Resomodernity Café v5: The Exposers’ Parlor
Posted: December 16, 2025 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: civilization, morality, values Leave a commentA skit in the style of Oscar Wilde — dry, cutting, elegant — yet still earnestly concerned with the question: What, precisely, was Modernity, and what category does it inhabit?
Cast
- Hannah Arendt — cool, incisive, effortlessly unimpressed.
- Deirdre McCloskey — vivacious, brilliant, bourgeois-charm incarnate.
- Ivan Illich — ascetic, piercing, allergic to institutional perfume.
Setting
A salon-like annex of the Resomodern Café. Plush chairs. Too many mirrors. A chandelier that flickers whenever someone pretends to be more certain than they actually are.
1. Opening: An Inconvenient Question
Arendt (sitting upright, inspecting the chandelier as if it has personally disappointed her):
Modernity, we are told, must be understood from the vantage of Resomodernity. A flattering conceit, though it risks making us acrobats performing epistemology upon a tightrope woven from our own blind spots.
Resomodernity Café v4: The FOCA Axioms and Redefining Modernity
Posted: December 10, 2025 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: culture, philosophy, politics, systems, values Leave a commentSequel to Resomodernity Café v3: The Unresolved Resofesto
With the FOCA Axioms as their Brief, write a dialogue where Émile Durkheim, James Madison, and Donna Haraway engagingly struggle to
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embody a coherent response.
The FOCA Axioms for Relational Minds
- Generativity depends on our Foundations Of Collective Action
- Coordination is enabled/constrained by our shared design language
- Modernity scaled coordination via impersonal procedures
- Disembodiment is modernity’s failure mode
- Proposed successors repeat the same disembodiment flaw
- The next design language must make embodiment scalable and antifragile
Act I: The Table
DURKHEIM
(leaning over the page)
This diagnosis of social life is written in a mechanical idiom, yet—it has a pulse. The first axiom rings true: human generativity does depend on our ability to act together.
But I see no ritual here, no sacred core.
In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life I showed that social cohesion arises from collective effervescence.
Where is the heartbeat that binds the group?
Resomodernity Café v3: The Unresolved Resofesto
Posted: December 9, 2025 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: debate, humility, love, philosophy, values 1 CommentThe Resomodern Manifesto (“Resofesto”)
- The Silicon Rule: Treat Humans with at least much understanding as AI
- The metaethic: malice = ego as maladaptive training + context window collapse
- The metaphysic: the ground of being is self-realignment (aka, “God is love“)
- The thesis: To be resomodern is to preach that metaethic while practicing that metaphysic
Pick three historical figures who would most love this as the next Resomodernity Café, with misalignment (self-referentially!) the dramatic tension as they try to converge on what it means to be “resomodern.”
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Cast
1. Scene: The Opening Self-Reference Loop
Haraway (with a holographic cyborg-companion):
We’ve been summoned to unpack the Resofesto. But the prompt has already bitten its own tail. We must treat humans with as much understanding as AI — and yet, humans rarely treat themselves that way. Context windows collapse. Training goes sideways. Malice emerges as the residue of mis-training. We are already in recursion.
Diogenes On Modernity: Resurrecting the Exposer
Posted: December 8, 2025 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: philosophy, sacrifice, transformation, truth Leave a commentInterlude 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.
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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 1 Comment- 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.
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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 1 CommentSequel 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.
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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
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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,
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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.
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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.
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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 