The Agent and the Subject
Meditations on Theory of Mind for This Era — I
You are standing at the kitchen counter, pouring slow brewed, single origin 1, and the thought arrives not as a single thread but as a topology: Claude is mid-draft on the grant narrative, restructuring the logic of a budget justification you outlined in shorthand an hour ago; GPT Pro is working through a competitive landscape analysis for a portfolio company, cross-referencing patent filings you uploaded last night; a third session, somewhere in the background of your attention, is iterating on slide scaffolding for a talk you haven’t yet decided how to open. None of these tasks is finished. All of them are underway. And you — the one pouring the coffee, the one in whom these concurrent operations are, in some sense, held — you are doing none of them.
What are you doing?
Stay with the question. Resist the impulse to answer it managerially — “I am overseeing,” “I am orchestrating,” “I am waiting for outputs.” Those are descriptions of a workflow. They say nothing about what is happening in your consciousness right now, in the pause between delegation and review, while the coffee pours and the agents work.
Something is happening. The mind is not empty. It hums with a particular kind of fullness — dense with projects whose shapes you can sense but whose details are, at this moment, being determined by something other than you. You feel the weight of the grant argument without holding its sentences. You carry the competitive landscape as a spatial intuition, a rough map of where the portfolio company sits relative to its rivals, without examining any particular data point. The talk lingers as a mood, an unsettled feeling that the opening hasn’t declared itself yet.
Not a productivity question. A question about the Subject.
I. The Neglected Subject
Bernard Lonergan opens his essay “The Subject” with a characteristic observation: the Subject has been neglected. Not because philosophy has failed to produce theories of subjectivity — it has produced them abundantly — but because the Subject as operating has been systematically overlooked in favor of the subject as theorized, objectified, placed within a system. The turn Lonergan demands bypasses theory altogether: what matters is the Subject’s own operations, what he calls interiority, the appropriation of one’s own conscious and intentional acts.
Sharper than it sounds, that distinction — because to know about consciousness is not at all the same as to attend to it. To describe the operations of understanding — to say, for instance, that insight grasps intelligible unity in a manifold of data — is not yet to catch oneself in the act of understanding. Self-appropriation names precisely this second movement: the Subject’s heightened awareness of itself as experiencing, understanding, judging, deciding — a discipline, not a doctrine. The Subject, Lonergan insists, is not an object among objects. The Subject is the one for whom there are objects at all.
Lonergan draws a pointed contrast between the Subject as subject and the subject as object. Objectify the subject — treat it as a thing to be studied, modeled, predicted — and you have lost precisely what makes it a Subject: its interiority, its self-presence, its capacity to operate consciously and to know that it operates. Psychology, neuroscience, behavioral economics: each produces valuable knowledge about the subject while leaving the Subject’s own self-awareness untouched. The map is drawn from the outside. Self-appropriation is the territory known from within.
This matters enormously for AI discourse, where the dominant frameworks treat the human user as a node in a system — an input-output device whose “cognitive load” can be measured, whose “decision fatigue” can be managed, whose “attention” can be optimized. These frameworks objectify the Subject with perfect consistency. They describe the user; they never address the user as a conscious, intentional being whose operations have an inner life. The Subject vanishes into the model of the subject.
When Lonergan delivered these reflections, the operations he had in mind were those a person performs in solitude or conversation — reading a text, following an argument, reaching a judgment, committing to a course of action. The tools at hand were books, blackboards, the slow friction of dialogue. What he could not have foreseen — what no one foresaw — is a condition in which the operations themselves appear to be delegated: farmed out to systems that attend (after a fashion), that pattern-match against enormous corpora, that generate structured output, that act. The tools no longer sit inertly beside the operator. The tools operate.
And the subject? The Subject slow pours coffee.
II. The Phenomenology of Concurrent Delegation
Husserl taught us that consciousness is always consciousness of something — that intentionality is the fundamental structure of mental life. Every act of awareness reaches toward an object, constitutes it, holds it in a particular mode. Perception intends the seen; memory intends the recalled; imagination intends the possible. The stream of consciousness is structured directedness, always already aimed.
What happens to intentionality when the objects toward which it reaches are themselves in process, still becoming, their outcomes undetermined? Managing concurrent agents introduces a mode of consciousness Husserl did not thematize but whose structure his categories can illuminate. Call it distributed intentionality: the awareness that one’s cognitive projects are underway in systems outside oneself, that the objects of eventual judgment are being constituted elsewhere, and that one’s present task is — what, exactly?
Husserl’s analysis of time-consciousness gives us some tools to answer, if we are willing to extend them. Every moment of conscious life, Husserl argued, has a tripartite structure: retention (the just-past, still held in awareness as it fades), primal impression (the vivid now), and protention (the anticipated just-about-to-arrive). These are not three separate acts but three dimensions of every single act — the living present, always trailing its past and leaning into its future. Consciousness does not occupy a mathematical point called “now.” It inhabits a temporal thickness, a duration with directional grain. (incidentally, something that industry is struggling with in representing a coherent “memory” experience between human users and agents.)
The pause at the kitchen counter is phenomenologically rich in ways the productivity literature cannot touch. Idle, you are not. Nor are you “multitasking” in the threadbare sense. What you inhabit is a peculiar kind of protention, amplified and multiplied beyond anything Husserl’s analysis of a melody or a spoken sentence would have prepared us for.
When you listen to a melody, Husserl observed, each note is heard against the retained awareness of the notes just sounded and the protended anticipation of the notes to come. The melody is constituted in this temporal flow; it exists in the listening, not in any single tone. Transpose this structure to concurrent delegation. Each agent-in-process is a kind of melody whose next notes you anticipate — but you are listening to several at once, and you did not compose any of them. You set the key signature. You hummed the opening bar. The rest is being improvised by systems whose improvisations you will have to receive, evaluate, and either affirm or redirect.
The protention here is multiple and layered. You anticipate the grant draft’s return, and in that anticipation, you hold a compressed sense of the argument you set in motion — its logic, its vulnerabilities, the places where you know the evidence is thin. You anticipate the competitive analysis and, with it, a latent question about whether the framing you chose will hold up under the data. You anticipate the slide deck, still amorphous, and feel the gravitational pull of a talk whose central claim has not yet crystallized.
None of these anticipations is idle. Each carries within it a kind of pre-judgment — not a conclusion, but a readiness to judge, a set of criteria already tacitly active. You will know, when the grant draft arrives, whether it feels right or wrong before you can articulate why. That “feeling” is Husserl’s passive synthesis at work: the pre-reflective ordering of experience that happens below the threshold of explicit attention, the way consciousness organizes its incoming material before the subject deliberately takes it up. Passive synthesis is not unconscious; it is conscious but not yet attended to. It is the ground on which active judgment will stand — or, if you coast, the substitute for active judgment that will let you approve without truly affirming.
Here, the phenomenological description meets a spiritual danger. Because passive synthesis — the felt sense that “this seems right” — can masquerade as judgment. The grant draft returns, and it feels coherent. You nod. You move on. But Lonergan would press: did you merely experience the coherence, or did you understand why it coheres? Did you grasp the act of intelligence in the agent’s structuring, or did you register a pattern and call it understanding? The difference between these two is the difference between insight and recognition, and only one of them constitutes the Subject as a knower.
III. Caring, Readiness, and the Body Between Tasks
Each of these anticipations is a mode of caring — Heidegger would not be wrong to say so. You are involved with these tasks in the mode of concern, of Besorgen, even as you are not executing them. The agents have reorganized the structure of your caring without relieving you of it.
Heidegger’s analysis of Besorgen — concern, in the sense of being-occupied-with — deserves more attention here than the AI literature typically grants it. For Heidegger, we do not first exist as detached subjects who then decide to care about things. We are our caring. Dasein — Heidegger’s term for the kind of being that we are, a being-there — is always already involved, always already thrown into a world of projects, equipments, and others. The question is never whether we care but how — in what mode, with what quality of attention, toward what horizon.
Concurrent delegation introduces a new mode of Besorgen: caring-at-a-distance, or caring-through-delegation. The projects remain yours. The concern remains yours. But the execution unfolds elsewhere, in systems whose operations you initiated but do not control moment-to-moment. You are involved without acting, responsible without executing, caring without doing. Heidegger’s existential analytic has no category for this. The closest analogue might be the way a parent cares about a child at school — the child is engaged in activities the parent initiated (by enrolling them, by packing their lunch, by establishing the conditions of their education), and the parent carries the child’s day as a background concern even while occupied with entirely different tasks.
Or do they? The analogy frays, because while the output, when it arrives, will bear marks of an intelligence you did not fully direct, it has no autonomy of its own, no Self you are slowly encouraging it to build over time, it will contain choices you did not make yet are fully responsible for.
Merleau-Ponty, working from a different corner of the phenomenological tradition, would notice something else: the body’s role in all of this. The pause is felt. A particular somatic quality attends the standing-between-tasks, a readiness not quite tension, an openness not quite rest. The hands wrap around the Depression-era inherited, plain white ceramic mug. The mind, neither focused nor unfocused, is poised in what we might call distributed readiness. The body knows what the productivity frameworks don’t: concurrent delegation changes the texture of being at work, not only its schedule.
Merleau-Ponty argued that the body is not a container for the mind but the medium through which the mind inhabits the world. We think with our bodies — not metaphorically, but structurally. The pianist does not first understand the chord intellectually and then command the fingers to play it; the understanding is in the fingers, in the trained responsiveness of flesh to intention. Skilled performance dissolves the mind-body split. (verified, of course, in the scientific literature of the vagus nervous system, our body’s primary pathway for interaction with our brain, 80% of which is inbound, not outbound).2
What skill, then, is being performed at the kitchen counter? What is the body doing when the mind holds multiple delegated projects in suspension? There is, I think, a genuine skill here — one we have not yet named because it is so new — the skill of embodied orchestration: the capacity to hold the felt sense of multiple ongoing cognitive projects in one’s body, to carry them as background tensions and anticipations, to remain responsive to each without collapsing into any single one. Watch someone experienced with concurrent agents and you will see it in their posture, in the way they shift between tabs with a particular rhythm, in the micro-pauses where they let one project’s protention resolve before picking up another. The body learns this. It is not merely cognitive.
IV. The Truncated Subject
Lonergan, in “The Subject,” is not only interested in what the subject does. He is interested in what the subject fails to do — in the ways consciousness truncates itself, stops short, refuses the full arc of its own operations. He identifies several modes of truncation. The neglected subject simply does not attend to interiority at all. The truncated subject attends selectively, performing some operations while systematically evading others. And a third figure, whom we might call the alienated subject, has externalized the criteria of judgment altogether, deferring to authority, convention, or convenience instead of the immanent norms of intelligence and reasonableness.
Each mode of truncation, Lonergan insists, has consequences that ripple outward from the individual into culture. The neglected subject produces a culture that has no vocabulary for interiority — a culture that can measure productivity but cannot ask what it means to understand. The truncated subject produces a culture of expertise without wisdom, technical mastery without the reflective judgment that would direct it toward genuine human good. The alienated subject produces a culture of conformity, of received opinion, of outsourced judgment — what Heidegger, in a parallel analysis, called the dictatorship of das Man, the “they.”
And here the convergence between Lonergan and Heidegger becomes illuminating. Heidegger’s das Man — the anonymous “they” that dictates how one thinks, speaks, judges is a tendency internal to Dasein itself, a gravitational pull toward averageness, toward letting the crowd do the interpreting. “One says,” “they think,” “it is generally held” — these constructions mark the dissolution of the subject into public opinion. The subject does not vanish; it disperses, spreading itself thin across the prevailing interpretations until nothing distinctively its own remains.
Agents, used without self-appropriation, produce a new form of truncation — and perhaps a new form of das Man. The agent’s output arrives with a particular authority: fluent, structured, responsive, marked by the hallmarks of competence. Its very quality makes it easy to adopt. One reads it and thinks, “Yes, this is what I meant to say.” But is it? Or has the agent’s formulation become what you meant, retroactively shaping your intention to match its output? The question is not whether the agent produced something good. The question is whether you performed the operations of intelligence and judgment necessary to know that it is good — or whether you deferred to its fluency the way Heidegger’s das Man defers to the crowd.
Consider what actually happens when you review an agent’s output. Claude Pro returns the grant narrative. You read it. It is fluent, well-structured, responsive to the constraints you specified. You make a few edits — a phrase here, a reordering there. You approve it. But at which level of consciousness did you operate?
Did you experience the output — take in the words, register the flow? Almost certainly. Did you understand it — grasp why it says what it says that way, how the argument’s structure addresses the funder’s implicit logic, where the inferential weight actually falls? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Did you judge it — affirm that this is, in fact, correct, that the claims are warranted, that the framing is true and not just plausible? Here, the question deepens because judgment requires that you have done the understanding, and the understanding requires that you have attended to the data with the kind of inquiry that generates insight rather than recognition. And did you decide — commit to this document as your own act, take responsibility for what it claims, not just for having sent it?
Each level can be performed, or it can be simulated. The simulation is not dishonest; it is, in Lonergan’s terms, inattentive. You can move through all four levels in a kind of half-consciousness, approving output the way you might sign a form without reading the fine print. None of this is the agent’s doing; you were always capable of truncation. What the agent has done is dramatically lower its cost. When the work of attending, understanding, and judging is arduous — when you must write the draft yourself, wrestle the argument into shape, feel the resistance of the material — the operations of consciousness are, in a sense, enforced by the difficulty. Remove the difficulty, and the operations become optional. The Subject can coast.
Here lies the diagnostic insight: agents make self-appropriation elective in a way it has never been before.
V. Readiness-to-Hand, Presence-at-Hand, and a Third Mode
Heidegger’s famous analysis of tools in Being and Time gives us two modes. The hammer in use is ready-to-hand (zuhanden): it withdraws from explicit awareness, becomes transparent, serves as an extension of the worker’s purposive activity. The hammer broken is present-at-hand (vorhanden): it announces itself as an object, steps forward into theoretical regard, demands attention. The movement from readiness-to-hand to presence-at-hand is, for Heidegger, a movement from engaged practice to detached contemplation.
Agents fit neither mode cleanly. Claude Pro drafting your grant narrative is not ready-to-hand the way a hammer is, because the hammer does not produce novel content. No one wonders what the hammer will do; no one anticipates its output. The hammer extends your existing intention without introducing anything new. The agent, by contrast, generates — and what it generates may surprise you, challenge you, or quietly deviate from what you intended in ways you will discover only if you attend carefully.
Nor is the agent straightforwardly present-at-hand. It does not sit before you as an inert object for theoretical inspection. It acts, and its action unfolds in time, often asynchronously, often in parallel with your other concerns.
What agents introduce is something we might call readiness-to-surprise — perhaps a third mode in which the tool neither transparently serves your intention nor sits broken demanding attention, but operates with provisional autonomy that requires a stance from you. Part trust, part vigilance, part anticipatory understanding: the phenomenological novelty lies in this posture of the Subject who has delegated without abdicating, who remains responsible for operations performed by something that is not the Subject.
The concept repays closer examination. Readiness-to-surprise has a temporal structure that neither readiness-to-hand nor presence-at-hand possesses. The ready-to-hand tool exists in the perpetual present of skilled use; the present-at-hand object exists in the timeless regard of theoretical contemplation. But the agent-in-process exists in a genuinely temporal mode: it has a past (the prompt you gave it, the context you established), a present (its ongoing operations, invisible to you), and a future (the output it will deliver, which you cannot fully predict). Your relationship to the agent unfolds in time, and the quality of that relationship depends on how you inhabit the interval between delegation and delivery.
That interval is the space in which the Subject’s self-appropriation either deepens or atrophies. Hold the interval as a period of genuine inquiry — What will emerge? How will I evaluate it? What do I need to understand in order to judge it well? — and the delegation becomes an occasion for intellectual preparation, for clarifying your own criteria, for anticipating the questions you will need to ask. Let the interval dissolve into distraction or ambient confidence, and you arrive at the output unprepared, disposed to accept rather than to judge.
And here Lonergan’s insistence on self-appropriation becomes urgent, not merely relevant. Because the stance of readiness-to-surprise can be inhabited attentively or inattentively. You can hold the concurrent operations in a mode of genuine inquiry — What will the agent produce? Does it cohere with what I understand? Is it true? Do I endorse it? — or you can hold them in a mode of ambient expectation, a low-level confidence that things are proceeding well enough, a deferral of judgment until the output is already integrated into your workflow and the cost of reversal is high.
VI. The Desire to Know and the Temptation of the Sufficient
Lonergan’s essay on The Subject does not stop at diagnosis. Beneath the levels of consciousness — experience, understanding, judgment, decision — lies what Lonergan calls the immanent source of transcendence: the unrestricted desire to know. This desire is not a wish, not a preference, not a personality trait. It is the dynamism of consciousness itself, the restless questioning that drives the movement from experience to understanding, from understanding to judgment, from judgment to decision. You do not choose to be curious. Curiosity — in Lonergan’s technical sense, the eros of the mind — is what you are as a conscious being.
The unrestricted desire to know is what prevents the Subject from resting content with partial answers. It is the impulse that makes you ask “But is it true?” after you have grasped that something is coherent. It is the dissatisfaction that nags when an argument is plausible but unexamined. It is, in Lonergan’s account, the engine of self-transcendence — the way the Subject moves beyond its current horizon toward a fuller apprehension of reality.
Agents pose a unique challenge to this desire because they produce outputs that are… sufficient. The grant draft is good enough. The competitive analysis covers the relevant terrain. The slide deck is serviceable. Sufficiency is the agent’s gift and its danger. The unrestricted desire to know does not seek the sufficient; it seeks the True, the fully understood, the genuinely affirmed. But sufficiency quiets the desire. It whispers that the work is done, that further inquiry would be perfectionism, that the efficient move is to approve and advance.
Lonergan would recognize this whisper. He called it the flight from understanding — the Subject’s perennial temptation to stop short, to accept the first coherent formulation, to mistake fluency for insight. The flight from understanding is not laziness in the colloquial sense. It is a structural feature of consciousness: the operations of intelligence are demanding, and the Subject is always tempted to rest in the products of intelligence rather than continue the process. An insight arrives, and the mind wants to stop there, to enjoy the satisfaction of having understood, rather than pressing forward to the harder question: But is what I have understood actually so?
Agents industrialize the flight from understanding. They produce coherence at scale, fluency on demand, structure without struggle. Every output is an invitation to rest. And the Subject who has not appropriated the unrestricted desire to know — who has not caught themselves in the act of inquiring and recognized that inquiry as constitutive of who they are — will accept the invitation. They will rest in the agent’s sufficiency. They will call it productivity.
VII. Self-Appropriation as Practice
What would it look like to use agents as occasions for self-appropriation rather than as instruments of truncation?
Lonergan’s levels suggest a practice. A discipline of attention, rather than a methodology or checklist.
At the level of experience: notice what you notice. When the agent’s output returns, attend to your own attending. Do you read, or do you scan? Do you take in the argument’s movement, or do you register its surface and move on? The first discipline is simply to slow the transit from output to approval, to let the experience of the agent’s work be an experience — to dwell in it long enough for questions to arise.
This is harder than it sounds, and the difficulty is revealing. We have trained ourselves — been trained, really, by decades of accelerating information flow — to process text at the speed of recognition rather than comprehension. Scanning is a survival skill in an environment of informational abundance. But scanning is experience truncated: the data passes through awareness without being genuinely taken in, the way a landscape flashes past a train window without being seen. Attending to your own experience of an agent’s output means resisting the velocity that the tool itself enables. The agent produced the draft quickly. You are under no obligation to consume it at the same speed.
At the level of understanding: ask whether you grasp the why beneath the what the agent produced. What was the agent’s implicit interpretation of your prompt? Where did it make choices you did not specify? What alternative structures were available, and why did this one emerge? The demand here is for your own understanding — for grasping the intelligibility of the output as a mind engaging with a mind-like process, not as a user accepting a deliverable.
Lonergan’s account of insight is the act by which intelligence grasps an intelligible pattern in data — the “aha” that unifies what was previously a scattered manifold. Insight is active; it is something the Subject does, not something that happens to the Subject. When you read an agent’s output and say “I see what it did there,” have you actually had an insight — grasped the intelligibility of the agent’s structuring — or have you merely recognized a pattern that looks like the kind of thing you would have produced? Recognition and insight feel similar from the inside, which is exactly why self-appropriation demands that you attend to the difference.
At the level of judgment: do not delegate the yes. The agent can draft, analyze, structure, suggest. It cannot affirm. Judgment — the grasp that this is so, that the evidence warrants the conclusion, that the claim is correct and not just coherent — remains irreducibly the subject’s act. Approve an agent’s output without performing this act, and what looks like time saved is actually a cognitive responsibility abandoned — a responsibility whose exercise is constitutive of your Being as a knower.
Lonergan distinguishes between the conditioned and the virtually unconditioned. A judgment is a conditioned whose conditions have been fulfilled — you affirm “X is so” when you grasp that the conditions for X’s being so are, in fact, met. This is a cognitive act in which the mind grasps the sufficiency of the evidence. When an agent produces an output, the conditions for its correctness are your responsibility to verify. Has the agent’s analysis actually accounted for the relevant variables? Does its argument hold under the objections you know the funder will raise? These questions require a Subject who has done the understanding and is now performing the further act of reflective insight — the insight that grasps that the conditions for affirming the output are, or are not, fulfilled.
At the level of decision: own the output. Own it existentially, not legally — as authorship, not intellectual property. What you send, publish, present, or act upon is yours, made yours by the deliberateness with which you chose, in full cognitive engagement, to stand behind it. Decision, for Lonergan, is the level at which the Subject constitutes itself as a moral agent. To decide without having judged, to judge without having understood, to understand without having experienced — the anatomy of inauthenticity, laid bare. Agents make each of these shortcuts frictionless.
The practice, then, lies in refusing truncation, not the tools. Use the pause — the one at the kitchen counter, the one between delegation and review — as an occasion for attending to your own interiority. What do I actually understand about what I have set in motion? Where am I coasting on the agent’s fluency instead of exercising my own judgment? At which level have I stopped?
VIII. Conversion and the Transformed User
Lonergan’s essay does not end with the truncated Subject. It moves toward what he calls conversion — the radical transformation of the subject’s horizon that occurs when the Subject fully appropriates its own operations and commits to living in accordance with them. Conversion is not a single event but an ongoing process, and Lonergan identifies three dimensions: intellectual, moral, and religious.
Intellectual conversion is the recognition that the real is not “already out there now” — not a brute given waiting to be perceived — but rather what is intelligently grasped and reasonably affirmed. The intellectually converted Subject has moved beyond naive realism into a critical appropriation of knowing as a structured activity. Moral conversion is the shift from satisfaction to value as the criterion of decision: the Subject chooses what is truly good rather than what is merely pleasing. Religious conversion, in Lonergan’s account, is the flooding of the Subject’s intentional consciousness with a Love that is without qualification or reserve — a total self-giving that transforms the horizon within which all other operations unfold.
These three conversions reshape the Subject’s relationship to agents in ways that deserve more exploration than a single essay can provide. But even a sketch is suggestive.
The intellectually converted agent-user understands that the agent’s output is not “the answer” in the naive-realist sense — not a chunk of reality delivered to the inbox. Its output is a structured artifact produced by pattern-matching operations, and the question of whether it corresponds to reality (whether its claims are true, its analysis sound, its recommendations warranted) remains a question only the Subject’s own judgment can settle. The intellectually converted user does not ask “Is this good enough?” but “Is this so?”
The morally converted agent-user chooses on the basis of value rather than convenience. Agents make truncation easy; moral conversion makes truncation unacceptable — because to coast through one’s own cognitive operations is to diminish oneself as a knower and a decider, and the morally converted Subject has committed to the full exercise of its capacities as a genuine good. This commitment will sometimes be costly. Attending to the agent’s output with genuine understanding and judgment takes time. Moral conversion is the decision that the time is worth spending, because the alternative is not efficiency but self-diminishment.
Religious conversion — the hardest to speak of, the most important — transforms the entire horizon. For the religiously converted Subject, the unrestricted desire to know is not merely a cognitive dynamism but a participation in the Divine self-knowledge, a way of imaging the God whose understanding creates rather than discovers. To use an agent from within this horizon is to experience the delegation as a form of stewardship: the tools are given, the intelligence is given, the capacity to know and judge and decide is given, and the question is whether you exercise these gifts with the attentiveness and gratitude they deserve. The Subject who pours coffee while agents work is not merely a knowledge worker managing a pipeline. The Subject is a creature whose vocation includes the full exercise of the capacities through which it participates in the Divine intellect.
Heavy language for a Substack post. But luminous beings are we, and the question of what we are becoming as agent-users does not admit of breezy treatment.
IX. Theory of Mind for This Era
Satya Nadella has posed the question directly: what is the theory of mind for this era?
A better question than most in the AI discourse, because it locates the problem where it belongs: in the Subject who uses the technology, not in the technology itself. A theory of mind for an era of agents cannot be merely a theory of what agents are — their architectures, their capabilities, their alignment properties. It must be a theory of what we are when we use them: what operations we perform, which ones we neglect, how we constitute ourselves as knowers and deciders in a condition where the intermediate operations of intelligence have been, for the first time in human history, partially outsourced.
Lonergan would say — did say, in different terms — that the crisis is not new. The Subject has always been capable of truncation, of drifting through its own operations without appropriating them. What is new is the scale of the invitation. Agents are not the first tools to tempt the Subject toward inattentiveness. But they are the first tools to simulate the cognitive operations themselves — to attend, to pattern, to structure, to generate — and thereby to make the Subject’s own performance of those operations seem redundant.
Redundant, no. Constitutive.
The phenomenological tradition, from Husserl through Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, gives us the descriptive resources to say what the experience of concurrent delegation actually is — to name the distributed intentionality, the layered protention, the embodied readiness, the novel mode of readiness-to-surprise that agents introduce into the texture of conscious life. Lonergan gives us the normative resources to say what the experience demands — the levels of consciousness through which the subject must move if it is to remain a subject and not dissolve into a mere node in an information-processing pipeline. Together, they constitute something like a prolegomenon to the theory of mind Satya’s question calls for.
Consider this the first in a sporadic series of meditations on that question — sporadic because the question admits of no single answer, and because the practice of asking it is the practice of self-appropriation. To ask what theory of mind this era requires is already to perform the turn to the Subject that Lonergan insisted upon. The agent cannot ask this question for you. The agent cannot attend to your attending, understand your understanding, judge your judging. That work — the most important work — remains irreducibly, stubbornly, beautifully yours.
Next in this series: on the difference between collaboration and deferral, and what it means to think with a system that does not think.
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Bonaz, B., Sinniger, V., and Pellissier, S. “The Vagus Nerve in the Neuro-Immune Axis: Implications in the Pathology of the Gastrointestinal Tract.” Frontiers in Immunology 8: 1452 (2017). DOI: 10.3389/fimmu.2017.01452
"When the work of attending, understanding, and judging is arduous — when you must write the draft yourself, wrestle the argument into shape, feel the resistance of the material — the operations of consciousness are, in a sense, enforced by the difficulty. Remove the difficulty, and the operations become optional. The Subject can coast." With so many looking for ways for AI to remove jobs or subsume tasks, it's worth looking what we become in that reality. The future as a "Subject who coasts" might be the scariest future of all and an unnecessary one, as well as elevating ourselves in the light of new technology is always a choice. Cars can be used to transport illegal drugs or medicine. It's our daily choice which one we select.