CONCEPT
Indwelling
The process by which a tool becomes phenomenologically transparent—absorbed so completely into the user's perceptual apparatus that she attends through it rather than to it.
Indwelling is Polanyi's term for the incorporation of a tool into the body schema—the state in which a blind person's cane, a surgeon's scalpel, or a pianist's keyboard disappears from conscious awareness and functions as an extension of perception itself. The tool user no longer feels the instrument pressing against her hand; she feels the world the instrument reveals. This transparency is not incidental to skilled performance but constitutive of it—when attention shifts from the tool's mediation to the tool itself, skilled performance collapses. The from-to structure breaks down. What makes indwelling philosophically significant is that it reveals the fundamental architecture of all knowing: consciousness always attends from subsidiary elements to focal meanings, and the subsidiary elements must remain subsidiary for the focal meaning to appear.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Polanyi developed indwelling as part of his larger phenomenological account of knowing. He observed that all perception, all skilled performance, and all understanding involve attending from clues we cannot fully specify to meanings that emerge through