Recursive Reflections on Friendship and Conversation

Abstract

As Ranulph was a friend, an with whom I had many conversations on reflection and recursion it behoves me to choose this occasion to reflect further on these topics.  The experience of friendship feels delicious and meaningful.  How is this so?  I turn to a fundamental of all living systems, that is living in a constant of structural coupling which maintains our systemic relational embeddedness wherein we change coherently with our niche which changes along with us. Our medium as a whole appears to change slower than we do, its apparent inertia resulting from its complexity of other connections.  In a conversation our immediate niche of the other, in whatever domain, changes at the same pace as we ourselves.  In friendship we have the experience of an intimate flow of these changes. 

In this talk I consider the implications of “chunking” and “betweens” in language, the fluid flow of entailments in meaning and emotioning, and the role of the current situation as well as the accumulation of co-epigenic coherences.  Even as we reflect on these notions in a conversation, or engage in reflexive conversation on friendship in conversation, the lived experience of conversation in friendship remains retains an aspect of mystery.  The experience of friendship happens both in our reflections and in our living; as a kind of multilayered awareness.