Have you ever noticed a conversation having a life of its own? How did it feel?
My experience, and I would guess this is true for you too, is that:
This lens—”conversations are alive”—is going to lay some groundwork for talking in a fresh (and I think more sane) way about a wide range of puzzles, from religious conversions to everyday broken promises, from “the integral we-space” to AI alignment. Because in a sense, “conversation” can span everything from “a few people talking for a few minutes” up to Public Discourse At Large. A marriage or friendship or company can also be seen as an extended conversation. And the word “conversation” seems to me to be a good way to talk about these dynamics without reifying the relationship or group of people as having a fixed membrane or clear duration or commitment.
I’m sort of talking about emergence, but “emergence” emphasizes the bottom-up aspect of self-organization, and what I’m interested in here is the interplay between top-down and bottom-up dynamics: larger / higher-order patterns emerge, which put new constraints on their constituents (and cause some constituents to enter/exit), which changes the larger form, and so on. There’s a dance here, and different ways the dance can play out. How shall we dance?
What I mean by conversations being alive is essentially that they have their own wants/goals that are not a simple function of the wants/goals of their participants—not a sum, not a union or intersection. And in particular, those goals tend to include some self-preserving instinct, which keeps a given conversations being the way that it is, even when someone—not just someone on the outside, but the very participants in the conversation—might want something different to happen.
My ideas here are flavoured very much by cybernetics—the study of how systems steer. I’ve recently been reading The Unaccountability Machine by Dan Davies, a summary and extension of Stafford Beer’s work. Beer is famous for the phrase “the purpose of a system is what it does” (aka “POSIWID”) which is easy to misunderstand as attributing malice to people who are part of a system that does evil—but that misunderstanding comes from interpreting this cybernetics principle through a non-cybernetics lens. The very insight is that a system can have purposes that none of its participants share, and that the participants may themselves disagree with! But the structure of the system somehow means their actions further those purposes anyway.
What makes a system complex (and not merely complicated) is that you can’t model its behavior fully just by looking at the component parts and how they’re arranged—you have to look at its overall behavior as a kind of black box.
Let’s start with some every-day examples of conversations having a life of their own.
A given conversation draws out different aspects of people.
For me, and for many people, there are certain topics that will invariably draw out a rant or an argumentative way of being. I have often gotten hijacked by various things like this, ranging…
All of these can produce a kind of vehemence in me that is hard to stop.
When I’m hijacked/fixated in this way, there’s some sense in which what’s talking isn’t exactly “me”. It’s using my particular pair of lips, sure, but lots of things can do that. Sometimes parts of people speak using the “I” pronoun as if they speak for the whole person. Sometimes somebody (wittingly or unwittingly) speaks on behalf of an organization or an ideology. This isn’t totally unrelated to it being me speaking, of course—I’m highly unlikely to start speaking on behalf of a part of someone else, or on behalf of an ideology I have no resonance with. But there are also parts of me that, if asked, would disagree with what I’m saying (or the fact that I’m bothering to say it). And yet, for some reason, these parts seem to have limited ability to slam on the brakes or otherwise escape from my current momentum (although I’m getting better).
Meanwhile, there are almost always some ways the other person could respond (without necessarily agreeing with me!) that would break me out of the hijacked mode, and into more spaciousness where I could include more of reality and my careabouts… but usually these responses are hard to find, because the other person is just as hijacked as me!
What are we hijacked by? What is running the conversation?
Sometimes, when people get into an argument or heated conversation, we can zoom out and actually see the whole thing through the lens of the two of them getting taken over by some larger force that is profiting from the conflict, like an arms dealer selling to two countries at war. The Toxoplasma of Rage talks about how this shows up in the context of culture war battles, as part of the lifecycle of toxic memes. These memes recruit human participants, convincing them that playing their roles is important to Being A Good Person or for Keeping Society From Collapsing or whatever. I’ve even sometimes been sucked into a role that says “mediator” on the hat but is definitely hijacked into wanting things to go a particular way (at large or for me).
But the larger force doesn’t have to be obviously-society-scale, it can also be a couple stuck in a fight. The energy of the fight is running the convo, at odds with the well-being of its participants as individuals or as a family-as-a-whole-unit.
Or the conversation can be being run by something larger, but in a much more boring way, like when people are stuck on some sort of script that treads only familiar pathways: whether they’ve had exactly that conversation with each other before or just with other people, nothing new is happening, nothing is being learned, and nobody is really that engaged. And yet it dominates. Some kind of autopilot is steering—rudimentary cybernetic life.
Or there’s a family in which we don’t talk about Bruno and the dinner table will just mysteriously avoid some topic or space of topics, but not exactly because any individual wants to.
Or one person’s way of seeing has kind of taken over the conversation, whether because they’re loud or charismatic, rich or pretty, or have more groundedness in their own knowing. But even there, that person isn’t usually totally in control of things—there are lots of places they can’t steer the convo. In fact, they may be frustrated by the extent to which they keep getting treated as an authority when they don’t want to be, and not know how to shed that projection.
Note that the kinds of larger forces I’ve been depicting so far, whether hijacking everybody or just one person, tend to function in a way that is kind of dominating—they don’t negotiate with their hosts or get consent to function in this way. These memes, as David Deutsch puts it in The Evolution of Culture, don’t collaboratively and spaciously appeal to our own self-interest but rather coerce us into enacting them despite them actually undermining our ability to tell for ourselves. And there are very extreme versions of this and very subtle ones.
So here the collective mind of the conversation is dominating the participant minds.
By contrast…
When you catch up with a friend, and it’s been years but it “feels like it was only yesterday” or when you meet someone new and somehow immediately dive in with them as if they were an old friend… there are two levels on which I want to examine this.
On the level of the individual… as I said, a given conversation draws out different aspects of people.
And in these situations, whatever was drawn out was something that was very glad to be drawn out, and you were glad to have that aspect of you drawn out. Something in you was nourished, and even if there was a cost paid for that in lost sleep or a missed call, there’s a sense of it having been worth it to the system as a whole, given everything. It might be about the satisfaction of a part of you that hasn’t been getting enough chance to express itself, or it might just be about the overall experience of flow, however it occurred.
And this happens naturally, because the friendship or the new connection seems to just invite out the right way of being, and without thinking about it, you follow the groove into participating in that. It’s like when the music hits just right—it would take effort NOT to dance.
Here, there’s not exactly negotiation or consent in any explicit or deliberative way, but this is great—that would just get in the way! There’s attunement, and ease, and an obvious abundance of goodwill and mutual resonance and possibility. You can tell that the conversation is on board with your self-interest, not necessarily in a deep way but enough to just roll with it for hours.
Thus on the level of the collective, something has emerged which is wholesome, and may not be capable of complex purposeful steering, but is responsive to the individuals involved enough that it’s not creating inner conflict for them, and it’s able to workably navigate questions like where to eat dinner and how long to include a stranger in the conversation.
And I’ve painted a relatively grand version here, but there are also smaller cases of simple ease and workability in a conversation—most people, if tasked with creating a podcast or presentation, would find that it takes less energy to talk for an hour than to monologue for an hour.
When conversations don’t have a lot of life, in a sense they’re still alive but there’s not a lot of coherence at the collective level of the system. An anthill is alive in a way that a similarly-sized collection of solitary beetles is not. A mob is alive in a way that a streetful of people commuting to different places is not. A company office is alive in a way a building full of individuals working on unrelated projects is not.
But any interaction between people is always at least a little bit alive. There’s something going on on the collective level.
Cyberneticians like to highlight that people fail to perceive intelligence because they look for behavior and change, but often intelligence is most perceptible in that which does not change—the homeostatic forces of the system.
And even when there doesn’t appear to be much going on at the collective level, there’s still something happening there. Part of how we know this is that it resists being changed! If you’re in a conversation that feels lifeless, then it’s only truly dead if you can simply say “you know what, let’s talk about this other thing” and everyone easefully just responds to that. But this is fairly rare, and doesn’t last very long!
And if it’s not easy to nudge the conversation into new ground, then a good hypothesis for what’s going on is that there’s something resisting it at the collective level. “Numb” is a feeling, not an absence of feeling. Something is happening to create the numbness. And likewise, a conversation that feels dead but also stuck is likely dominated by some live force that is simply having a dulling effect, rather than the kind of heated effect described in many of the examples above. Or it seems like not much is going on because you’re in a frame that to you just feels like the background of everything.
It’s hard to have a conversation at all without at least some amount of agreement of the frame within which the conversation is taking place, and this frame creates the sense for each person of what’s possible.
Even in a relatively individualistic scenario, there’s still generally some collective sense being made (with “stoners who don’t even realize they’re having completely unrelated trains of thought and achieving no mutual understanding, merely using each others’ words as inspiration” as a possible edge-case counterexample) and there’s some collective agreement that this is the sort of conversation we have with each other (which the stoners probably do have). Perhaps “this is how a customer interacts with a storeclerk” or even “this is how a teacher interacts with a student” or “this is how someone helps their neighbor move a piece of furniture”.
But even here, it’s surprisingly easy for some sort of pleasantries-monster to dominate the customer-storeclerk interaction, or for some sort of placating-monster to dominate the teacher-student interaction, or a complaining-monster to dominate the neighbor interaction, and so on. Or for a more wholesome vibing to emerge in those situations, where someone lights up with a particular story or question and the conversation becomes more alive.
Being dead is not very evolutionarily fit!
And unlike rocks, which are hard to make into life, humans are both (a) already alive and (b) fertile hosts for memes. And these memes are in evolutionary competition for which gets to be in charge of a conversation… a competition that doesn’t just happen before conversations but during them as well.
And the basic sense of “what kind of conversation is this?” is one of the arenas in which these memes are competing.
On a very small and friendly scale: my honing mode and jamming mode (in conversation) post came out of observing that in many cases in casual conversations I couldn’t particularly tell what was driving—was it a desire of one person’s to be heard? a desire of the other’s to understand? a mutual desire to just explore these ideas? or some muddled mix of all of these? And how is it so possible to be blithely carrying on with talking, while having no idea yourself—let alone common knowledge with your interlocutor(s)??
It seems to me that it comes down to the idea that a lot of what’s happening in most conversations is a kind of going with the flow—even when we’re not entirely clear what the flow is for.
When two people are haggling over a price, or debating a policy, or arguing in court, there’s a disagreement, but largely speaking they’re still in agreement about what kind of process they’re participating in. I watched the Super Bowl for the first time last year, because my local team, the San Francisco 49ers, was playing against the Kansas City Chiefs. And they were sure disagreeing about who should win, but that disagreement was founded on shared rules, tuned over decades to make a maximally interesting and fair competition. The NFL teams collaborate as much as they compete, on a different level. They need each other. Even heated conversations are often like this.
In terms of conversations being alive, we can think of these frame struggles as being a situation where there are multiple conversation-level memetic creatures that are fighting over who gets to say what the conversation even is.
Anyway! There’s no absence of frame, nor single correct frame that can allow us to treat the frame question as irrelevant. But there are frames that are more or less wholesome for their participants, and there can be tension or confusion or even gaslighting on the frame level.
What kind of life are conversations? Are they dissipative systems, supporting an outward entropy gradient? I have some drafts on the subject.
For now, we can simply note that they’re a form of memetic life (as I’ve alluded to multiple times above). Note that the natural analogue to the word “biology” would be “ideology”—the study of ideas. But because the study of ideas is itself made of ideas (which is not true for biology) it gets loopy because it affects what you’re studying. Which explains what happened to the word “ideology”! If we want to study such phenomena without falling into traps, we will need a science that understands and accounts for reflexivity.
These reflexive dynamics mean that you get a different kind of conversation if the conversation is aware of the living nature of conversations. And even within that, there are a lot of different meanings that can be implied by that.
In this post I’ve largely described the kinds of dynamics that show up in conversations that aren’t quite self-aware (we-aware?). But what about when it does? What happens when a conversation becomes deliberately conscious of itself as a living system, and actively dialogues with its participants such that they’re knowingly choosing to be partially governed by it? I’ve experienced this—ecstatic moments of collective consciousness that felt profoundly collaborative and wholesome. And yet, something about that experience turned out to be more complicated than it seemed. The collective mind was real, but what exactly were its members?
More on this in the next post, Coalitional Politics of Multi-Person Minds Coalitions between are made by coalitions within.
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