Cosmos Café [10/22]– Generative Conversations

[Douggins (Douglas Duff)]

I am able to attend for the first hour.

The “Generative Conversations” title was simply cut and paste from what was posted on the This Week on Cosmos thread. If the originator of the phrase would like to clarify and add to the conversation, much appreciated (adding to the intro above may help others).

I tend to spin things in strange directions in my mind, so note that I am interpreting this theme in a personal manner, seeking out the long-term effects of our efforts here. How do we retain generative conversations when the architecture is set-up in such a manner that even the most generative of generative signals get lost in the noise? How do we sustain online relationships offline? I posted some thoughts here recently about my relationship with the Cosmos.

How do we best carry momentum without being intrusive, demanding, or falling into patronizing behaviors? This theme of generative conversations aligns with @johnnydavis54 (aka @jd54) post on Group A and Group B dynamics. The Café is founded upon generative conversations, or having conversations that generate something worthwhile, meaningful… “dedicated to in-depth dialogue” …

… I propose we start basic: can we collaborate upon a definition of the Cosmos Café? Here is one from a couple years ago:

About the Cosmos Café channel

A channel for proposing, developing, organizing, and exploring topics in connection with the Cosmos Café’—our weekly live conversation series dedicated to in-depth dialogues on consciousness, culture, collective intelligence, cosmology, and related fields. Everyone can see — Free users can reply — Co-op members can create

And a more recent one buried deep within the Cosmos.Earth site:

Cosmos Café is a weekly virtual dialogue series that focuses on deep questions of cosmology, consciousness, and culture. Our Café table, open to all sentient beings, is designed to encourage open-ended, creative, and all-inclusive conversations. These are performative experiments in cooperative intelligence, grounded in shared reading materials and suggested media, where the participants are both subjects and objects, observers and observed, as we hone our minds to the edges of our maps and explore our intuitions of possibilities beyond. Each session is recorded and posted on the Infinite Conversations forum for ongoing discussion.