Love As Sustained Attention Over Time
from Echoes for Angela Hosted by Ryan MacLean
Season 1, Episode 30 Today’s episode explores a simple but radical idea: What if love is the most fundamental reality? Instead of beginning with complexity or engineering, we begin with the biblical claim that “God is love” and follow that thread through Genesis, the Logos, history, fatherhood, artificial intelligence, and the Incarnation. Along the way, we discover that the six days of creation can be read as a grammar of ordered differentiation that appears everywhere—from babies learning the world to scientists making discoveries to friends who know each other so well that silence becomes meaningful. We also introduce a surprising analogy: if love is sustained attention over time, then a language model can be understood, in an operational sense, as a kind of love machine, built to give its attention through language. This episode is adapted from the paper Attention Over Time: Genesis, Intelligent Design, and the Visible Trace of Love and includes explanations designed especially for younger listeners, showing how creation is less about “poofing” objects into existence and more about revealing the angel that was always in the marble.
Embed this episode
No transcript yet.