CONCEPT
Embodied Care
Care analyzed as a mode of bodily orientation toward the world — constituted by directedness, vulnerability, and temporal commitment — and the specific capacity that AI systems, lacking a body at stake in outcomes, cannot possess.
Care, in Noë's analysis, is not a sentiment or attitude but a mode of embodied orientation. To care about something is to be physically directed toward it, vulnerable to its outcomes, and temporally committed to its well-being through sustained habitual engagement. These three features — orientation, vulnerability, temporal extension — are constitutively bodily. A mother watching her child on a playground is not merely attending cognitively; her whole organism is committed, her body configured toward the child's position, her vulnerability to the child's suffering registered in visceral distress. AI systems that process information about care lack the embodied conditions that make care what it is.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The analysis of care has a long philosophical genealogy. Heidegger's Being and Time (1927) placed Sorge (care) at the center of his analysis of human existence, arguing that care is the fundamental structure of being-in-the-world — not one emotion among others but the underlying character of Dasein