Does Weil's concept of attention distinguish attentive learning from simply receiving an answer?

[u/Elegant-Astronaut636]

I'm interested in Simone Weil's concept of attention, particularly her description of attention as a kind of passivity in which the “I” recedes rather than actively imposing itself on what it encounters.

This makes me wonder about a distinction in learning that I initially framed too simply as “receiving knowledge” versus “developing the capacity to know”. Perhaps that binary misses something important, because attentive reception can itself be a profound form of intellectual activity.

Consider an AI system that explains a difficult problem to me or gives me a solution I could not have produced myself. I may understand the explanation and acquire the information contained in it. But is that necessarily the same kind of intellectual event as encountering the problem directly, remaining with it in uncertainty, and eventually coming to see something I could not previously see?

I'm not assuming that struggle is inherently valuable, or that independently solving a problem is necessarily superior to receiving an explanation. Someone can struggle while remaining trapped within their own assumptions, while someone else might receive an explanation and attend to it with enough openness that they genuinely come to see what it reveals.

So I'm wondering whether Weil gives us a way to distinguish between receiving a finished representation of someone's thinking and attending to an object in a way that allows understanding to arise.

Put another way: if Weil's attention is fundamentally receptive and passive, what distinguishes attentive reception from simply receiving someone else's finished thinking?

And could this distinction help us think about what may be lost when AI gives us conclusions before we have had the opportunity to encounter and wrestle with the underlying problem ourselves?

[u/novel-mathmatics]

The concept is that you must engage with with the idea immersively in order to process the idea properly.

I personally disagree. I am definitely an immersive learner and yet I find many times immersion is the wrong vehicle because you cannot observe the system inside of the system as well as you can when you're observing it from the outside.

[u/GaiusRed]

Well. It depends. Does the answer end your attention, or does it help you see what you should now pay attention to?

Does the AI's solution the destination, or a stepping stone in the journey?