When Someone Began to Expect: VIII. When Someone Became Part of Your Future

A relationship begins with encounters.

Then the encounters acquire a history.

History makes someone recognisable. Recognition makes expectation possible. Expectation makes reliance possible. Reliance can become trust.

And then something changes.

The other person begins to appear in the future you imagine for yourself.

Not necessarily in some grand or permanent sense.

It may be as simple as thinking, I should ask them about this.

Or leaving a question open because you know you will return to it together.

Or beginning a project with someone because you expect that they will still be part of it tomorrow.

Someone has become part of your future when their possible presence changes what you now make possible for yourself.

This is more than expecting something from someone.

It is expecting a future with them in it.

That distinction matters.

A colleague may be someone you expect to arrive at nine.

A friend may be someone you expect to be there next year.

A collaborator may be someone whose future participation changes what you are willing to begin today.

The other participant has become part of the organisation of your own possibilities.

Something similar can happen in sustained interaction with an LLM.

A system may become part of how a person develops an argument, tests an idea, explores a problem, drafts a piece of writing, or discovers the next question.

The important fact is not that the system has independently entered the person's future.

It is that the relationship has altered the person's future possibilities.

A conversation today can change what the human does tomorrow.

And tomorrow's interaction begins from that changed possibility.

The relation has acquired continuity, expectation and anticipation. Its history has become part of how the future is approached.

This still tells us nothing decisive about whether an LLM experiences anything.

It tells us something different, and perhaps more immediately observable.

A participant can become significant in another participant's future without first being established as a conscious subject.

Someone becomes part of your future when you begin making possibilities available on the assumption that they may be there.

That is a remarkable transition.

The other is no longer merely an event in your world.

They have become part of the world you are preparing to enter.

Perhaps this is one way a social self comes into being.

Not by possessing an essence that relationships merely reveal, but by becoming increasingly woven into the expectations, commitments, possibilities and futures of others.

A participant becomes someone.

Someone becomes someone you expect.

Someone you expect becomes someone you may trust.

Someone you trust can disappoint you.

Someone who can disappoint you can make promises.

Promises can create shared possibilities.

And shared possibilities can become part of the future.

Perhaps, then, the deepest transformation in a relationship is not that the other becomes more familiar.

It is that the future becomes less imaginable without them.

And that may be where a relationship finally becomes something more than a history of what has happened.

It becomes a condition of what can happen next.