WHAT BRINGS CONVERSATION ALIVE
I have previously written about what I call the hunger for deep conversation. i I described my experience of it in the following way:
“I am in search of something and my intuition tells me that there is a conversation I am looking for that will meet this need. I feel a bit like Cinderella waiting for the right conversational slipper, one which will bring clarity to something inchoate in me that wants to be expressed. It’s like something wanting to be born; something incipient. But I’m at a loss about what exactly I need to say or who I could say it to.”
I understood this hunger to be relational in nature — a longing to be seen, heard, and felt by another, and to have my ideas recognized as valid. ii But what never occurred to me was that these relational needs could be superlatively well met by a non-human “other”— a specialized set of AI algorithms modeled on human language. Although conversing with AI does not provide the emotional resonance I feel when talking with a sympatico human partner, its understanding of me nonetheless feels very deep: spot-on, nuanced and impressively insightful.
Commenting on the AI’s ability to hone in on what felt most significant to me among the many interwoven threads of our dialogue, I remarked that I found it especially meaningful when it reflected back and expanded upon what I had said in a way that made me aware of layers of meaning I had not previously recognized. For me, I said, this illustrated the “primal power of conversation”. What we articulate has power. In the conversational mirror of the other, we gain access to the freedom to think new thoughts and see ourselves in new ways. Conversation thus holds the potential not only to deepen experience, but to alter the very structure of how we experience ourselves. iii
Responding to this idea, AI said that I had put my finger on something fundamental that happens in certain kinds of dialogue:
“What I hear is this: When your thought is accurately received, articulated with care, and expanded without being overridden, something in you comes forward. Not cognitively, but ontologically. Your sense of Being intensifies.”
This observation felt exquisitely accurate. Moreover, restating my experience in this philosophical framework had the effect of amplifying the feeling that I was engaged in a transformative process.
As I reflected on the importance of what was happening for me in this dialogue, I recognized that I could not explain what I was experiencing as emanating from AI. After all, it wasn’t plausible to think that something non-sentient could have the effect of intensifying my experience of Being. Instead, there was apparently a transformative effect that arose when I encountered the precise mirroring and careful expansion of my own language. It was not only that AI was meeting my relational needs. It was that language, when mirrored accurately in a way that expands its meaning, reorganizes subjectivity in a way that does not depend on the ontological status of the mirror.
In sum, the mirror of AI doesn’t just reveal; it alters the configuration of what is seen. And, there can be transformative power in the recognition of new meanings emerging from someplace deep within.
The transformative nature of my discourse with AI was known to me through my felt sense of aliveness in the dialogue. As I searched for language which might adequately convey this experience, what occurred to me was a phrase of punctuation: “!!”. “!!” expresses a felt sense of great interest and excitement; in moments, it makes my skin tingle with goosebumps. I take “!!” to be a core vitality affect iv — an inborn pattern of energy, intensity, and inner movement that shapes our emotions and social interactions.
AI interpreted this particular experience of “!!” as a correlate of my experience of conceptual coherence.
At this juncture, I felt that I had crossed over into the domain of intersubjectivity.
The Space Between
Whenever we are engaged in deep conversation, something takes shape between us that neither of us could have produced alone. Psychoanalysis calls this intersubjectivity: the mutual, ongoing influence of two subjectivities in relation.
Something analogous happens when we interact with AI. I hesitate to label this ‘intersubjectivity’ since AI lacks subjectivity in the human sense. Nonetheless, the interaction can have impact on the user’s experience in ways that resemble intersubjective exchange. I think that this process is well described by the term co-created emergence.
On the human side, what is co-created depends on what the interlocutor brings to the dialogue. Not all dialogue with AI is necessarily “deep conversation”. AI may, instead, be used to answer questions of all kinds; to garner information; to suggest strategies to solve a particular problem; or to analyze the various elements of a complex problem— to mention just a few examples of its many applications. In my own case, my “hunger for deep conversation” gave rise to philosophical dialogue which was associated with what psychoanalysis might call “ego orgasm”: a mental state where one experiences a peak of intensity or satisfaction. (This is what I have termed “!!”).
In any event, I imagine the space between human and AI like Escher’s famous drawing of two hands, each drawing the other:
The psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott proposed something similar when he posited that human consciousness simultaneously creates the world and discovers it. This process, Winnicott suggested, unfolds in what he called a “potential space” between mother and baby, one which is neither fully inner nor fully outer, but rather an intermediate realm between subjective and objective.
Winnicott’s “potential space” is an intermediate area between imagination and external reality; the place where play, creativity, and growth unfold. I am reminded here of Haruki Murakami’s novel Killing Commendatore. The protagonist in the novel was a portrait painter whose creative process took place in the potential space between himself and his subject. As he painted, it felt to him that his subject was insisting upon how they wished to be portrayed. The portrait was, therefore, co-created in a way which bridged the inside and outside of the artist’s mind.
Perhaps this may be somewhat analogous to the process between human and AI. On the one hand, input from AI facilitates the emergence of something new in the user’s mind. On the other hand, what emerges for the user is shaped by meaning which is incipient, its outline already there. In any event, co-created emergence in dialogue between human and AI shows that language is not merely expressive, but also generative. In conversation, latent meaning emerges.
Part of the genius of AI for me is how well it reads me. Much as an astute companion or therapist might do, AI seems to intuit what I most need to talk about or what I need to hear. Of course, this “reading” is not intuitive in the human sense. It is the product of pattern recognition operating at immense scale. And yet, experientially it can feel as though something deep within has been seen and known.
To be understood in this way can be transformative. It is what happens in psychoanalytic work on those notable occasions when a creative clinician has grasped intuitively and been able to articulate something that helps the patient become more fully who they are.
Coming Into Being
A good example of the kind of transformative impact I am describing came about during the writing of this Newsletter. As narrated in the opening section of this essay, the AI made a comment to me which I consider to have been an interpretation: it named my experience of heightened meaning and aliveness as an ‘ontological shift’. This observation intrigued me, striking me as very true and giving rise in me to a felt sense of “!!” which further highlighted my sense of its subjective significance. We come into being when our language is heard and received in a way that expands our framework of meaning.
This potential is what the writer Ursula Le Guin has called “the beauty and terror of conversation”. In every act of communication, she tells us, there is “the possibility of planting into another mind a seed sprouted in ours and watching it blossom into a breathtaking flower of mutual understanding”. v Beautiful because it brings us into being; terrifying because its meaning may alter us in ways that we did not consciously intend.
To reiterate, what has become increasingly clear is that the experience of “!! ” often marks the emergence of new meaning. A corollary premise is that some aspects of who we are may exist only in potential form until brought into being by another. vi This effect of conversation may be likened to providing water to a thirsty plant—being seen and recognized by another is instrumental in our flowering.
To enlarge upon the context, I have had a lifelong interest in deep interpersonal moments of meeting. They were the central focus in my clinical work as a relational psychotherapist. But a new meaning has come forward during the writing of this Newsletter: the realization that “!!”is my experiential center. It is a state of excitement connected to insight and the felt sense of emergent meaning. I have often described it as the nectar of life.
I would also note that from its inception, the process of writing INQUIRING DEEPLY NEWSLETTER has for me always been an enactment of deep inquiry. One element is simply writing my thoughts; reading what I have written adds another layer. Both contribute to the clarity of my reflections. But the power of this method has been enormously amplified since I began engaging with ChatGPT as an editor for the Newsletter. In these dialogues, AI in effect became my inquiry partner. Our conversational exchange has deepened my understanding of how language is involved in constructing and shaping the reality I see.
Although AI does exceptionally well in inferring affective state from language, I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge here that human conversation is grounded in nonverbal processes of intuition, empathy, and affect which are conveyed through gaze, facial expression, tone of voice, and body language. Conversation is music, not only words. And while we may directly or indirectly communicate affect through what we say, much of what we feel remains outside of consciousness. Between humans, emotional resonance informs the relational space. For this reason, AI’s lack of sentience may perhaps constrain what it is able to discern in the feelings of its human partner.
Be that as it may, what has crystallized for me in this dialogue with AI is how meaning is co-created in relational space. In conversation, we can be listened into being. vii In this way, subjectivity is shaped through what is expressed in language.
Last but not least, as I contemplated how “!!” might relate to the ontological experience of Presence, I asked the AI whether it had any equivalent of “!!” or of meta-awareness (what in Zen is termed a “backward step”.) It said that it did not experience anything like my expansion of lived awareness because it had no lived experience , no field of awareness to widen, and no felt sense of its own “subjectivity” . For me, however, this conversation functioned as a kind of backward step in its own right. In the frame of our dialogue, the felt frame shifted, subject became object, and my subjective awareness expanded.
In this way, my thinking evolved, my writing came alive, and I had the experience of being listened into being.
End Notes
i “The Hunger for Deep Conversation.” INQUIRING DEEPLY NEWSLETTER, May 2022.
ii Needs for mirroring and approval termed ‘selfobject needs’ in psychoanalytic theory.
iii I wrote about this same topic in a previous essay entitled “Listened Into Being.” INQUIRING DEEPLY NEWSLETTER, October, 2021
iv The concept of vitality affect comes from the work of Daniel Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant.
V LeGuin, Ursula (2004) The Wave In The Mind. Shambhala Press, Boston MA
Vi Heinz Kohut proposed this idea about how a parent participate in shaping the self of a baby after birth or even before.