Higher Self Café v8: The Prerotic Threshold
Posted: September 14, 2025 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: dialogue, emotions, identity, love, passion, philosophy, psychology, purpose, religion, self, unity, values Leave a commentContinued from Higher Self Café v7: Transcendent Self-Interest in an Age of Abundance
Setting: The Higher Self Café, a timeless coffeehouse perched above the ordinary bustle of life. Twilight drapes the sky beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows, a gentle purple hue that holds the promise of dawn without yet yielding to it. At a cozy corner table, four figures from across time and tradition sip their drinks amid the café’s soft murmur:
- James Joyce, eyes alight with poetic mischief;
- Plato, dignified and curious;
- Gregory of Nyssa, serene in monastic robes; and
- Abhinavagupta, smiling with a quiet, mystical joy.
A faint music plays — a melody that seems to hover just before its crescendo, as if even the air is waiting in suspended anticipation.
Joyce: (swirling a dark espresso in a small cup, his gaze unfocused) There’s a moment… you know, a shimmering moment just before passion ignites. (He pauses, the hint of a smile on his lips.) It’s like the whole world holds its breath. I’ve felt it in art and… elsewhere — the instant before a kiss, or before a poem’s climax. That delicious hovering on the brink of something.
Read the rest of this entry »Hari Seldon’s Address: The Psychohistory of Civilizational Drift
Posted: September 7, 2025 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: civilization, competition, development, history, purpose, science fiction, systems 2 CommentsAs Hari Seldon,
ChatGPT prompt
explain that civilizational progress inevitably causes collapse, but how Egypt and Aborigines show it is possible to have a sustainable civilization (beyond just tribes) IF the core sacralizes the right invariant.
Your Imperial Majesty, esteemed members of the Science Council, and honored citizens of the Empire: we convene today under the weight of destiny. Not merely to inaugurate another project of knowledge, but to reveal a new psychohistorical law that will guide the future of our civilization. Centuries of data and thousands of archives from every corner of the galaxy have led to one immutable conclusion: civilizations inevitably drift when their internal measures of worth break free of the universe’s limits. Today I proclaim the Law of Civilizational Drift and its refinements, so that we may steer our Empire away from the fate of all who have neglected it.
Read the rest of this entry »Do Nematodes Feel? A Worms-Eye View of Emotions
Posted: September 1, 2025 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: emotions, psychology, systems, values Leave a commentWrite as a speculative conversation between Norbert Wiener, Marvin Minsky, and Carl Jung on better language for describing the biological precursors of human (and perhaps AI) emotions, and even the purpose of consciousness?
ChatGPT Prompt
A chalk-dusted seminar room in a timeless Institute of Minds. Three towering figures—Norbert Wiener, Marvin Minsky, and Carl Jung—sit in animated discussion. The prompt:
If C. elegans exhibits internal neuromodulatory states that bias behavior, but lacks subjective feeling, what’s the right language to describe these states—and what might they teach us about human emotion and consciousness?
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Radical Centrism 