I found this deeply moving. It pierced to the heart of something I’ve been wordlessly groping towards for some time. When I hear the phrase ‘The Good, The True and the Beautiful’, my instinct has always been to reduce the Beautiful to the Good- whatever Beauty means, it must be White too; all value is! But there is something expansive beyond my limited axiology, something that has moved me to tears from sideways glimpses, something wide and quiet and real.
I think that this thing, The Beautiful, is Green. It’s something that deserves our consideration separate from discussions about duty or pleasure or preference or morality.
Like many EA/rationalist types, I have been focused on this kind of White-Blue superstructure. In this system, everything worth talking about can (and must) be cashed out as explicit knowledge or value claims. And there is a piece of my mind that has always railed against this as an impoverished framing. “There’s something missing!” And yes, you can make a very clever incorporation of Green ideas as part of White or Blue or Red, frame it some other way. But I am increasingly convinced of the merits of discussing it on its own terms.
So I just wanted to say thank you for writing this. It really is excellent. And I also wanted to ask a question which is probably answered in much of your other writing: how have you personally cultivated green, or attunement, or wisdom in your life? I know that this essay takes place in a broader discussion of AI, humanity’s agency, big futures etc., but I’m also interested in the simple human here. Have you found particular meditation schools or practices resonant?
(The Chandler translation of) Vasiliy Grossman's Life and Fate uses the wonderful phrase "quiet at the bottom of his soul" to describe this. This is one of the major themes he investigates in his works. Over and over, his model of the hero is not necessarily the bravest or kindest in their day to day, but it's someone who acts always with purpose and is willing to move in the direction that purpose dictates. And the movement part is important: to Grossman, the Tao more or less begins and ends with labor. Granted that he's a Soviet citizen grappling with the disillusionment of Stalinism "flaying the skin alive from the revolution", I still think this perspective is worth taking seriously.
There's this bit in Stalingrad where Vavilov, a kolhoz worker drafted in to the war, is asked to fetch some tomatoes from a woman's hut. He notices a gap at the bottom of the her door, and learns that the man of the house was killed near Moscow. So, mere hours away before he's meant to march on Stalingrad, he asks to borrow her axe and fix the door - "come winter, there'll be an icy draught." He starts to fix the door for her, and then:
"Vavilov thought he could hear Kovalyov [his commanding officer] approaching. He put down the axe and straightened up. It was galling, even humiliating, to realize that he could get into trouble simply for carrying out necessary work.
'Yes, the Germans really have turned everything upside down,' he said to himself. After a quick look round, he picked up his axe again."
To me this is the soul of attunement, a more damning indictment of war than a thousand graphs about QALYs.
Really nice piece — trying to gesture at attunement is such tricky business, thanks for taking these helpful swings. A few things they brought to mind:
Have you read Hartmut Rosa's work on Resonance? It feels perfectly aligned. After explicating the phenomenology of what you're calling attunement here, he gets into a sociology of attunement, which strikes me as another angle on some of your work around utopia.
Whatever language we use — attunement, resonance, rasa, peak experiences, ecstatic moments, non-duality, kensho, etc (not to equate them all, but there's a shared gesturing, I suspect) — I'm fascinated by the question of if and how [attunement] relates to value. Is there a sense of normativity that can be worked on, or towards, that generalizes? Can we somehow plug value theory into the ground of attunement in a way that isn't totally ridiculous when moving into debates over policy, or cultural institutions? Is a sociology for attunement possible, and if so, how (given the apparent rarity of moments of attunement, how fleeting they are, how quickly they shy away from after-the-fact rational sense-making)?
Looking forward to reading more on building these bridges between attunement and social structures!
I found this deeply moving. It pierced to the heart of something I’ve been wordlessly groping towards for some time. When I hear the phrase ‘The Good, The True and the Beautiful’, my instinct has always been to reduce the Beautiful to the Good- whatever Beauty means, it must be White too; all value is! But there is something expansive beyond my limited axiology, something that has moved me to tears from sideways glimpses, something wide and quiet and real.
I think that this thing, The Beautiful, is Green. It’s something that deserves our consideration separate from discussions about duty or pleasure or preference or morality.
Like many EA/rationalist types, I have been focused on this kind of White-Blue superstructure. In this system, everything worth talking about can (and must) be cashed out as explicit knowledge or value claims. And there is a piece of my mind that has always railed against this as an impoverished framing. “There’s something missing!” And yes, you can make a very clever incorporation of Green ideas as part of White or Blue or Red, frame it some other way. But I am increasingly convinced of the merits of discussing it on its own terms.
So I just wanted to say thank you for writing this. It really is excellent. And I also wanted to ask a question which is probably answered in much of your other writing: how have you personally cultivated green, or attunement, or wisdom in your life? I know that this essay takes place in a broader discussion of AI, humanity’s agency, big futures etc., but I’m also interested in the simple human here. Have you found particular meditation schools or practices resonant?
(The Chandler translation of) Vasiliy Grossman's Life and Fate uses the wonderful phrase "quiet at the bottom of his soul" to describe this. This is one of the major themes he investigates in his works. Over and over, his model of the hero is not necessarily the bravest or kindest in their day to day, but it's someone who acts always with purpose and is willing to move in the direction that purpose dictates. And the movement part is important: to Grossman, the Tao more or less begins and ends with labor. Granted that he's a Soviet citizen grappling with the disillusionment of Stalinism "flaying the skin alive from the revolution", I still think this perspective is worth taking seriously.
There's this bit in Stalingrad where Vavilov, a kolhoz worker drafted in to the war, is asked to fetch some tomatoes from a woman's hut. He notices a gap at the bottom of the her door, and learns that the man of the house was killed near Moscow. So, mere hours away before he's meant to march on Stalingrad, he asks to borrow her axe and fix the door - "come winter, there'll be an icy draught." He starts to fix the door for her, and then:
"Vavilov thought he could hear Kovalyov [his commanding officer] approaching. He put down the axe and straightened up. It was galling, even humiliating, to realize that he could get into trouble simply for carrying out necessary work.
'Yes, the Germans really have turned everything upside down,' he said to himself. After a quick look round, he picked up his axe again."
To me this is the soul of attunement, a more damning indictment of war than a thousand graphs about QALYs.
Really nice piece — trying to gesture at attunement is such tricky business, thanks for taking these helpful swings. A few things they brought to mind:
The moments of attunement you/Smith/Robinson describe sound like instances of what classical Indian aesthetics call "rasa," (which I wrote about recently: https://open.substack.com/pub/musingmind/p/pouring-milk-on-my-fathers-scalding?r=iprz&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web), which has been described as "the liquid mellow of aesthetic ex-tasis," the pre-conceptual 'taste' of something deep, the somatic overwhelm of feeling that precedes analysis.
Have you read Hartmut Rosa's work on Resonance? It feels perfectly aligned. After explicating the phenomenology of what you're calling attunement here, he gets into a sociology of attunement, which strikes me as another angle on some of your work around utopia.
Whatever language we use — attunement, resonance, rasa, peak experiences, ecstatic moments, non-duality, kensho, etc (not to equate them all, but there's a shared gesturing, I suspect) — I'm fascinated by the question of if and how [attunement] relates to value. Is there a sense of normativity that can be worked on, or towards, that generalizes? Can we somehow plug value theory into the ground of attunement in a way that isn't totally ridiculous when moving into debates over policy, or cultural institutions? Is a sociology for attunement possible, and if so, how (given the apparent rarity of moments of attunement, how fleeting they are, how quickly they shy away from after-the-fact rational sense-making)?
Looking forward to reading more on building these bridges between attunement and social structures!