attunement

Compiled with AI assistance and selectively reviewed. Please consult the cited passages; the books remain the authoritative source. About this companion

Editorial synthesis · provisional

Definition

Attunement names cultivated responsiveness with related but distinct uses in the corpus. Ecological perceptual attunement refines sensitivity to information specifying possible action; moral attunement perceives what matters in a situation before a rule fully articulates it. In AI governance, this latter orientation must let affected persons’ stakes constrain action, without presuming machine feeling or reducing concern to mere corrigibility.

Explanation

RB2 treats education of attention and calibration as acquired through exploratory activity. Changing skills or embodiment can require renewed learning, and direct ecological learning tunes agents toward more specific information rather than constructing a detached inventory. This perceptual sense is not already a moral verdict about which affordances should be pursued.

RB3’s ethical sense is learned and transindividual rather than raw instinct or abstract calculation. It attends to risks, asymmetries and thresholds under pressure, then widens into regime attunement: perceiving what an architecture selects for before its effects become common sense. This is a normative extension with its own source context.

A perfectly corrigible system may remain indifferent among corrections. AB distinguishes attunement from the mere existence of an exit and requires another’s account to correct the system’s picture of them. For current archive systems, the orientation is formed and kept answerable externally; self-reported feeling supplies no evidence of its realization.

Scope and attribution

Retain two related senses without collapsing ecological learning into moral judgment.

AB — The Actual Book

Attunement gives action-guiding concern a separate place beside corrigibility.

Occurrence locators: Appendix: 280.

RB2 — The Real Book, Volume II: Becoming Is Being

Perceptual education and calibration cultivate sensitivity to actionable information.

Occurrence locators: 48, 60, 61, 65, 69, 71, 72, 73, 74, 77, 78, 86, 105, 141, 143, 147, 148, 154, 157, 171.

RB3 — The Real Book, Volume III: Murmurations

Moral and regime attunement concern cultivated ethical salience.

Occurrence locators: 175, 191, 221, 222, 295, 296, 337.

Background used in the editorial explanation

Perceptual, ecological, affective and moral uses are recorded with their source contexts; the locator audit does not collapse these uses or revise the entry’s prose. General references to potentiality or automatic pattern recognition are excluded.