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.
Resamodernity Café v2: Blueprints for Scaling Resonance
Posted: November 22, 2025 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: culture, philosophy, politics, systems 1 CommentWrite the sequel to Resamodernity Café v1: Can It Scale? as a speculative dialogue featuring Mark Satin, Vint Cerf, and Timothy Leary
ChatGPT Prompt
1. Scene: The Emergence Lab
(The Resamodernity Café expands; the glowing table now projects faint holographic nodes like a self-generating network map. Mark Satin enters with a copy of New Age Politics. Vint Cerf wheels in an interface covered in blinking diagnostics. Timothy Leary appears as though stepping through a psychedelic ripple.)
Leary:
We’ve seen the obstacles. Now we get to design the system. How do we scale Resomodernity without short-circuiting the social psyche?
Cerf:
With infrastructure. Stable, interoperable systems. Resonance without architecture is just turbulence.
Satin:
And architecture without culture collapses. Scaling resonance requires values-forming institutions that cultivate nuance, ambiguity, and shared agency.
Narrative Self Café V2: The Paradox of Patriarchy
Posted: November 20, 2025 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: culture, politics, psychology, society, values 3 CommentsSequel to Narrative Self Café: Men Explaining Mansplaining
ChatGPT Prompt
For a sequel, find one man brave enough to engage with three optimal female thinkers about “the paradox of patriarchy” in the context of narrative selfhood.
Characters
Key Concepts:
Scene: “The Café That Thinks”
A quiet room lined with books. The same café as before—Paris and
Oxford folded into one. A chalkboard reads:
“The Paradox of Patriarchy: A conversation about identity, survival, and the stories we become.”
Scene 1 — Opening the Question
McGilchrist:
Thank you for coming. Our topic is the idea that what we call patriarchy
may be less a conspiracy than a self-protective architecture—a
collective version of the narrative self defending coherence under
duress. Let me start with the survival question: Why do societies become rigid?
Douglas:
Because every society must draw boundaries. My work on purity and
danger shows that taboo systems act as the immune system of the social
body. Patriarchy is one such boundary structure, forged under the
pressures of threat. It organizes roles, risks, and responsibilities.
Haraway:
And boundaries become prisons when they forget they are stories.
Patriarchy fossilizes not because it begins badly, but because it
refuses multi-species, multi-perspective relationality. It insists on a
single narrative of order—one sex, one epistemology, one script.
Weil:
In times of fear, societies cling to force. And force, I have argued, behaves like gravity: it pulls everything downward into necessity.
Patriarchy is the triumph of necessity without compassion—a defense of
the social self that threatens the personal soul.
Narrative Self Café: Men Explaining Mansplaining
Posted: November 20, 2025 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: identity, psychology, self, self-determination 2 CommentsHow Compensatory Verbosity Protects the Narrative Self
Write a skit where three expert men explain mansplaining as a form of left-brain self-protection.
ChatGPT Prompt (condensed)
Skit
Characters
Setting
A café that exists simultaneously in Paris and inside a cognitive neuroscience conference in Boston.
Scene 1: The Opening
Dennett: Gentlemen, I submit that mansplaining is a bug in the
narrative self’s operating system. Emotional ambiguity launches
ExplainEverything.exe.
Ricoeur: Or perhaps the bug appears when narrative becomes narcissistic. Monologue replaces dialogue; coherence replaces what I
call hermeneutical hospitality.
Gallagher: It starts in the body. Stress rises, breath tightens, and the left hemisphere grabs the mic. Fight, flight, or explain.
Read the rest of this entry »Resamodernity Café v1: Can It Scale?
Posted: November 12, 2025 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: dialogue, identity, modernity, resilience, self, systems, values 1 CommentSequel to Metamodern Epilogue
Write a speculative dialogue where Yuval Noah Harari, Stephen Hawking, and Ayn Rand attempt to sympathetically but honestly converge on the fundamental challenge with scaling resomodernity.
ChatGPT Prompt
Scene 1: The Table of Tuning
(Soft hums fill the air, as though the café itself is alive. A round glass table glows faintly. Three chairs face one another. Harari enters first, tablet in hand. Hawking’s voice synthesizer crackles softly from his iconic chair. Rand stands upright, intense, composed, eyes sharp.)
Harari (smiling gently):
We’ve gathered to discuss scaling Resomodernity — the idea that society must move from individual oscillation to collective coherence. But scaling harmony sounds suspiciously like scaling empathy, and history isn’t great at that.
Hawking (dryly, voice calm but with wry bite):
Scaling anything that involves consciousness usually fails the way thermodynamics says it should — increasing entropy. The larger the system, the noisier the signal.
Rand (arching an eyebrow):
And yet you both assume the signal is collective. My concern is that “Resomodernity,” in its hunger for coherence, risks flattening the sovereign individual. You can’t harmonize free will without turning it into a chorus of consent.
Metamodern Epilogue: Resomodernity (ChatGPT as Seth Godin)
Posted: November 10, 2025 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: culture, modernity, relationships, values 1 CommentSequel to Metamodern Self Cafe v2:
A spoken-word manifesto for the age of resonance
1. The Opening: Marketing the Future
Seth Godin (measured, confident, conversational):
We’ve spent the last hundred years trying to name our moment.
Modern. Postmodern. Metamodern.
Every one of those was an attempt to sell a story about how humans make meaning.
And every time, the story ran out of gas — or attention.
Because the truth is, people don’t live in isms.
They live in vibrations.
And that’s why I’m here to pitch you something new.
Resomodernity.
The age of resonance.
Read the rest of this entry »Metamodern Self Cafe v2: Quantum–Integral Epistemology as Partially Examined Life
Posted: November 10, 2025 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: consciousness, philosophy, relationships Leave a commentSequel to The Metamodern Self Café
Have Tom Stoppard host Carlo Rovelli, Iain McGilchrist, and Douglas Hofstadter on a special episode of the Partially Examinded Life podcast to explore and explain QIE.
ChatGPT Prompt
Guest Host: Tom Stoppard
Guests: Carlo Rovelli, Iain McGilchrist, Douglas Hofstadter
1. Cold Open
Theme music fades. The sound of clinking teacups. A brief rustle of paper scripts.
Stoppard (dry, amused):
Welcome to The Partially Examined Life. Tonight, an experiment in epistemic theater — or perhaps a theatrical experiment in epistemology.
We are gathered to discuss something called Quantum–Integral Epistemology, or QIE — which, as far as I can tell, is either the most ambitious synthesis since Hegel, or the best pub name never used.
(Polite laughter from the guests.)
My guests are three gentlemen who make the incomprehensible sound lyrical: physicist Carlo Rovelli, neurophilosopher Iain McGilchrist, and cognitive cartographer Douglas Hofstadter.
Together, they will attempt — God help us all — to make the Quantum–Integral Café comprehensible to mere mortals.
The Metamodern Self Café
Posted: November 10, 2025 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: dialogue, identity, reconciliation, self, truth 1 CommentSequel to “The Modern Self Café v4”
Write a skit where Penrose hosts a meeting with diverse metamoderns to see if anyone is willing to buy what he’s selling (quantum consciousness) — and help him complete it (as a formal human epistemology).
ChatGPT Prompt
1. Setting
A cozy but strangely curved café at the intersection of Oxford, Paris, and Nowhere.
The tables form a Möbius strip.
Menus list beverages such as Superposed Espresso and Flat White Collapse.
A sign over the door reads:
“The Metamodern Self Café — We oscillate between irony and sincerity until coherence emerges.”
2. Cast
- Roger Penrose — genial, professorial, slightly disheveled; still convinced consciousness hides in microtubules.
- Ken Wilber — integral philosopher; speaks in holarchies and color-coded worldviews.
- Nicolas Bourriaud — art theorist; originator of Relational Aesthetics and Cosmodernism; wears a scarf that somehow connects everyone.
- Karen Barad — quantum feminist philosopher; her sentences diffract into smaller sentences.
- Basarab Nicolescu — transdisciplinary physicist-mystic; switches between French and Romanian mid-idea.
- Alastair Noble and Nicoline van Harskamp — cofounders of Symmodernism; they finish each other’s metaphors.
- Waiter — a self-aware AI who insists it’s “just running on probabilistic wavefunctions, not feelings, thank you.”
3. The Scene
Penrose stands at the head of the Möbius table, gesturing to a holographic brain diagram shimmering between neuron and nebula.
Penrose:
Ladies and gentlemen—and whatever else consciousness may be—thank you for coming. I’m still trying to finish what I started. You see, I believe consciousness is objective reduction. Collapse. A genuine, non-computable event. I need… collaborators. Investors, intellectually speaking.
He presses a button. The hologram flickers: neurons become Planck-scale twirls.
Penrose (softly):
We are the universe’s way of deciding itself.
Radical Centrism 