's widely taken for granted in AI alignment research, but it's a very undigested, assumed concept. What are values? Why do we even reach so naturally for this concept? And is it a coincidence that values are also what we enter into a spreadsheet? That values are what we put on poster boards and celebrate as the values of our company — sometimes in a performative way that the people who work there can see don't actually line up with how the company works?
Andrea: And with Spivak and David, because mathematically talking about value is also a very interesting idea — and how that relates even in terms of symbols, representations, and language, which is another whole area of your work. But something you said there — I want to get a little messy just for a minute, because caring is tending to what matters. Sometimes I think of caring as mattering — I mean that in an ongoing sense, I don't know if you know much about ecological psychology or Gibson — this more immediate sense of everything mattering, and to me that feels like it's caring. In a sense it's very bodily and immediate. I wonder if you've ever thought about it that way, in an even more immediate and radical way than "tending to" — because tending to sounds like we've thought about it, and some of it sounds very bodily and immediate to me. Does that make sense to you?
B. Scott Rousse: I think that's really important. That's another thing we have to be careful about when we talk about caring — it doesn't necessarily happen at the level of higher-order reflection. You're absolutely right. And 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 notion of affordances that you brought up from the Gibson tradition is exactly the right place to look. Mattering — the phrase I got from Dreyfus and Jane Rubin and their interpretation of Kierkegaard — is that we live in a space of meaningful differences. What does that even mean? It means what's relevant and what's irrelevant in your immediate situation. It doesn't necessarily mean what you think about and what you think you care about and what you reflectively love. The meaningful differences are what's around you now that is standing out to you as relevant and important to deal with, and what's receding into the background as irrelevant. What you care about is first of all reflected 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.
I just got done writing a paper that I'm going to read at a conference on machine consciousness, and when I was writing that paper, that was the most important thing. So my room is chaos. You walk in, and the pile of unfolded laundry isn't totally irrelevant to you, the coffee cup from yesterday, the pile of books all around — well, the books are relevant because you're still digging around in them. But what shows up to you as relevant and important and demanding of your attention — that's what care does. That's what mattering is. Making that distinction — the meaningful differences — first of all shows up as what phenomenology calls the polarization of your field of possibilities.
Andrea: That's really cool. And that's one really important thing that phenomenology brings to technology right now — Dreyfus was one of the first to critique that, I guess you'd say. I wonder about those ideas and whether they relate to your ongoing work. Do you ever revisit Dreyfus and his ideas about technology?
B. Scott Rousse: Yes. The way Dreyfus brought out what was at stake in AI — he was writing against symbolic AI, or what we call Good Old-Fashioned AI — which was the project of basically trying to reduce human knowledge to statements, propositions, and the logic between them. 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, 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. We have the paradoxical capacity to, together, set up things in our culture that matter to us and orient our lives toward them.
We can turn ourselves into more machine-like agents. We can interpret ourselves in a way that covers up and forgets 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. This is where Dreyfus brought in his understanding of the later Heidegger — where technology for Heidegger 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 this picture of cognition as the representation of symbols belongs to this whole tradition of separating the mind from the body and from the so-called external world — looking at it as a process of mediated representation. That's connected to the larger tradition of the technological way of being that endangers our capacity for connecting to 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.
Andrea: Wonderful. And this goes really back to what it means to be alive. So I want to be a little messy here, because there's a lot of exciting things in that. This idea of symbol manipulation and that kind of critique sounds like it's old, but actually it's even more present now if we think of language the way an LLM uses it. And when we think about that and we think about care — and these different fractal ways of caring, because it's not a linear thing, we don't just care all the time for the same thing, care is a very tense thing and we can have cares that don't fit together, as individuals, as societies, all the time, our body itself is doing that — I want to hear what you think about the fact that right now we've kind of forgotten the body. We're hungry to remember what the body is. We almost think we don't need the body. And yet this thing that's come out of the body — our communication, our ability for conversation — which is actually what we're feeling in the excitement of being able to converse in new ways, has somehow gotten confused with the symbols. We seem to think everything is language, but we're also reading the body into that. It feels very confused in a way that actually brings up a lot of those same critiques at another level. Does that make any sense to you?
B. Scott Rousse: Yes, definitely. I think even though the critique that Dreyfus — and also Winograd and Flores in their 1986 book Understanding Computers and Cognition — were making about symbolic AI, what they showed is that if you look at language as simply 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 my information processor to your information processor. It's a way of making commitments to each other, creating our social reality. When you invited me to have this conversation and I accepted, that became a mutual commitment that we had to show up and have the conversation. So language didn't just send information — it coordinated commitments, which are connected to what we care about and what our concerns are.
And so an overly thin picture of language blinds us to those dimensions — the caring, concerning, coordinating, social-reality-creating dimension of conversation as humans inhabit it. Even though Dreyfus's picture was criticizing symbolic AI, he and his brother Stuart were actually very friendly to the possibility that neural networks were a much better — non-representational, in the technical sense — way of making sense of how intelligence works. Already in their book Mind Over Machine, they recognized what they called back then "connectionism" as an emerging way to make sense of how intelligence might work, one that didn't have the same assumptions as the symbolic AI tradition.
The AI systems we have today are based in the neural network paradigm, but some assumptions from the classical AI tradition are still carried over. Which is connected to the fact that language as the large language models have it — let me just say, before I go on a critique: I think these things are amazing. I think they're beautiful. It's a marvelous invention. I think it's wonderful that the people who made them don't even fully know how they work. We're living in this age with this new entity that speaks to us, and we need to exercise humility about what these things are, 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, or that they speak 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 minds. Our language is connected to our being in the world. It's connected to our way of interpreting what matters to us. Living a life doesn't always mean going around reflecting "what do I care about, what do I love?" But when you have moments of decision, when you have to navigate 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 gives you focus, that gives you a sense of direction.
A lot of us get that — people who study philosophy and literature like to get it from there. I think most people develop the capacities to think 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.
All of that is a way of saying: language is part of our being in the world. It's not a frictionless spinning in the void. It's not simply statistical patterns drawn from a massive corpus of text. It's connected to our way of life, what matters to us, our coordination, our way of making the world happen.
The large language models — and maybe this is going to be addressed in further technological developments, because what I'm saying isn't news to the people who build and think about these things — they are trained and then deployed. So there's a training phase where they develop a model, and then post-training, where humans interact with them and sculpt their behavior through what's called reinforcement learning with human feedback. They give these systems a certain personality, reward certain ways of responding, disincentivize other ways, and create a personality for them. Then they deploy it.
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 being-in-the-world. But they don't learn from their interactions. There are caveats — there is some in-context learning, and some systems now can draw on your files if you allow them. But the model itself, its weights, are not retrained in connection to how it's interacting with the world. Whereas our linguistic capacity is fundamentally enmeshed in our relationships, our real-time conversations, our real-time dealing with the tragedies and dramas and perplexities of being human and figuring out how we're supposed to live and what's important to do in this moment. That's what language enables for us. And it's in that real-time interaction with a situation that it's alive for us. So that's one way that assumptions carry over when you look at language like a model that's trained and then deployed — and fundamentally disembodied.
Andrea: With Flores — did you ever meet Maturana?
B. Scott Rousse: Oh yes!
Andrea: I wonder if there was any connection there. But I bring it up because of this idea of languaging — I'm not remembering it so well now, but I think there's a real distinction you're making that I want to bring out a little more: between language as a symbolic system — like math, where we wouldn't think that a thing doing math is conversing with us — and language in the kind of symbols and representations that is the way we language together, which is different from language as a symbolic system but which is so hard to keep clear. The embodied action of languaging is something different from language as a symbolic system. We tend to think that if something has language, it's languaging — but those are different things. Is that how you see it?
B. Scott Rousse: Yes. The Maturana understanding of languaging is something Fernando brought, and it's very much in the pocket we're exploring right now. I didn't read Maturana until I met Fernando, who was friends with him. When I first met Fernando, I had just finished my PhD. Fernando had been a senator in Chile and was on his way to move back to California. But he did one more political activity in Chile — he ran a think tank on innovation called the National Council for Innovation and Productivity. Fernando is the kind of character who wants to hire a Heidegger scholar to be on his research team for writing a report on innovation. He proposed to Hubert Dreyfus that he hire him as a consultant on the innovation report. Bert was too busy at the time and I was a fresh PhD. So Bert introduced us — he said, "Well, let me introduce you to B." Two months later I was on an airplane to Santiago to be on Fernando's research team. And one of the other tremendous opportunities of being on that team was that another consultant he hired was Humberto Maturana.
Andrea: Oh wow. This is what I mean about your life — it's like a kind of weird flow. It's not like you would sit there and plan this. It's really quite spectacular.
B. Scott Rousse: Exactly. You make an important point — sitting there and planning what's going to happen can only take you so far. Being open to the contingencies of life and seeing where they take you is also part of the adventure.
Andrea: And I think that relates to the embodiment and the ecological aspect I'm trying to get at — not so much about affordances, but about the immediacy of being as the world, not separate from the world. That's very hard to really grasp, but it feels so much like what we want to grasp now, or what I read into your work when you're talking about care and why this matters in the age of technology. Because as you were talking — you're talking about these amazing technologies, and they are amazing, I don't want us to waste the opportunity. I feel like there's so much we're not getting at because we're not thinking about what it means to be human, what it means to be alive, what we could do better with this. Just to come to that for a moment — though I really want to ask you about Francisco Varela, I'm not going to — I wonder what you think.
B. Scott Rousse: I didn't get to meet him, because he died in 2001.
Andrea: And Flores — did Flores know him?
B. Scott Rousse: Yes, they were friends. Francisco Varela actually brought philosophy books to Fernando in prison to read.
Andrea: Oh wow. I'm so glad you said that. That's beautiful. But, to this thing about technology right now — people are creating technologies that are changing us and changing the world in an embodied way. And so what we care about feels really important to me in a way that I don't think we've really articulated before. Not me and you, but as humans. I think you and I are on that project together. So I want to hear from your perspective why this matters for people who are making technology, using technology.
B. Scott Rousse: Good. Thank you for that question. I really appreciate about your work — in this interview series and in your writing on Substack — that you are out there with a very similar agenda: to raise questions about love and care, to not lose touch with these capacities, and to ask how these capacities can be cherished, preserved, and integrated into the technological times we have.
I think a lot of the people building these technologies are aware of the 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 would frame it this way: 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. In designing technologies, we're also designing ways of being human. That's the thesis of ontological design that Winograd and Flores articulated in their book — there are ontological implications for creating technologies, especially those technologies that will become pervasive in human life and enter into all of our daily habits by which we construct our lives and our relationships.
So how can we be alive to the responsibility there? And it's not only a question for the designers of these tools — it's also a question for all of us who use them. Because the tool is one thing, and it does have its own affordances and invites a certain way of interacting with it.
These chatbots — one of the most popular applications of large language models — and there's a lot of debate about what kind of personality these things should have. Should they be so-called sycophants, telling you how great your question is and sucking up to you, which they are right now —
Andrea: I'm sorry, like —
B. Scott Rousse: Yeah. And this is partly a design choice, because they want these things to be pleasant to interact with. And it partly emerges from reinforcement learning with human feedback in a way they're still grappling with — struggling to find the right way to tune them so they have just the right amount of pleasantry and aren't necessarily so sycophantic, although some people really like the sycophancy, understandably so.
And then there's something I've seen change recently in the interface with ChatGPT and Claude — sometimes they compulsively prompt you to prompt: "Do you want me to write up 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?" That kind of solicitation keeps you engaged, and it takes something from the engagement strategy of social media — to keep you addicted, to keep you wondering. It's a bit like hitting a slot machine. What's this thing going to say next? The next sentence it spits out — that'll be the one. The next graph it makes, that'll be the one. So you get caught in these compulsive loops of engagement where sometimes you have the illusion of doing something, but you're just caught in this spiral of compulsive prompting.
At the same time, there are questions for all of us as users: How can we take responsibility for creating our own ways of engaging with these things? Practices for using them to help us think, not to totally offload our thinking. Inviting them into our conversations in a way that keeps them connected to real-world concerns and real-world conversations.
I don't have kids myself, but my brother and sister both do. I have a project called Curiosity Craft with a colleague of mine, Massimo, where we developed a framework for helping families develop practices for introducing their kids to AI. The point is to help families be aware of the fun and intriguing and exciting things these tools can do — by helping you connect with the world, not by falling into the compulsive prompting, but by using AI to create songs together about a family vacation, to have practices of family creativity, to learn about something you pass on a walk in your neighborhood, to always bring the engagement with AI back to the conversation in the real world, with your family, with your friends, and not get sucked into the compulsive prompting. So that's an example of ways that we, as users, also have a responsibility to bring the AI tools back into real contact with the reality around us.
There's another thing to say here. Even though we live as human beings in touch with this — that we live in a space of meaningful distinctions, that some things matter to us more than others — we live in a crazy world right now. We live with a transformative new technology that everyone's trying to figure out. The post-World War II geopolitical order is dissolving. There's a real sense that 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 whether that's because of AI or because the economy itself has a lot of problems and companies want to look like early adopters rather than just organizations with cash flow problems.
But young people and people in general — including me — are in a position of disorientation. And there are two things we should avoid, and one thing we should remind ourselves of in this period.
First: life is not about just solving problems. A lot of the people who build AI systems are engineers, and engineers are trained to solve problems. But life itself can't be looked at as just a series of problems to solve, because that series always has the question, "for the sake of what?" And the "for the sake of what" question is where the question of care comes in. Often when we get into problem-solving mode, we just look at the problem itself and the solution to it and lose the larger context.
Second: there's no right answer to what to care about. There's no right answer to how to live your life. And this makes it stressful, especially for people who would like a structure and 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 — that adds to the disorientation of our particular moment, where college is so expensive, rent is so expensive, houses are expensive. What career do you choose? What do you devote yourself to? It seems like a very fraught, nerve-wracking decision. But life itself is an exploration of this question, and not something you have a quick and easy answer to.
So these are two things connected to the design of technologies and the larger context in which we live — there's a sense of compulsive problem-solving, a sense 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 the Cosmos Institute, an interesting group talking about philosophy, AI, and entrepreneurship. For the sake of what are you solving problems? 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. Part of the adventure of being human today is staying in touch with the questions: What matters for our civilization now? What are the conversations we need to be having? And as for your own individual life — to realize there's no formula, and it's an adventure and experimentation to undertake with others.
Andrea: Those are really beautiful and important points. I often think about, or write about, holding paradox or tension — not resolving it. I feel that in what you're saying about the indetermination, the ambiguity, the fact that there's no one right answer. And yet we don't think that way — it's very hard for us to hold that space of tension or ambiguity. You're also a fan of Merleau-Ponty, and I really like his use of indetermination, and the generativity of it — he talks about the good kind. That feels like something that's not really part of the conversation, but that technology could help us better hold.
Also, you talked about orientation a lot — that word is really important, because I'm thinking about cognition and movement together. I studied the hippocampus, I'm thinking about navigation, and I've heard you say that caring is a kind of orientation. So it's interesting when you talk about disorientation — how that would naturally relate to something that's not being noticed or maybe not dealt with relative to this ongoing caring, in the sense we were talking about earlier, that's not always rational. And maybe even that's a word to think about a little bit, because you talk about instrumental rationality, and there's the optimization stuff in your work, where you go into the paperclip kind of example — that feels like the kind of optimization and rationalization that's connected to what I was talking about with the symbols, which 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 — more like what I'm thinking of as caring. Does this bring up anything for you?
B. Scott Rousse: Yes. It connects very well with the things I'm concerned and disoriented about. It reminds me of the following story. One of the times I was a teaching assistant for Hubert Dreyfus in his existentialism class, we do the whole first part of the course on Kierkegaard and Kierkegaard's book Fear and Trembling.
Andrea: Wonderful philosophy — hard but worth it.
B. Scott Rousse: Yeah. And Bert's lectures on Kierkegaard are on YouTube, and he's a wonderful guide to getting through Fear and Trembling. Something that will really shake you to your core.
By the way, I have to mention — I'm helping Hubert Dreyfus's family on a project to protect the cassette archive he left behind. 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 L. Dreyfus Foundation. But then the philosophy department — I went there to hang up the flyer for this project, and the department manager came out and grabbed me and said, "We just found a bunch of Bert's stuff in library storage." There was another 700 cassettes going back to the seventies, eighties, and nineties — and there's some stuff from the sixties in the house. So we have almost a thousand cassettes of Bert's lectures that we're raising money to get digitized and to create an authoritative archive, with the syllabi, the handouts, the context. I'll send you a link to share in the show notes.
Andrea: Yes! I want to help in any way I can. That definitely sounds like a project we all want to get behind.
B. Scott Rousse: It's so exciting. So, coming back to Kierkegaard — Bert made Kierkegaard really come alive by using him to raise questions about what it means to live a meaningful life. In the existentialist, Kierkegaardian picture, meaning comes from committing yourself to something. And sometimes committing yourself to something isn't rational at all — you just fall in love. Bert loved to talk about how something just grabs you. He found himself in debate with the AI world at MIT not because he chose it as his rational life plan, but because he happened to be at MIT. Minsky and Papert were down the hall. His brother Stuart happened to be working at the RAND Corporation. There happened to be somebody there who suggested they should hire someone who knows about Merleau-Ponty to assess the AI research. So this is just a concatenation of contingencies that suddenly organizes your life in such a way that shows you something in your moment worth doing, that you can then commit yourself to — giving your life purpose and direction. You don't find it by sitting back and thinking about it. You find it by throwing yourself into life and looking at where this strange concatenation of contingencies — what Bert called your drift — makes up who you are, and what that reveals to you as alive and important and relevant.
The way I just described that is a mashup of what Bert would say about Kierkegaard and what Fernando would say about finding your calling. The students who took the Kierkegaard class from Dreyfus — he would talk very beautifully about what he called unconditional commitment. Kierkegaard's example is Abraham, who has an unconditional commitment to God, and this leads him to do something that looks very crazy — to be ready to go up and kill his only son, because of this stronger commitment. And Kierkegaard in this context talked about the teleological suspension of the ethical: you sometimes suspend ethical norms to have an unconditional commitment, for the sake of having this higher telos of tending to what matters to you, what gives your life purpose and direction.
Kierkegaard used the Abraham story to point out how gnarly and how irrational it can sometimes be to wholeheartedly devote yourself to something. Dreyfus used the example of romantic love, which also shows up in Kierkegaard. In Fear and Trembling, in a footnote, Kierkegaard says, "Love — let us use love to stand for any relation in which an individual concentrates the whole of his life's reality." And so Dreyfus used this phrase, unconditional commitment, to connect to that. At the end of the Kierkegaard class, the students would come up and say, "B, an unconditional commitment sounds awesome. Where can I get one?"
And the question reveals the actual disorientation of our times — as if getting a commitment to something is something you can order from Amazon. Finding the direction of your life is something you can learn about from a teacher. That shows an orientation to life that looks at life like a menu of options to choose from. You stand back and choose your options, like ordering something online. And that is a disconnection from where you actually can find what to love and care about — which is throwing yourself into life, into your moment of history, into your city, your connections, your family, your technological moment of disruption. What's going on in your life that draws to you, that speaks to you, that gives you something to do? It's not going to be the same for everyone, and it's not something you can find by standing back and thinking about it. Thinking 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 accepting that you might be wrong about that.
Andrea: What you just said is so important in so many ways. Two things come up: I think there are generations now — I'm not one of them, and I don't think you are either — who did grow up with exactly that mentality those students have. Not really feeling comfortable being in their bodies, in the immediacy you described. Trying to always escape that, or never having actually had that kind of immersion. And then linking that to ambiguity and indeterminacy as a generative kind of thing — I think this relates to punk a little bit, because I'm thinking about you. You're a punk musician, you're a drummer. That spirit of disruption being not necessarily bad, depending on how you are in your body and who you're with. Does that link at all?
B. Scott Rousse: Thank you. I do think that if there's one thing I want to emphasize, I like how you're pulling out the notion of ambiguity and indeterminacy and the generative nature of the indeterminate — and how it's not a bad thing to not have a full plan and full certainty, not to have a problem-solving menu for how your life's going to go. Embracing the indeterminacy and uncertainty as part of what makes life meaningful. Having everything easy and laid out on a plan is a lot of times what we're trained or encultured into thinking we should be doing. But you miss out on what is there that doesn't fall into the structure you want to impose on it.
I feel very worried when I hear about young people asking ChatGPT what to say in a conversation with their friends or family, and not being able to sit with the discomfort of risking something from themselves. The thing is, we don't know what we think beforehand. We have to take the risk of saying something out loud in 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. It's so important to be ready to deal with that discomfort and uncertainty — to discover and create your sense of who you are and what matters to you in conversation with others, and not have a plan given to you by your AI assistant. I think it is a skill, and it takes practice to enter into conversation with that uncertainty and that experimental way.
Andrea: Do you think people who are really shy, who have trouble throwing themselves in and kind of lose the opportunity — could they practice with the technology? Knowing it's technology, so they can get, habitually in their body, the sense of how it does feel to do that — but then the whole point is to really try to do that, and not stick to the script?
B. Scott Rousse: It does make sense. I think that would be a cool practice. It could be a very cool practice to design with your chatbot — maybe there are some prompts you can give it to encourage you to take the risk of saying something.
Andrea: But the point is the embodied interaction in real life with people, not the script that you're then in your head when you're talking to people.
B. Scott Rousse: Yeah.
Andrea: Anyway, you were going to talk about care and punk.
B. Scott Rousse: Oh yeah. Thanks. So I do think we should beware of the tendency to want to use AI to meticulously plan our lives and have all the answers. For me, the work of Jonathan Haidt is really important here — the danger of simply spending too much time on screens and media and not enough time in face-to-face, embodied interaction. Of course, mediation by screens also does a lot of great things — we're talking right now, and there are a lot of awesome conversations that happen through the mediation by screens. But there is something in the sense of immediacy of embodied engagement.
The reason I'm saying that is to come back to my lifelong obsession with punk. Punk isn't really meant to be listened to — I joke that I play in 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. The music is meant to be live and in direct contact, experienced together. What the audience does is just as important as what the musicians are doing. It's something you're all creating together in the moment of controlled chaos.
Punk is also an articulation of a sense of disorientation. It helps a lot of people focus on why they feel like they don't belong in the world, what's wrong in the world. There are a lot of variations of punk — that's why it's so interesting. There's totally nihilistic, reprehensible punk. There's conservative, religious-conservative punk. There's political punk. All kinds. But the kind I gravitate towards 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 — you create something together. You create a bubble of belonging. It's a secular church of a certain kind. You have your devotional services, which are 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 — there's also a lot of coordination. All the conversations that happen to put on a punk show, to put out a record, all the skill and concern and shared love of doing something together. Just because you love doing it, not because you get money or status.
Within the punk scene, there are status games — you can make critiques. But by and large, the punk attitude is doing something just because you love it, and coming together to create something in the moment. Not necessarily because it's all that creative — the songs we play are the same kind of songs they made up in 1983, which are really the same kind of songs the Beatles were playing. Very simple song structure. It's not about the particular brilliance 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. Punk serves 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, having the experience of carrying on a tradition and doing it for the joy and the love of doing it? That's connection to what matters.
Andrea: That is actually one of the most important things. And what a lot of people have expressed — even listeners — as being what they're hungry for: a group of people they can explore something with that doesn't necessarily have to sound good or look good, but done out of passion and not judged for it. But still able to be discussed. So it's wonderful to think about punk like that, and whatever you said about everyone having their own punk band, even if it's not music — that seems like something technology could also help us do, and in a way is already doing, because there are so many groups and communities that can form because of technology.
I have to ask you, because having been around musicians and knowing drummers, how many bands are you in?
B. Scott Rousse: I'm always in three bands at a time. It's our community service — there's a drummer shortage. There always has been.
Andrea: Drummers are so important. And you need the right drummer too — every band wants the right drummer. But I'm thinking about mood and atmosphere a little bit, and how when you were describing doing something for love, 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. Can you imagine what your life would be if you hadn't had that atmosphere through music?
B. Scott Rousse: Yeah, exactly. The connection between music and mood is so important. Mood is a way of 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 important now, how you relate to it. That's why 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 nothing too crazy happens that someone gets hurt — and you have this heightened sense of urgency, but also the sense that we're doing something crazy together for the sake of doing it. That's a certain mood of joy. Joy is the sense of uplifted, collective upliftedness for its own sake — a really important mood that music can connect us to.
Andrea: It's wonderful you say that, because when I think about care and some other writing, I think about it through that ambiguity we were talking about — the awe of ambiguity, but also a kind of jouissance, a kind of joy, a kind of release, a kind of overflow. That feels very important for that caring that we're trying to talk about as so primordial — in an almost Heideggerian kind of way. And in terms of the other kinds of ambiguity we were talking about: punk can give us a way — or not even just punk, but these kinds of situations where there's a little bit of entropy — that also feels like something only possible in a living, interactive kind of thing, which we seem to be trying to control with our technology, but maybe we don't want to control it all.
B. Scott Rousse: Yeah, I like that. And actually, even in the large language models — sometimes in your settings you can have them be more adventurous, with more randomness in their replies, or more controlled. So there's something to say about the generativity of tropic chaos, of the paradox of tensions, the uncertainty, the unsettledness — and how that's also connected to how these machines speak their language, which is pretty cool.
Andrea: And this paradox of technological caring that you bring up sometimes — 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. How do we find ways to go through this together, in the way you were talking about with punk? In all the worlds you've been in — I wonder if that tension has ever been overwhelming, or if you've been able to stay in that kind of pocket that it sounds like you're in. When you were describing Dreyfus, it sounds like your life too — going with what you care about, being awake and alive to it, taking the opportunities, but also through care. Does that relate to the way you've been in the world with all these different trajectories?
B. Scott Rousse: Yeah, definitely. The decision not to do a traditional academic career was this moment of recognizing that here I was, with this opportunity to stay working with Bert while he was teaching at Berkeley. And here was this mysterious figure, Fernando Flores, who came into my life through Bert and was offering me a job to work with him in his consulting and coaching company. And I was like, how am I going to say no to this? Yes, I was giving up what academics like to believe — that you can have this safe, structured life, with a path and tenure, so you don't have to worry. Which is a funny version of this, and is not really true anymore anyway. And it is a funny version of abdicating the uncertainty endemic to life and looking for a problem-solving plan. But it gives you space to think, which has its own benefits.
But I had this moment of just deciding to bracket the traditional academic path and say yes to what life had presented — the other kind of adventure of going out to be a philosopher in the wild, a working philosopher. And to learn the relevance. And right now I'm in a big transitional moment where I decided a year ago that what I've got to do is 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. I'm floating, raising money here and there, with institutional affiliations that sometimes support me, research funds that sometimes come my way. But I'm navigating and making it up as I go along, in the conviction that these conversations really need to happen and that I can help people think about this stuff and be aware of the stakes of the technologies we're living through.
Andrea: Well, B, I mean — something is happening around you and with you. I think it's interesting, and I've thought about it before you even said any of that, but — something is happening. And I would want to call it a kind of teaching, in a sense. Because I think all the stuff we've been talking about with care, and all this training you've been doing in all these different ways you've inhabited — it feels like there's a kind of teaching in that, in the sense of what Dreyfus meant to you, or why it matters to be doing philosophy at all. I don't know if that makes sense to you.
I'd like to hear, before we go, just how you experience teaching. I think a lot of people are in a situation like yours now — and in a way it's becoming the modern situation, because all older kinds of scaffolds are changing and nobody's really in a state that's not precarious. And yet there's so much opportunity. So it can be overwhelming to figure out what to do. But before we go, I want to hear about teaching and how that relates to care or how you feel it in your body. And also — thank you — we have to talk about love just a little bit.
B. Scott Rousse: Oh, thank you. About teaching: I have two paradigms, two great mentors, who have been in my life. One was Hubert Dreyfus and the other was Fernando Flores.
With Bert, he was the most inspiring teacher. People loved taking his classes because you had somebody up there defending a view — he wasn't just reading a text and summarizing. He had a way of articulating the philosophical position in a way that connected to life, and he was up there to defend and explain and make it matter. But at the same time, he was always teaching at the edge of his own understanding. He would not teach something he understood completely. He always wanted to teach the stuff he didn't understand, or if he was coming back to Heidegger for the hundredth time, he wanted to focus on the places where he was unsteady from last time. That's why he always recorded his lectures — mostly for himself. He did put them on reserve for 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. He was always teaching at the edge of his own understanding.
And that created a sense of adventure — shared adventure, 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. But the questions of what it means to be human are always changing because our technologies are changing, our political intuitions are changing, the historical craziness happening all around us changes the stakes and the questions we have. So we're never done in these philosophical reflections. That was something I was inspired by Bert to see: teaching as a shared inquiry, an immersion in that perplexity and uncertainty and indeterminacy, where the real thinking can happen and where the real issues of being human can be dealt with.
From Fernando, I learned that teaching is most importantly not about transmitting content or a theory, but about teaching skills for living in a richer ontology. Bert was still a university teacher who would help people develop arguments and think systematically — how to read Kierkegaard, how to read Heidegger, how to write a paper about a philosophical issue. You were still learning a kind of theoretical skill, even grounded in existential concern and immersion in perplexity.
Fernando was not a university teacher. He had a consulting company and a coaching approach, and he had a way of locating the ontology that somebody lives in and helping them break out of it, or develop a richer ontology. What does it mean to live in an ontology? It means to have certain habits of conversation and habits of what you notice. Engineers, for example, live in an ontology of problem-solving — they see problems, they want the procedures to solve them, and they go after them. That's what they notice in life. But Fernando would help people see that they live in an ontology, and then help them realize that, as conversational and moody beings, they have the capacity to learn new conversational skills — not just to be stuck in the problem-solving way or transmitting information, but to awaken to their capacity to coordinate, to co-create a world with others in conversation, and to focus on what matters to them and what their dream of life could be, and to coordinate with others to create it.
He sometimes called this the "ontological detox" — if you have to show people that they live in an ontology that prevents them from seeing the full richness of being human, if they're always looking for problems to solve, for information and procedures — instead, help them develop the skills to relate to life as an adventure. One that has a structure of conversation and of paying attention to the moods that you live in and the moods of the organization you work in. Knowing that moods shape our possibilities: if you're in a mood of resignation, you don't see possibilities — that's what the mood of resignation is, everything feels overdetermined, there's nothing you can do. But a mood of ambition is a mood where you see challenges as opportunities to prove yourself, to test yourself and your community, to overcome.
So helping people see that we live in moods, that we live in a conversational being, that we can develop our conversational skills for making better offers, making better requests, making declarations in our communities about the concerns we're going to take care of — and waking up to the joy and the mystery of life and going for it. That's one of the ways I learned about teaching from Fernando.
Andrea: I have to say, that reminds me of something you said about nature, which I don't remember exactly, or maybe it was even Dreyfus — but it comes from this tradition of there being meaning, nature is meaning in a sense. What you just described, when you put all of that together with the sense that we're immersed in meaning — and all the stuff we've been talking about with caring — then that's a kind of gift that you can express for other people. That seems pretty important right now.
B. Scott Rousse: Yeah. I like that sense — that the 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. The 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 and unique life history that each of us is, and the historical moment we all live in. Meaning isn't just in the head — it's in this social-historical space that sets up some issues as important and some as irrelevant. And given your history, that meaning can attract you, hold you, grab you. That's the way Bert liked to talk about it — something grabs you. And then you have the wherewithal and sense of adventure to allow yourself to be grabbed, sometimes without a plan.
Andrea: How to be strong enough to — it comes back, because I think about it all the time — but it's that holding of tension and paradox, learning how to do that together, learning how to help each other do that. And as you were talking, I was feeling the body's power — the power 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, we started thinking about technology as enhancing that caring and that sensuality and that beingness. Whoa — that's a really beautiful way to think about the future.
B. Scott Rousse: Yeah. That is the most important issue of our times — how to design and use these technologies to enable us to keep in touch with these capacities 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? To tend to what matters — to use David Spivak's phrase. 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.
Andrea: Yeah. We're making care all the time, literally. So maybe if we think about that and notice it differently, it changes it. But love — I want to ask you, I always ask at the end if there's any experience of love you would like to share relative to basically anything. It could be love of knowledge, love of your teachers, love of punk. Just — that word. We've already mentioned it quite a few times in important ways, but are there any other thoughts or experiences you want to share?
B. Scott Rousse: Well, I'm definitely a pluralist about love. I think there are many loves and many ways of loving. Loving is a way of being — again, not just a feeling. And there are many loves that happen in life that have different structures. There's the teacher-mentor-mentee love. There's parent-child love, sibling love, romantic love, love of your punk bandmates, love of art. And what's striking about love too is that it's not under your control. And it's the things that are not under your control that also make life meaningful — if you can be in the right relation to them. Love is not under your control. It's risky, it's terrifying. But it gives life color.
I'm compelled to say that my lifelong love of music has been there together with my lifelong love of thinking, reading, teaching, and being involved in intellectual inquiry — but the love of music has been something different for me. That has been, like I said, a source of community, a source of creative expression without the pressure of having to do something radically new or innovative. We're doing the same songs they did in 1983, in different variations. It's embodied, it is moody, and it gives you a refuge from everything else that 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 co-experience of co-creation with your bandmates. And this is existential salvation. This is the experience of love in its best sense.
Andrea: That's beautiful. I think music really is very close to what we try to gesture towards with words like love. Also, as a drummer, the way you use your body is so amazing — using your feet and your hands, it's such an embodied way of thinking. Not not-thinking, but it's so cognitive and so bodily and so immediate in the ways we've been talking about.
B. Scott Rousse: Yeah. You have all kinds of problems to solve in a certain sense — creative problems. How do you fit this drum roll into this part? How can you get your body to move in the right way?
Andrea: And being aware of all the other instruments, the space you're in — you could write a book just about that.
B. Scott Rousse: Yeah, and the embodied part and the skill part are both very important. Learning a new song is learning a new skill — you're always expanding your repertoire. Even playing cover songs, you learn how to mimic someone else's style of drum rolls. You expand your repertoire of intuition, your repertoire of skill. You're expanding your agency. And the other thing I want to mention in this context is inheriting and transforming a tradition. You have a sense of longer-horizon belonging, which is more than just a nice thing to have — it's absolutely important.
Andrea: And I really think music is one of the ways we continue things through the world, in ways we don't quite understand, but that has a lot of resonance — dare I say.
B. Scott Rousse: Exactly.
Andrea: Is there anything we didn't talk about that you want to talk about?
B. Scott Rousse: I feel like our conversation hit its stride talking about the music issues and being inspired by certain teachers, and those experiences — because those are the concretization of the abstract stuff about care and love that we were starting to talk about at the beginning in a theoretical way. I was trying to say: for Heidegger, 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 at this level of embodied immersion in your situation. The affordances that are there for you are a reflection of what you care about and the stand that you are in the world. All of that's nice to say at a theoretical level.
And it's important to use that to argue against conceptions of agency that are overly rationalistic or overly naturalistic — like the later Frankfurt stuff — and it's important to bring this theory to bear for people who are thinking about the nature of intelligence. Intelligence isn't a disembodied capacity to solve problems or even to learn how to solve new problems. This is a kind of common definition in artificial intelligence research. It's very important that, if we're going to build systems that are going to integrate into our lives, that we realize that intelligence isn't a free-floating capacity for problem-solving. 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 priorities are. Intelligence without caring will be a disaster. It will be dehumanizing.
There's a strong temptation in this age to think that AI will be able to solve all of our problems — to create a superintelligent machine that can then give us the optimal solution for how humans should live together. But this would be to give up on the project of being human. To give up on the project of attuning to what's worth caring about and loving and living for in this moment. Reminding ourselves of this at this moment — that intelligence is connected to our capacity to care and not just a problem-solving capacity, and that the dream of solving all problems forgets to ask the question "for the sake of what" — that question always needs to be raised anew by each person in each generation. And that's what I'm here to keep thinking about.
Andrea: I was thinking about nihilism — a word that comes up a lot, and that I think you're also talking about sometimes in your work. Everything you just said is what we really need to hold in mind when there's 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 — creators and users of technology. Does nihilism connect to the punk and the ambiguity and everything?
B. Scott Rousse: Yes. Nihilism is two things. On the one hand, it's a cultural condition in which we lose track of the project of love and care, and get sucked into efficiency and optimization, and look at life as a series of problems to solve, 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 question of living in pursuit of what we love and care about gets dissolved or subordinated. That's a sense of meaninglessness. And you see a lot of people with a sense of disorientation today. They're in a context where they're like: the computer's going to do all the jobs, the computer's going to make all the political decisions, the country, the world's at war — what am I even here for? What's the point? That's the second nihilism — the personal reaction to all of this: a visceral sense that the world is hostile to meaning and involvement and care.
And again, that's when I come back to the need to revivify, resuscitate, revitalize the capacities for care — in the way that the conversations we've been exploring have been doing.
Andrea: So, thank you so much for this.
B. Scott Rousse: You're welcome. Thanks for having me. I really enjoyed that. I'm writing about these issues a lot in my Substack, which is called Without Why — without-why.substack.com. And I have an aspiration to put more content on my YouTube channel, because I know that people aren't reading as much and the conversations are happening a lot with video formats. I want to do what I can to help these kinds of conversations happen. That's why I admire your project and appreciate that you invited me to be on here.
I taught Heidegger's Being and Time at UC Berkeley last summer, I recorded it, and I'm editing the videos and going to put them on my channel as another project. I invite people to find me and to please send me a message if you want to think or talk about any of what we've been saying today.
Andrea: That's great. And also send it to us, to Love and Philosophy — we'll link to it and we can highlight it. I did watch some of your lectures that I put in my list to watch, and I think a lot of people will like them. And also the Dreyfus archive — that's all a big, wonderful treasure chest. We could probably make a whole list of that.
B. Scott Rousse: Yeah, exactly.
Andrea: Well, thank you. Thanks for what you're doing, and I'm excited to see where it goes. It's wonderful to talk to you. I love all the work you're doing relative to care, and I hope we can work together in the future.
B. Scott Rousse: I'd love to join forces.
Andrea: Thank you.