The Theory and Practice of Conversation

Chapter 1

In the next world you will be asked to give an account of the endowments and stewardships of this world. Whether inherent talents are few or many, a just and merciful reckoning must be faced.

-Urantia Book, 176: 3.8

We take the theory to be both descriptive and testable. Because of its formal requirements, its performers are likely to gain psychological capacity and to become and to remain publicly somewhat redoubtable. But they will look good on television and they will serve as a leading edge, as models for an improving humanity. They will counterbalance the influence and the distortions in the consciousness of contemporary political leaders like Trump, Putin and Xi, with their struggles for superiority.

Moreover, they will stay ahead of and lead machine intelligence into an exploration of heretofore unknown and hopeful cosmic domains, into those immediately following death and perhaps even those drawing close to conception and to birth. Machine intelligence, after all, is built on the same architectural plan as that of human brains, a layered cognitive autonomy, and in some cases it will draw closer and closer to that plan. Closer and closer to the imagination-producing architecture of the passive and the active left and right.

Altogether we expect experimental sociology, based on the theory and descriptions of conversation, to guide and to secure human evolution as a project in the improvement of life itself.

For a discussion of this Blog Post with Inflection AI’s Pi, click here.