The Experience of Conversation

Many role-playing games, in their rulebooks, assert that playing the game takes the form of a conversation. Even games like Pathfinder, which tends to use grid-based tactical combat, lets the game master give bonuses for things that aren't covered in the written rules, which keeps the conversational element that separates RPGs from board games. Now, the premise of this blog is that your humble critic does not play role-playing games, but I have had quite a few conversations in the course of my life, and I believe I know something about them. This morning, I discovered a recent essay entitled "An Analogy About Rules for Sickos," on a blog called To Be Resolved. The essay asks whether conversation games that are defined by rules leave space for infinite human creativity, or whether the rules function by subtractioin, marking off a bounded set of conversations from the set of all possible conversations. The writer uses the infinite complexity of the Mandelbrot set's border as an analogy for how creativity isn't dampened by limits. ("Cantor Dust," created by the infinite removal of middle thirds of line segments, has some properties that could enliven the analogy further, but it's not so pretty to look at.) Now, I like this analogy and I think it does the work it needs to, but for the blog, let's try pushing a little further.

The first thing to note is that fractals, or the fractal-like border of the Mandelbrot Set, require properties of continuity. The "zoom" has to be infinite; if there's a lowest level of resolution, you have to end your recursive process when you reach your atoms. Now, an in-person role-playing game or a face-to-face conversation partakes of enough sensory experience that I'm willing to hypothesize fractal-like continuity, but people also play by post, or play by chat, and digital text is ultimately discrete rather than continuous. The space of possible human interactions may be uncountably infinite, but the space of possible digital texts is countable and, given an arbitrary upper bound of length, finite. So if play-by-post is a valid instantiation of a conversation game, we aren't in a situation of fractal-like possibility.

What Borges was getting at in "The Library of Babel," a story about a library that contained all possible texts of a certain length, is that a large enough set of possible texts is functionally infinite for human cognition. And meaning does not automatically adhere to a text; a random generation gives you an ocean of gibberish with a drop of meaning. The Library of Babel is what I think of when I try to conceptualize the space of possible conversations.

In the era of chatbots, the large language model (LLM), is something like a structure for generating semantic paths through the space of possible texts. The Library of Babel finally has a decent card catalog. And, given how intellectual history tends to go, I believe we're entering a stage of culture where it's as seemingly obvious to us that the human mind is a kind of large language model as it was to Freud that the mind was a kind of steam engine, dealing with all sorts of explosive internal pressures. Which is to say, we always reimagine ourselves in light of our dominant technologies.

But human beings are not actually known to be procedural text generators. For all of our science, we don't understand our minds particularly well, and we seem to be stuck with the "hard problem of consciousness," insofar as internal experience is self-evident but incurably internal. And, after introspection: how does our conscious reasoning relate to what we actually say and do? When we speak or write fluently, where does the next phrase really come from? The unconscious in mysterious and not obviously algorithmic.

Perhaps most importantly, for our purposes, is the question of how social expectations, laws, and rules function in our unconscious minds. Learning to participate in a social practice, such as a conversation game, means that our unconscious or subconscious minds can effectively present our conscious minds with reasonable options for action, so that we can deliberate rather than feeling lost in the rules. We experience the rules of even a finite game as positive options rather than constraints on our freedom: the strong chess player doesn't waste time consciously discarding invalid moves as options.

So, to sum up, the fractal-like border of the Mandelbrot set is a wonderful image for illustrating infinite creativity within bounds, but the "space of all possible conversations" is an abstraction with little relationship to how we speak and think. Besides, so many creative endeavors involve adding things to an empty space, whether it's paint on a canvas or words on a page, that "subtractive" arts seem like an exception. A noble exception, to be sure: heaven forbid that I cause any offense to stonecarvers or practitioners of Moog-style subtractive sound synthesis.