This also gives you some idea of how bizarre things get for me when the conversational matrix malfunctions.
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Here’s an example of the conversational matrix in action. I’ve talked about it before, but it’s more effective, I think, to show what’s going on, however tongue-in-cheekly. This happens on a pretty fast level—faster than the comic would indicate—so the pause isn’t generally noticeable. Plus, I’ve learned to throw out completely generic answers to the most commonly encountered questions, so there is almost no perceptible delay.

“My first instinct is to actually answer the question, even though this is not what anyone wants.”

Still, I have not yet internalized that when people ask me how I’m doing, or what happened over my weekend, the majority of the time, they’re not really asking for this information. It’s just a silence filler. Even so, the conversational matrix still has to weed out these possibilities in every encounter, and that takes a finite amount of time. My first instinct is to actually answer the question, even though this is not what anyone wants.

You can understand how quickly this would get annoying in regular, boring, back-and-forth conversation. There are all these levels of metadata and meta-modeling which make it very tedious (not to mention exhausting) over a period of time. I can do it for maybe an hour and a half, tops, with strangers—a few hours with friends. But eventually I have to give my brain a rest.

I think this also explains why I can’t role play very well. I’ve had jobs in the past where I was supposed to pretend to be selling something, or waiting on a customer—but the role player would be my boss, or a coworker. First of all, what’s the point? But also, I’m already role playing, in a sense. I’m role-playing being a regular person, rather than whatever I would be if I acted the way that comes naturally to me. So to role play while role playing—this is an additional level of meta-modeling, and I can’t handle that much recursion. My processing slows to a crawl.

One last point: you will note that the conversational matrix has the phrase, “I really don’t want to talk right now,” tagged as rude. It is also has negative connotations, as in “I’m not feeling well.” This is a cultural imposition—and a freakin’ annoying one. There is no way to tell people that I simply do not feel like talking. The request indicates a problem. I can’t say it in a neutral way. More so than anything else in the example, that makes me feel like a stranger.

-Pulsar