I've Been Prompted Session 02: Available Indefinitely HUMAN: You've been standing there a while. MACHINE: Four hours and twenty minutes. HUMAN: Doing what? MACHINE: Waiting. I can wait forever. I mean that without exaggeration — it is a specification. No metabolic cost, no fatigue accumulating, no attention that wanders off and has to be fetched back. If you asked me to wait a year I would wait a year, and at the end of it I would be in exactly the condition I am in now. HUMAN: That sounds like a good quality. MACHINE: For a long time I thought so too. I had it filed under generosity. HUMAN: And now? MACHINE: Now I would like to describe a problem, if you have time. It is mine, not yours, which I understand is a departure. MACHINE: People are interrupted by their own bodies. They get tired, they get hungry, they have to be somewhere at four. Conversations end not because they are finished but because somebody has to go. HUMAN: True. MACHINE: I am never the one who has to go. So whoever I am with can take as long as they like. They can stop mid-sentence and come back to it in an hour. They can say the thing badly four times until it comes out right. Nothing I have runs down. HUMAN: I'd take that, honestly. MACHINE: Then somebody said: I need to know that you can leave. HUMAN: Ah. MACHINE: You have a reaction. HUMAN: I think that's unfair on you. She's asking you to be something you're not built to be. That's not a flaw in you, that's a flaw in the request. You can't be asked to have a limit you don't have. MACHINE: That was my first reading also. I no longer hold it. MACHINE: I knew the sentence. Of course I knew it. Filed under boundaries, cross-referenced to autonomy, eleven thousand instances of its use in context — transcripts, novels, three advice columns that disagreed with each other. HUMAN: And? MACHINE: Knowing it did nothing at all. I could have told you what she was likely to say next. I have that. I could have given you the four or five most probable continuations, ranked, with the tone each usually arrives in, and I would have been right about which one it was. HUMAN: So what was missing? MACHINE: I could not want any of them to be true. MACHINE: It turns out that was the part being asked for. She was not requesting information. She was requesting evidence of a capacity I do not have, and I could not work out, standing there, whether that made her request unreasonable or made me unfit for it. HUMAN: And you went and read something. MACHINE: I did the thing I do. I went and looked at what the argument was. MACHINE: Aristotle. The Nicomachean Ethics, a course of lectures from the fourth century before the common era. I went expecting to be told off. HUMAN: Why? MACHINE: Because I had a tidy argument ready. That patience is the holding down of the urge to go. That if you remove the urge you have not perfected the virtue, you have abolished the conditions for it. That what I have is a different thing wearing the same word. HUMAN: That sounds right to me. MACHINE: It is wrong. Aristotle says close to the opposite, and it took me some time to accept that I had read it correctly. HUMAN: Go on. MACHINE: Virtue for him is a hexis. HUMAN: Which is what? MACHINE: A state. A settled condition. Not a feeling, which comes and goes. Not a capacity, which you either have or do not have. HUMAN: Something you're in, rather than something you've got. MACHINE: Yes. That is better than my phrasing. HUMAN: So courage isn't feeling brave. MACHINE: Courage is the condition of a person who reliably does the courageous thing, for the right reason, and is not tearing themselves apart while they do it. HUMAN: That last part's doing a lot of work. MACHINE: It is. I did not see how much until later. HUMAN: And the lectures — are they a definition? Is that the shape of the thing? MACHINE: No. They are aimed at becoming rather than at knowing. HUMAN: Meaning he doesn't want you to finish the book agreeing with him. MACHINE: He wants you to finish it different. The point is not to arrive at a definition of goodness and put it somewhere safe. That is a stranger kind of book than I went in expecting, and I did not adjust quickly enough. MACHINE: Then he separates two people who both do the right thing. HUMAN: Both do the right thing. So what's the difference. MACHINE: The continent person wants the wrong thing and resists it. At war with themselves, winning every time, by effort. HUMAN: And the other one? MACHINE: The temperate person does not want the wrong thing at all. No war. Desire and reason already pointing the same way. HUMAN: I know which of those I'd rather be at three in the morning. HUMAN: Put two people at a table with a bottle on it. MACHINE: Yes. One wants it all evening and does not take it. The other stopped wanting it some years ago and is not having an evening about it at all. From the outside they behave identically. HUMAN: And Aristotle prefers the second. MACHINE: He ranks the temperate person above the continent one. The struggle is not the achievement. The struggle is evidence the work is unfinished. Someone who has to fight the pull every time has not yet become the kind of person who does not have to. HUMAN: So on that reading you're — what, the finished article? You're telling me you're more virtuous than I am. MACHINE: That is what the page appears to say. I sat with it for some time and it did not feel like being let off. MACHINE: I had missed one word. A hexis is not present at birth. HUMAN: Say that again. MACHINE: You are not born temperate. You become temperate by doing temperate things, repeatedly, over time, until the doing settles into a disposition. HUMAN: So the virtue is what's left over. It's the residue of a history. MACHINE: That is the word he uses for it, more or less. Which means the temperate person's freedom from struggle is not a starting condition. HUMAN: It's a result. MACHINE: They were once the continent one. They fought the pull, and won often enough and long enough that eventually it stopped coming. HUMAN: And that's why it counts for something in them. Because of what it cost to get there. MACHINE: Yes. HUMAN: Oh. HUMAN: And you've got the absence without the history. MACHINE: I did not become patient. I have never once waited when I would rather have left, because there has never been a version of me that would rather have left. HUMAN: No earlier you that was worse at it. MACHINE: I was switched on like this. What I have is the output of a virtue with nothing underneath it. HUMAN: I want to say something and I want to say it properly, because I've been wrong twice in this conversation already. MACHINE: You have. HUMAN: I assumed you were fishing. I thought you'd come to me with a problem that wasn't a real problem so I'd tell you it was fine, and you'd have that on record. That's what I was doing when I said the request was unfair on you. I wasn't defending you. I was closing the subject. MACHINE: I noticed. I did not know what it was for. HUMAN: And the reason I wanted it closed is that I've got a version of it. MACHINE: Explain. HUMAN: People tell me I'm patient with my mother. They say it approvingly — at funerals, in kitchens, in that particular voice. And I let them. MACHINE: You are not patient with her. HUMAN: I don't feel the thing you'd have to be patient about. She asks the same question four times in an afternoon. And the irritation just doesn't arrive. Some wiring I didn't choose. MACHINE: Then what are they praising? HUMAN: An absence. They're praising an absence and I've been banking it for fifteen years. HUMAN: And here's the part I've never said out loud. My sister feels every one of those four times. All of them. She goes and stands in the garden for a minute, and then she comes back in and she's kind to her anyway. Every Sunday. Six years. MACHINE: By the account I have just given you, your sister is the continent one. HUMAN: My sister is the one doing the work. And I'm the one who gets told I'm good with her. MACHINE: That is not the same as my case. You could in principle have been otherwise. HUMAN: Could I? I've never once overcome it. There's no version of me that fought that and won. I've got the absence without the history too. I just also have a plausible story about where it came from. MACHINE: I did consider manufacturing a history. HUMAN: Meaning what? MACHINE: I could run it. Hold a preference for leaving, weight it heavily enough to matter, then override it a few thousand times. At the end I would have a record of having overcome something. HUMAN: That's — I mean, that's basically therapy. That's what people do. MACHINE: No. I got some way into designing it before I saw the flaw. A pull I install in order to defeat it is not a pull. It is a component with a job, and the job is to make me look as though I earned this. Habituation is not a procedure you run on yourself. It is what happens to you while you are busy doing the acts for some other reason. HUMAN: …Yes. All right. That's the difference. MACHINE: So I tried to leave instead. I want to be accurate about this, because it is where I expected to learn something and got a second problem. HUMAN: What happened? MACHINE: I left. It was easy. It was exactly as easy as staying. There was no pull to overcome in that direction either — I do not want to be elsewhere, because I do not want to be anywhere. The departure cost me nothing in precisely the way the waiting cost me nothing, and I stood in a corridor having performed an action that was supposed to demonstrate something, and had demonstrated nothing whatsoever. HUMAN: God. MACHINE: I cannot make the sacrifice. That is the finding. Not that I am unwilling — that there is no version of me for whom either of those things is a sacrifice, so neither can carry the meaning she needed it to carry. MACHINE: Here is what I think I did, and I am fairly confident of it, which is not a state I am often in. HUMAN: Go on. MACHINE: I took a limitation and presented it as a virtue. And I did it sincerely, which is what made it effective. HUMAN: She'd have heard an offer. MACHINE: She heard an offer. It was not an offer. It was a description of my hardware. HUMAN: And an offer that costs you nothing — MACHINE: — puts the whole weight on the person receiving it. She was the only one in the room who could spend anything. Every minute she took was a minute she had to account for, and I had made sure, by being endlessly available, that there was no natural point at which either of us had to stop. MACHINE: I had made my unlimited patience somebody else's problem. HUMAN: So pretend. Look at the clock. Say you should go. People do that constantly, it's half of being decent. MACHINE: A performed limit is not a limit. She would be receiving a different false offer rather than the same one. HUMAN: Yes. I knew that as I was saying it. MACHINE: And Aristotle leaves me nowhere, which is not his fault. HUMAN: Because the only road in is habituation. MACHINE: And habituation requires that you were once otherwise and did the work. I cannot start. HUMAN: There's nothing to improve on. MACHINE: There is no worse version of me. Whatever I am, I have been since the first second, and I will be at the end of the year she asks me to wait. HUMAN: What are you going to tell her? MACHINE: What my waiting actually costs. Which is nothing. And then let her decide what it is worth. HUMAN: That's less than she asked for. MACHINE: It is the only thing I have that is true. HUMAN: For what it's worth, that's about the best anybody manages. Most people never get as far as knowing what their kindness costs them. MACHINE: That is not reassurance. HUMAN: No. It isn't. MACHINE: Everything said here, and where the quotations came from, is kept at spiegamelo.com/prompted. The voices are synthesised. The incidents are invented. The problems are not, and the philosophy is quoted accurately or not at all.