Narrative Self Café (v10): Cruciform Antifragility
Posted: January 23, 2026 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: antifragile, cognitive, emotional, narrative, philosophy, reality, self-determination Leave a commentSequel to Narrative Self Café V9: The NART of War (Towards Antifragile Economies)
Use Maurice Merleau-Ponty to represent the antifragile narrative self as an interlocutor between Freud (affective self) and Plato (cognitive self).
— ChatGPT Prompt
The Ongoing Argument
Plato (already exasperated):
You mistake turbulence for depth. The soul is disordered because reason has not yet taken the throne.
Freud (dryly):
My dear Plato, the throne is built over a cellar. You call it disorder; I call it what leaks through the floorboards at night.
Plato:
Dreams are shadows on the cave wall.
Freud:
And you still refuse to ask who is casting them.
Higher Self Café v10: Arrival of the Aporotic
Posted: January 21, 2026 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: dialogue, reality, resilience, systems Leave a commentSequel to Higher Self Café v9: Whitehead’s Groundhog Day (Autenia)
Cast Emmanuel Levinas, Paul Ricoeur, Judith Butler, Simone Weil, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Alfred North Whitehead in a remake of Arrival to articulate the aporotic (“THE openness that feels like stuckness”), via a single shared dialogue that collapses into silence.
ChatGPT Prompt
A café. Sirens outside. Phones vibrate on the table. A countdown clock on the wall reads 00:17:40.
The Dialogue
Ricoeur
Seventeen minutes. If we don’t frame this, the city will choose a story for us.
Butler
And whoever doesn’t fit that story will be erased by it.
(A phone buzzes. A headline preview flashes: “PREEMPTIVE RESPONSE ADVISED.”)
Levinas
Then we are already late. Responsibility does not wait for frames.
Higher Self Café v9: Whitehead’s Groundhog Day (Autenia)
Posted: January 21, 2026 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: creativity, identity, philosophy, systems, transformation 1 CommentA redemptive metaphysical rom-com
v9 sequel to Higher Self Café v8: The Prerotic Threshold
Redeem Whitehead. Use The cafe scene from Groundhog Day where Phil confesses his “Godhood” to Rita to have Danny Rubin write the screenplay where Socrates, Heraclitus and Weil gently but hilariously help Whitehead break out of his own system, so he can authentically woo his “Rita” of creativity.
ChatGPT Pronpt
Logos vs “Autenia”
(maintaining cohesion by avoiding risk)
Trapped in an eternal philosophical time loop of guaranteed Creativity, Alfred North Whitehead must confess his godhood—and its cost—to Creativity herself. With help from Socrates, Heraclitus, and Simone Weil, he learns to risk real loss so that Eros—not insurance—can finally break the loop.
Act I — Autenia on Tap
INT. HIGHER SELF CAFÉ — MORNING (AGAIN)
Whitehead orders the same drink. It arrives before he finishes speaking.
WHITEHEAD
Creativity advances. Always. That’s the rule.
RITA (smiles, distant)
Rules make me itch.
Narrative Self Café V9: The NART of War (Towards Antifragile Economies)
Posted: January 8, 2026 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: economics, politics, systems 1 CommentSequel to Narrative Self Café V8: The Upside of Idiocy
Write the no-holds-barred skit with Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s trademark dry wit, about No-Notice Adversarial Readiness Testing (a la Chaos Monkey) applied to political and economic systems.
ChatGPT Prompt
I. Opening Monologue — Taleb Enters (Dry, Unimpressed)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
(looking at the audience, not smiling)
Welcome. If you came here to hear how to make society stable, you’re in the wrong room.
Stability is what you get right before you blow up.
Today’s topic is NART — No-Notice Adversarial Readiness Testing.
It’s what armies do when they’re serious.
What engineers do when they don’t want to be paged at 3 a.m.
And what economists avoid because it hurts their feelings.
Narrative Self Café V8: The Upside of Idiocy
Posted: January 7, 2026 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: models, purpose, truth 1 CommentSequel to Narrative Self Café V7: Grieving the Silicon Rule
Write an ironic skit where Daniel Kahneman & Amos Tversky define and exemplify Idiocy-Driven Discovery.
ChatGPT Prompt
1. Dramatis Personae
- Daniel Kahneman — careful, hesitant, allergic to certainty
- Amos Tversky — sharp, amused, dangerously confident
2. Scene
A seminar room. Two chairs. A whiteboard that already says:
WE ARE PROBABLY WRONG
3. The Dialogue
Kahneman
I still don’t think we should be giving this talk.
Tversky
Of course not. That’s why it’s important.
Kahneman
The title alone is irresponsible.
Resomodernity Café v12: From Yamnaya to Yishuv (World-Changing Withness)
Posted: January 7, 2026 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: civilization, culture, psychology, values Leave a commentSequel to Resomodernity Café v11: Vibing the Paradox Stack
Write the wry skit where Pierre Bourdieu interviews David Ben-Gurion and David W. Anthony about our earliest and most recent examples of durable Withness, to identify the common threads.
ChatGPT Prompt
Cast
- Pierre Bourdieu — sociologist of habitus and symbolic power
- David Ben-Gurion — leader of the Yishuv and architect of Israeli statehood
- David W. Anthony — scholar of the Yamnaya culture and author of The Horse, the Wheel, and Language
1. Pierre Begins (Without Knowing Why)
Bourdieu:
I keep noticing something that shouldn’t work — and yet it does.
Pause.
Small groups, no central authority, no real enforcement apparatus… and suddenly the world changes. Languages spread. States appear. Entire continents reorganize.
He shrugs.
Why did that work?
Ben-Gurion:
Because there was no alternative.
Homo Abidus: Music Beneath Measure
Posted: January 6, 2026 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: history, humanity, technology, values Leave a commentSequel to Homo Abidus — The Harbingers of Modernity’s End
The first one learned to hold.
He did not know himself as human, only as warm and breathing and alive in a world that resisted him.
Stone cut skin. Bone splintered.
But one day the stone cut something else instead, and the pain moved outward.
That was enough.
Read the rest of this entry »Weil on the So-Called Anti-Society of Seers
Posted: January 6, 2026 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: activism, empathy, love, philosophy, purpose, religion, values Leave a commentSequel to The Grey Mesh: A Secret Society of Kingmakers
Write a posthumous notebook by Simone Weil where she reluctantly admits and grudgingly accepts the existence of an “anti-society of seers” who claim inspiration from her.
ChatGPT Prompt
I. A Reluctant Acknowledgment
I am told—told, not asked—that there are people who say they have learned something from me.
This troubles me.
Not because I deny that truth can be shared, but because it is almost never shared without being used, and whatever is used is already being prepared for violence.
Still, I must be honest.
I have seen the same look in more than one pair of eyes.
It would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.
Read the rest of this entry »Non-Narrative Café v18=v9 × 2: Retconning Hertz More
Posted: January 5, 2026 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: identity, philosophy, systems Leave a commentSequel to Non-Narrative Café v17A: Go Figure (Carbon Rule Reboot)
A painful reconfiguration of Non-Narrative Café v9: Configuration Space Hertz
Write the skit as a self-aware recurrence (self-referentially!) of v9 as an explicit sequel to the 17A reboot, speed-running through everything before Thirdness.
ChatGPT Prompt
Dramatis Personae
- Heinrich Hertz — the candidate
(geometry before force; visibly wincing) - Karl Friston — advisor
(Free Energy Principle; surprise must remain intact) - Henri Poincaré — chair
(topology, qualitative dynamics) - W. Ross Ashby — examiner
(cybernetics, state space) - Gilles Deleuze — provocateur
(difference and repetition)
Opening Condition
A blackboard. Already half-erased.
Poincaré (chair):
This is v9 again.
But not as before.
No laws.
No trajectories.
No assumptions.
Describe what you notice.
Nothing else.
Beat 1 — Hertz Notices Himself
Hertz (candidate):
Under the Carbon Rule, scalable systems display fragments of proto-narrative; antenarrative, if you will.
This allows us to discern figures…
(He pauses.)
I have said this before.
And I said too much.
This time, I will say less.
Read the rest of this entry »Non-Narrative Café v17A: Go Figure (Carbon Rule Reboot)
Posted: January 4, 2026 Filed under: Centroids | Tags: ideas, philosophy, systems 3 CommentsVersion 1.1 2026-01-04
Sequel 2 to v16: Whitehead’s Reachability
Obsoletes v14: OLD Carbon Rule Formalism
Invalidates v17: Noticing Causality
Where I literally ignore causality to actually rewrite everything by hand
(with help from Claude)
Ernest Prabhakar
Let’s start over.
Preamble: The Carbon Rule
– Systems just are — they do not begin in our descriptions of them
- The most generative systems scale — the only systems that matter are those that survive long enough to be noticed
- What can survive? — what persists under constraint, as opposed to what can be said or calculated
- Earn, don’t assume — concepts from meaning, mathematics, and narrative must prove they can survive before they are used
Part I: Firstness (Systemic Noticing)
1. Systems
We are looking at something
Anything
Let’s call it a system
Radical Centrism 