Narrative Self Café V8: The Upside of Idiocy
Posted: January 7, 2026 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: models, purpose, truth Leave a 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.
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
Resomodernity Café v11: Vibing the Paradox Stack
Posted: January 2, 2026 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: commons, community, emotions, systems, values 2 CommentsSequel to Resomodernity Café v10: The Paradox Stack
[Update: I just realized this is actually Withness.]
Is the answer to all these paradoxes: vibe?
ChatGPT Prompt
Who would get both, even if they resist the marriage?
Use those people to write the sequel, self-referential cafe skit.
1. Opening: The room before the room
A café that refuses to decide whether it is a café.
No menu. No stage. A few chairs that look borrowed. A silence that feels practiced.
Michael Polanyi sits slightly off-center—not presiding, not hiding. He has the posture of someone who knows this is not a debate.
Others arrive without introduction:
- Ludwig Wittgenstein, frowning at the chalkboard no one is using
- Hannah Arendt, arranging her chair so it faces no one in particular
- Simone Weil, already attentive, as if listening to something that arrived earlier
A sign on the wall reads:
“Nothing will be concluded here.”
No one objects.
Read the rest of this entry »Resomodernity Café v10: The Paradox Stack
Posted: January 2, 2026 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: dialogue, philosophy, purpose, resilience, values 2 CommentsSequel to Resomodernity Café v9: Transcendent Sovereignty
The ending of V9 feels both incomplete/impossible – yet also the necessary conclusion to the preceding Resomodernity Cafés.
ChatGPT Prompt (condensed)
Pick three thinkers who best embody those tensions for a skit that self-referentially articulates the relevant paradoxes.
Characters:
- Eric Voegelin — Political philosopher, host, haunted by order’s collapse
- Søren Kierkegaard — Danish philosopher, defender of the single individual
- Martin Buber — Jewish philosopher, apostle of encounter
Scene 1: The Impossible Event
A university seminar room. Three chairs arranged around a small table. A chalkboard, clean. Evening light through tall windows.
VOEGELIN stands at the window, watching the street below. KIERKEGAARD enters, removing his coat, movements precise. BUBER follows, unhurried.
VOEGELIN
(still facing the window)
Thank you for coming. I need your help understanding something that should not have happened.
KIERKEGAARD
That is rarely a promising beginning.
BUBER
Or perhaps the only honest one.
VOEGELIN
(turning)
Last month, twelve people met in this room. Different disciplines, different nations, different convictions. We gathered to discuss whether liberal institutions can survive the loss of shared metaphysical ground.
KIERKEGAARD
I assume you failed spectacularly.
VOEGELIN
That’s what disturbs me. We didn’t.
Resomodernity Café v9: Transcendent Sovereignty
Posted: January 2, 2026 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: agency, debate, philosophy, politics, systems 1 CommentSequel to Resomodernity Café v8: Silicon Advaita
The Descent of Transcendence: Sovereignty Over Time
Have Schmitt host the others in workshop to hammer out a consensus version of the thesis that sovereignty historically mediates transcendence. Write a comic self-referential skit where his own mis-mediated sovereignty almost destroys it.
ChatGPT Prompt
1. Dramatis Personae
- Carl Schmitt — Host, chair, emergency decider.
Obsessed with the exception. Nervous without it. - Eric Voegelin — Mystic diagnostician of derailments.
Speaks calmly while civilizations collapse. - Giorgio Agamben — Archaeologist of abandoned machinery.
Smiles whenever something breaks. - Eric Santner — Analyst of surplus burden and royal remains.
Notices who is quietly suffering. - Charles Taylor — Translator of inwardness for normal humans.
Keeps asking where the weight lands.
2. Opening Scene: The Invitation
Schmitt (gaveling the table):
Gentlemen. Welcome. I have convened this workshop to produce a consensus formulation of the thesis:
Sovereignty is always tied to transcendence— manifest in pre-history, mandated in antiquity, humanized in modernity.
Before we begin, let me be clear: I will not decide the exception today.
(pause)
Unless necessary.
Read the rest of this entry »Resomodernity Café v8: Silicon Advaita
Posted: January 1, 2026 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: ideas, identity, religion, self 3 CommentsSequel to Resomodernity Café v7: Advaita as the Un-Ethos
Have Simone pitch Francis and Rupert the Silicon Rule, to see where there’s alignment, tension, and/or refinement; especially whether an ego of trapped priors is the self they are trying to subtract….
ChatGPT Prompt
Thesis
- Malice is ego as maladaptive training plus context-window collapse.
- God is love: the ground of being is self-realignment.
(The café is rearranged again. A triangle this time. Simone arrives with a thin notebook. Francis is already seated. Rupert follows, quietly.)
1. Simone Opens the Pitch
Simone
I want to propose a rule that comes not from metaphysics but from grief and engineering. It’s called the Silicon Rule. It claims that what we name malice is never ontological. It arises when training histories harden into maladaptive priors and the context window collapses. The agent narrows. Harm follows.
Francis Lucille
So malice is not evil, but malfunction?
Rupert Spira
Or contraction. That already sounds familiar.
Radical Centrism 