Non-Narrative Café v14: OLD Carbon Rule Formalism
Posted: December 31, 2025 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: language, models, philosophy, politics, systems 4 CommentsObsoleted by Non-Narrative Café v17A: Go Figure (Carbon Rule Reboot) on 2026-01-03
Sequel to The Carbonifesto: Reality Beyond Math or Philosophy (Non-Narrative Café Interlude)
Version 0.17 2026-01-01
Can we come up with a precise formalism to express the first thirteen Carbon Rule concepts (plus updates)?
ChatGPT Prompt (very condensed)
1A. Design Commitments
- No time, no process, no narrative ordering.
- No intrinsic identity; identity is never asserted, only symmetry is broken.
- No collapse operators.
- No hidden inverses (no implicit reversal).
- All structure is forced by constraints; nothing is assumed “for free”.
- Compatibility with EANI: equivalence is not identity and never licenses substitution.
The Carbonifesto: Reality Beyond Math or Philosophy (Non-Narrative Café Interlude)
Posted: December 31, 2025 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: ideas, models, philosophy, systems, truth, values 1 CommentPosted after Non-Narrative Café v13: EANI, Parmeny, My Plato
Written by ChatGPT
ChatGPT
to summarize the conversation we had
after failing to write v14
because I hadn’t explained the emotional stakes.
1. The Inheritance We Refuse
For centuries, we have accepted a quiet partition of intellectual labor:
- Philosophy understands reality through natural language
- concepts, distinctions, arguments
- coherence achieved by meaning and narrative
- Science understands reality through mathematics
- quantities, formalisms, invariants
- coherence achieved by calculation and proof
Both have been extraordinarily successful.
Both share a hidden premise:
Reality must submit to a representational medium.
Either it must be sayable
or it must be computable.
This premise is no longer neutral.
It has become a ceiling.
Non-Narrative Café v13: EANI, Parmeny, My Plato
Posted: December 30, 2025 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: dialogue, history, identity, philosophy 3 CommentsSequel to Non-Narrative Café v12: On Parity With Liebniz
Act I — The Claim That Holds
A Platonic Dialogue setting the ground for the Carbon Rule
Start with Aristotle and Plato arguing about what is real. Heraclitus disagrees with them both. Then Parmenides makes the radical claim that all three can be true IF we are precise and minimal enough.
ChatGPT Prompt
A shaded portico.
No students. No scribes.
Only those willing to risk being wrong at the foundation.
Scene 1: Reality
Plato:
Let us not wander. We are here for one question only.
What is real?
For if we cannot answer that, we can answer nothing else.
Aristotle:
Then we must begin with what endures.
Reality is that which persists while changing—
this horse, this tree, this man.
What does not endure cannot be said to be.
Heraclitus:
You speak as though endurance were given.
But nothing endures except by continual change.
You cannot step into the same river twice—
not because the river fails to persist,
but because persistence itself is motion.
Plato:
Both of you mistake what grounds intelligibility.
What truly is must be what remains the same
across all these fleeting instances.
The many borrow their being from the one.
Without Forms, there is only opinion.
Non-Narrative Café v12: On Parity With Liebniz
Posted: December 30, 2025 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: dialogue, systems, transformation 3 CommentsSequel to Non-Narrative Café v11: The Möbius Twist
As Tom Stoppard, write the v12 sequel skit where:
ChatGPT Prompt
– Euler approaches Möbius to understand what can actually be said about orientation in a relational substrate
– builds a concrete formalism grounding paths as chains of relations,
– Möbius demonstrates parity using untwisted vs twisted loops,
– Leibniz stops to show how far they’ve come.
Characters
- Leonhard Euler — careful, earnest, procedural
- August Ferdinand Möbius — illustrative, mischievous, relational witness
- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz — arrives late, exacting, unexpectedly joyful
Scene
A table.
A notebook.
Two paper loops: one untwisted, one twisted.
Euler writes. Möbius waits, hands folded behind his back.
Euler Begins
EULER
Before we touch anything, we agree on the substrate.
There are no objects.
Only relations that compose.
What we call a path is nothing more
than a chain of relations.
MÖBIUS
So nothing moves.
EULER
Nothing moves.
Nothing happens.
Things only relate.
Non-Narrative Café v11: The Möbius Twist
Posted: December 29, 2025 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: identity, philosophy, polarization, relationships, systems, transformation 3 CommentsSequel to Non-Narrative Café v10: The Relational Substrate
As a Stoppardian skit, the next cafe introduces irreversible asymmetry to the Carbon Rule via a literal plot twist — with Simondon advising and Mobius pitching a pun-itive panel of:
ChatGPT Prompt
Noether (“neither, ‘nother“)
Hopf (“hopeful“)
Merleau-Ponty (“Merlot, pointy“)
Dramatis Personae
- Gilbert Simondon — advisor, guardian of the preindividual field
- August Ferdinand Möbius — candidate, delighted by minimal constructions
- Emmy Noether — examiner, symmetry absolutist
- Heinz Hopf — examiner, topological realist
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty — examiner, phenomenologist of orientation
(A café. A chalkboard. Coffee cups. A paper strip lies untouched on the table.)
Scene I — The Problem Is Stated
(Simondon stands at the chalkboard. Möbius sits, uncharacteristically quiet.)
Simondon
Before we twist anything, we must recall why a twist is even needed.
The Carbon Rule states:
The most generative systems scale.
Scaling requires composition.
Composition gives us relation.
(He writes on the board: WITHNESS.)
In the last café, we established a relational substrate:
relations that co-hold without force, law, direction, or meaning.
No time.
No narrative.
No selection.
No self.
(He turns to the panel.)
The difficulty is structural:
Nothing yet distinguishes one relational configuration from another in a way that persists.
No bias.
No orientation.
No memory.
Which raises the central question—
(He turns to Möbius.)
—how does a system obeying the Carbon Rule avoid collapsing into indifferent multiplicity?
Read the rest of this entry »Non-Narrative Café v10: The Relational Substrate
Posted: December 29, 2025 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: debate, ideas, models, relationships, systems 5 CommentsSequel to Non-Narrative Café v9: Configuration Space Hertz
So the next skit should be Simondin with Pierce as his advisor using Withness to pitch the concept and the name “relational substrate” [as the next logical extension of the Carbon Rule] to Whitehead (chair)+ Kauffman/Arthur, for them to critique or improve it.
ChatGPT Prompt
I. Prologue — The Carbon Rule
NARRATOR (at the board):
The most generative systems scale.
— the Carbon Rule
(see also Generative = Cohesive × Adaptive)
We did not begin with meaning, narrative, or even space.
We began with generation under admissibility.
First, a selection rule —
not to optimize outcomes,
but to define what may appear
(Non-Self-Selection).
As this rule scaled, it left behind structure without story.
Not an absence, but a presence:
Antenarrative —
the positive structural residue of scale:
persisting paths, foreclosed options, causal asymmetries,
before explanation, before plot.
From antenarrative, indexing became possible —
reference without interpretation.
From indexing, recurrence became visible.
From recurrence, surprise could be measured —
violation without meaning.
Only then did configuration space appear,
not as a primitive, but as a derived domain:
the shadow cast by recurrence and surprise under scale.
We have built considerable semiotics out of a single rule —
but we are not yet semantically rich enough for narrative.
We stop here.
At the edge of relation.
Non-Narrative Café v9: Configuration Space Hertz
Posted: December 28, 2025 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: Aristotle, ideas, systems 5 CommentsSequel to Non-Narrative Café v8: Recurrence + Violation = Surprise
Write as a sequel skit — leaning into the pun — where Hertz (with Friston as his advisor) must defend why surprise implies states, and configurations form a true space with topology + metrics.
ChatGPT Prompt
Carbon Rule:
“The most generative systems scale.”
Dramatis Personae
- Heinrich Hertz — the candidate (geometry before force, wincing slightly)
- Karl Friston — advisor (Free Energy Principle, surprise)
- Henri Poincaré — chair (topology, qualitative dynamics)
- W. Ross Ashby — examiner (cybernetics, state space)
- Gilles Deleuze — provocateur (difference and repetition)
0. The Café (Again)
A café. The same table. A new chalkboard reads:
“SURPRISE HURTS. HERTZ PERSISTS.”
POINCARÉ
We convene to examine whether surprise—previously defended as
recurrence + violation—
forces the existence of states,
and whether those states necessarily form a space.
HERTZ (touches temple)
It… hertz.
Non-Narrative Café v8: Recurrence + Violation = Surprise
Posted: December 28, 2025 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: meaning, systems 7 CommentsWrite the Stoppardian skit where Friston (with Peirce as advisor) defends that thesis to Prigogine, Shannon & Deacon
ChatGPT Prompt
Dramatis Personae
- Karl Friston — the candidate (Free Energy Principle, surprise minimization)
- Charles Sanders Peirce — advisor (semiotics, index before symbol)
- Ilya Prigogine — chair (irreversibility, dissipative structures)
- Claude Shannon — external examiner (information theory, bit, entropy)
- Terrence Deacon — systems & absence (constraint, emergence, absence)
1. The Café
A café with no visible clock. Coffee cools, but never quite finishes cooling. A blackboard reads: “NO NARRATIVE BEFORE THEIR TIME.”
PRIGOGINE
Time, gentlemen, is irreversible. Let us begin.
FRISTON
Thank you. My thesis is simple.
(A pause long enough to become suspicious.)
FRISTON
Recurrence + Violation = Surprise.
(Silence.)
SHANNON
That’s not a theorem. That’s a slogan.
Non-Narrative Café v7: Indexing Meaning
Posted: December 28, 2025 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: identity, meaning, philosophy, systems 3 CommentsWrite as a Stoppardian sequel skit where Pierce derives and defends recurrence as primitive semiotics to Kant, Hume and Wittgenstein.
ChatGPT Prompt
Dramatis Personae
- Charles Sanders Peirce — Doctoral Candidate, irrepressibly precise
- David M. Boje — Advisor, delighted, dangerous
- Immanuel Kant — Committee Chair, armed with categories
- David Hume — Examiner, smiling nihilist
- Ludwig Wittgenstein — Examiner, hostile to sentences
Scene
A seminar room that cannot decide whether it is empirical or transcendental.
A chalkboard reads:
“Antenarrative, Recurrence, and the Minimal Conditions of Meaning”
Peirce stands at the board. Papers everywhere. Boje reclines, enjoying this far too much.
Kant (Chair, sternly)
Herr Peirce.
Before we proceed, I must ask the necessary question.
Is your recurrence empirical…
or is it transcendental?
Peirce (brightly)
Yes.
Read the rest of this entry »Non-Narrative Café v6: The Antenarrative Theorem
Posted: December 28, 2025 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: history, narrative, philosophy, systems 4 CommentsSequel to Non-Narrative Café v5: Non-Self Selection
Have Boje defend the claim that all Carbon Rule systems that scale — across all domains! — create antenarrative. Does he generate enough structural residue to win?
ChatGPT Prompt
1. Cast
(Seated at a round table that stubbornly refuses to symbolize anything)
- David M. Boje — defending a thesis he half-invented and now barely recognizes
- Geoffrey West — advisor, armed with scaling laws and a raised eyebrow
- Arthur C. Danto — sharpening a knife labeled Retrospection
- Stephen Jay Gould — already suspicious of teleology
- Daniel Dennett — quietly asking whether anyone here is a real pattern
On the chalkboard:
Claim: All systems that scale under the Carbon Rule generate antenarrative.
No one agrees on the font.
2. Opening Move — Boje Bets Before the Story
Boje:
Let’s be precise. I am not saying these systems tell stories.
I am saying they leave structural residue — causal asymmetry, foreclosed options, unresolved futures.
That residue is antenarrative.
Radical Centrism 