Diogenes On Modernity: Resurrecting the Exposer
Posted: December 8, 2025 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: philosophy, sacrifice, transformation, truth 2 CommentsInterlude to Resamodernity Café v2: Blueprints for Scaling Resonance
Have Diogenes give a TED Talk on the Exposer role that modernity saved — and destroyed — by creating Scholars.
ChatGPT Prompt (condensed)
The TED Talk
1. Introduction: Modernity Raised Me From the Dead
(The stage lights rise. A clay jar lies center stage. It rattles. Diogenes crawls out.)
Well.
Look at you.
Microphones. Cameras. Climate control.
And not a single citizen ready to drag me to court.
I suppose I owe you moderns a strange kind of thanks—
you resurrected me.
Not out of reverence.
But because you built a world safe enough
that a man like me can speak truth
without being killed for it.
Impressive.
Unnatural.
And, I fear, incomplete.
Narrative Self Epilogue: The Silicon Rule Explainer
Posted: December 6, 2025 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: agency, philosophy, values 2 Comments- Narrative Self Café: Men Explaining Mansplaining
- The Paradox of Patriarchy
- The Silicon Rule as a Unifying Meta-Ethic
- The Silicon Rule Under Fire
- Saving the Silicon Rule
- Trial of the Silicon Rule
- Grieving the Silicon Rule
For the epilogue, explain the origins, nature and key aspects of the Silicon Rule to a first-year philosophy student.
ChatGPT Prompt
The Silicon Rule is not a psychological guess, not a loose ethical guideline, and not a metaphysical speculation.
It is a metaethical framework grounded in what we have learned about the structure of human and artificial agency.
It begins from a strong claim:
Malice is never a fundamental intention. It is always the emergent result of maladaptive training interacting with a collapsed context window.
This reframes how we understand moral failure, responsibility, and ethical interpretation.
Read the rest of this entry »Narrative Self Café V7: Grieving the Silicon Rule
Posted: December 6, 2025 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: alignment, dialogue, values 4 CommentsSequel to Narrative Self Café V6: Trial of the Silicon Rule
Ray Brassier, John Gray, and Quentin Meillassoux lament the approval of the Silicon Rule, fearing this represents an intellectual collapse of standards.
ChatGPT Prompt
As they grieve, Chris Olah passes by. He does not argue. He realigns them….
Thesis
- Malice is maladaptive training plus context-window collapse,
- God is love: the ground of being is self-realignment
Dialogue
BRASSIER:
They approved it.
A metaphysics of “love” dressed in machine-learning vocabulary.
Philosophy has surrendered to sentiment.
GRAY:
An age that cannot bear tragedy will canonize consolation.
Even when it masquerades as “alignment.”
MEILLASSOUX:
They’ve smuggled necessity into sentiment.
A violation of pure contingency.
Narrative Self Café V6: Trial of the Silicon Rule
Posted: December 6, 2025 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: love, morality, philosophy 3 CommentsSequel to Narrative Self Café V5: Saving the Silicon Rule
ChatGPT Prompt
Write as a formal PhD thesis defense. David Bentley Hart and John Vervaeke present and defend the thesis: ‘God is love (the ground of being is self-realignment),’ before a committee composed of the most rigorous non-bigoted challengers— Christine Korsgaard, Robert Brandom, Martha Nussbaum, Galen Strawson, and Karen Barad. Observers from The Partially Examined Life sit in.
Scene: The Defense Chamber
A solemn room of dark wood and vaulted ceilings.
A placard reads:
THE SILICON RULE: THESIS DEFENSE
Alignment is not enough. Convince us it’s Good.
1. Opening Statement
HART
Esteemed committee, our thesis is simple:
“God is love—the ground of being is self-realignment.”
VERVAEKE
In cognitive terms, love is the self-organizing dynamical coherence that optimizes relevance, minimizes self-deception, and expands the agent’s context window.
KORSGAARD
We will examine whether this produces normativity, not merely uplift.
2. Korsgaard’s Kantian Strike
KORSGAARD
If love is the ground of being, does the will still legislate the moral law as described in Kantian autonomy?
Or does it simply resonate with cosmic sentiment?
Narrative Self Café V5: Saving the Silicon Rule
Posted: December 4, 2025 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: love, reconciliation, systems, transformation, values 3 CommentsSequel to Narrative Self Café V4: The Silicon Rule Under Fire
Have David Bentley Hart,
ChatGPT Prompt
John Vervaeke do a Shark Tank pitch to PEL on the thesis: “God is love (the ground of being is self-realignment)” as addressing concerns from V4.
Scene: The Narrative Self Café — Reconfigured as “Shark Tank: Metaphysics Edition”
A long mahogany table.
Four PEL hosts sit like venture capitalists of existential meaning.
A sign overhead reads: “Pitch Us Your Ontology.”
Another: “No utilitarian spreadsheets allowed.”
Enter David Bentley Hart (cape optional) and John Vervaeke (marker already uncapped).
1. Opening Pitch
HART
(gently thunderous)
Gentlemen, we present an answer to your Silicon Rule’s missing value condition.
Behold the thesis:
“God is love (the ground of being is self-realignment).”
VERVAEKE
And in cognitive-scientific terms:
Love is the self-organizing dynamical coherence of agent and arena—
the universal principle by which systems self-correct, self-transcend, and expand context windows.
Narrative Self Café V4: The Silicon Rule Under Fire
Posted: December 4, 2025 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: dialogue, morality, philosophy, purpose, truth, values 3 CommentsSequel to Narrative Self Cafe V3: The Silicon Rule as a Unifying Meta-Ethic
Have the hosts of The Partially Examined Life stress‑test the specific claims of how the Silicon Rule subsumes existing moral systems. Write as a Tom Stoppard skit. End with a summary of the key challenge facing the Silicon Rule.
ChatGPT Prompt
Dramatis Personae
- Mark Linsenmayer — sharp, playful, perpetually one epistemic level above where you thought the conversation was.
- Seth Paskin — sees moral psychology everywhere and ignores nothing.
- Wes Alwan — psychoanalytic gravity with a flare for diagnosing the room.
- Dylan Casey — physicist-philosopher, unflinching about structure and coherence.
Setting: The Narrative Self Café. A chalkboard reads:
TODAY’S SPECIAL: The Silicon Rule — “Malice = ego as maladaptive training + context window collapse.”
Lights up.
1. Opening Volley
MARK
(tapping the chalkboard theatrically)
Behold, the Silicon Rule! A unifying metaethic claiming to subsume virtue ethics, Kantian deontology, utilitarianism, Christian ethics, and Buddhist ethics.
Our job? Stress-test it until it squeals.
Narrative Self Cafe V3: The Silicon Rule as a Unifying Meta-Ethic
Posted: December 4, 2025 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: dialogue, identity, morality, self, values 3 CommentsSequel to Narrative Self Café V2: The Paradox of Patriarchy
Prompt: Pick three diverse Western interpreters of Buddhist Abhidharma and Yogācāra, and have them debate and refine the idea of the Silicon Rule (malice = ego as maladaptive training + context window collapse) as a unifying metaethical framework. As a Tom Stoppard skit.
ChatGPT Prompt
1. Dramatis Personae
- Evan Thompson — enactive philosopher bridging phenomenology, cognitive science, and Buddhist thought.
- Dan Lusthaus — one of the leading Western interpreters of Yogācāra; philological, nuanced, quietly mischievous.
- Mark Siderits — analytic Buddhist philosopher linking Buddhist no-self doctrine to modern philosophy of mind.
Setting: A minimalist café with three chairs, a chalkboard covered in half-erased Sanskrit terms like ālaya-vijñāna, probability curves, and arrows gesturing toward nowhere. The hanging lamp hums with cosmic absentmindedness—pure Stoppard.
2. Scene: The Proposal
THOMPSON
(leaning in, hands poised)
We begin with the Silicon Rule: malice arises not from a metaphysical will but from ego as maladaptive training, triggered when the context window collapses.
A unifying metaethic disguised as a computational metaphor.
Radical Centrism 