It turns out that giving neural networks attention gives you some pretty amazing results. The attention mechanism allowed neural language models to ingest vast amounts of data in a highly parallelised manner, efficiently learning what to pay the most attention to in a contextually aware manner. This computational breakthrough launched the LLM-powered AI revolution we’re living through. But what if attention isn’t just a computational trick? What if the same principle that allows transformers to focus on what matters from a sea of information also lies at the heart of consciousness, perception, and even morality itself? (Ok, maybe this is a bit of a stretch, but hear me out.)

To understand the connection, we need to look at how perception really works. Modern neuroscience reveals that experience is fundamentally subjective and generative. We’re not passive receivers of objective reality through our senses, we’re active constructors of our own experience. According to predictive processing theory, our minds constantly generate models of reality, and our sensory input is then used to provide an ‘error’ of these predictions. But the extraordinary point here is that we never ‘see’ these sensory inputs, only our mind’s best guess of how the world should be, updated by sensory feedback. As consciousness researcher Anil Seth puts it “Reality is a controlled hallucination… an action-oriented construction, rather than passive registration of an objective external reality”, or in the words of Anaïs Nin, half a century earlier, “We do not see things as they are, we see things as we are.”

So what does this all mean? If every moment of experience is a creative act, and attention directs that creation, then what we choose to attend to becomes a moral act. Iris Murdoch argued that the essential moral act is to cast a “just and loving attention” on another person. Iain McGilchrist takes this further: “Attention is a moral act: it creates, brings aspects of things into being, but in doing so makes others recede. What a thing is depends on who is attending to it, and in what way.”

Idealism, the view that consciousness is fundamental and the basis of reality, gives this an even deeper resonance. Berkeley’s “esse est percipi” (to be is to be perceived) suggests that our perceptual attention doesn’t just shape our experience of reality; it is reality itself, thereby directly shaping it and bringing it into being.

This view transforms everyday actions into ethical ones. When we choose what to attend to, whether that’s scrolling our phone or engaging with the person across from us, we’re making a moral choice by choosing what to bring into being. Simone Weil captured this: “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” She argued that “the authentic and pure values—truth, beauty, and goodness—in the activity of a human being are the result of one and the same act, a certain application of the full attention to the object.” What we pay attention to reveals our inherent values. The modern attention economy is not only absorbing our time but shaping what we collectively bring into existence.

There is a bidirectionality here as well, the actions we take, our choices of what to attend to, influence the training data these models are then trained on, and their resulting models of the world. Every time we choose what to attend to, we choose what world we want to create, and what AI we bring into that world.