Setting:
Same faculty room. Evening now. The light is dimmer. The teapot has been replaced by glasses. The blackboard has been wiped clean, except for a single phrase written in chalk:
ACT ≠ PATTERN
Quillibrace sits, relaxed.
Stray is perched on the edge of the table.
Blottisham stands closer to the board than before.
The Almost
Blottisham:
All right. I think I see it now. The system doesn’t cause the act. The probabilities don’t force the meaning.
Quillibrace:
Good.
Blottisham:
They just… make certain selections more likely.
Quillibrace:
(Still calm)
Careful.
Blottisham:
Likely in the sense that they’re already there. Already sedimented. So when someone speaks, they’re drawing on what’s most available.
Stray:
Available to whom?
Blottisham:
To the system.
Quillibrace:
There it is.
(A pause.)
The Slide
Blottisham:
No, wait—hear me out. I’m not saying the system acts. I’m saying the act is… statistically anticipated.
Quillibrace:
Anticipated by whom?
Blottisham:
By the distribution itself.
Stray:
So the distribution expects something?
Blottisham:
Not expects—biases.
Quillibrace:
Bias is already too strong.
Blottisham:
Surely not. Bias just means unevenness.
Quillibrace:
Unevenness in description, yes. Not inclination in the world.
Stray:
You’re letting the map lean.
(Blottisham frowns, rubs his forehead.)
The Almost-Insight
Blottisham:
So the act… the act is free?
Quillibrace:
It is answerable.
Blottisham:
But not unconstrained?
Quillibrace:
Of course not.
Blottisham:
Then the system guides the act.
Quillibrace:
It conditions the space in which the act can occur.
Blottisham:
That sounds like guidance.
Stray:
It sounds like weather.
(A small smile from Quillibrace.)
Where He Fails
Blottisham:
So meaning emerges from the interaction between agency and probability.
Quillibrace:
No.
Blottisham:
Why not? That seems fair.
Quillibrace:
Because probability does not interact.
Blottisham:
Surely it does—look at learning, adaptation, updating—
Quillibrace:
Those are properties of descriptions, not of acts.
Stray:
You’ve moved the interaction to a place where nothing can answer back.
(Blottisham opens his mouth, then closes it.)
The Diagnostic Moment
Blottisham:
So close… I can almost say it.
Quillibrace:
Say it anyway.
Blottisham:
Meaning is… selected under constraints?
Quillibrace:
And now you’ve lost it.
Blottisham:
Because?
Stray:
Because selection already assumes a chooser.
(Silence.)
The Quiet End
Blottisham:
So probability never touches meaning.
Quillibrace:
It touches its traces.
Stray:
And confuses us because the traces are all that remain.
(Blottisham looks at the chalk on the board.)
Blottisham:
ACT ≠ PATTERN.
Quillibrace:
You can understand that sentence.
Stray:
But you still want the arrow.
(Blottisham nods, rueful.)
Curtain.
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