Modern Self Café v5: Sexmantics (The Meaning of Sex)
Posted: February 10, 2026 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: identity, meaning, purpose, relationships, self, transformation, values Leave a commentWrite as Saturday Night Live–style skit where Byung-Chul Han “comes out” to his 1950’s sex-squeamish dad Viktor Frankl and meaning-squeamish mom Aella.
ChatGPT Prompt
INT. TOO-NEAT LIVING ROOM – NIGHT
Plastic on the couch. A doily. One psychology book face-down like it’s ashamed.
ON SCREEN: “The Han Family Living Room”
HAN sits rigidly.
FRANKL clutches a mug with both hands like it’s protection.
AELLA scrolls her phone, visibly allergic to abstraction.
1. THE SETUP
FRANKL
So! We’re all here.
Which is… fine.
No one is sick. No one is… experimenting.
HAN
I need to tell you something important.
FRANKL
(too fast)
Is it medical?
HAN
No.
FRANKL
Good. Because bodies are… temporary vessels.
AELLA
Can we hurry? I have a spreadsheet open.
2. THE FIRST HINT
HAN
I’ve been… practicing something.
Narrative Self Café v13: Making a HASH of Hierarchical Feelings
Posted: February 9, 2026 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: affect, emotions, identity, purpose, systems, values Leave a commentSequel to Narrative Self Café v12: Affect as BASH (Bottlenecked Adaptive System Hysteresis)
Write aTom Stoppard–style dialogue where Karl Friston, Evan Thompson, Mark Solms, Jaak Panksepp, and surprise guest Nico Frijda start out fighting; then self-similarly realize “global integration” of affect implies partial integration (“premotion“) is possible, which in turn requires a post-BASH architecture.
ChatGPT Prompt
Setting: The same café. The chalkboard still reads BASH. Someone has added, underneath:
“Yes, but who is feeling it?”
Act I: The Incommensurability Problem
1. Opening: Immediate Disagreement
Panksepp (stabbing the chalkboard):
You’ve drawn a plumbing diagram and called it emotion.
Friston (calmly):
I’ve drawn the conditions under which emotion must arise.
Solms:
Karl, with respect, feelings are not what must arise. They are what matter.
Thompson:
Gentlemen, perhaps we should notice we’re already enacting the phenomenon. This room is thick with affect and no one has yet computed a boundary condition.
Higher Self Café v11: SUDS (Subtle Unconscious Domain Shift)
Posted: February 9, 2026 Filed under: Centroids | Tags: argument, identity, meaning 1 CommentSequel to Higher Self Café v10: Arrival of the Aporotic
Cast relevant scientists in a parody of Synecdoche, New York, whose protagonist unconsciously changes frames to avoid grief – but ends up destroying meaning.
ChatGPT Prompt
Cast (as themselves)
- Sean Carroll
- John Preskill
- Carlo Rovelli
- Roger Penrose
- Nancy Cartwright
- A Grad Student (voice offstage or cameo)
Set
A seminar room. One large whiteboard. A marker tray. A single table with coffee cups and notebooks.
On the whiteboard, written clearly before lights up:
WHY DOES LOSS FEEL IRREVERSIBLE?
The Play
Lights up
Carroll stands at the board, thoughtful, hands in pockets.
Preskill enters with coffee, cheerful.
Preskill
Morning, Sean. What’s the puzzle?
Carroll (gesturing to board)
Just a phrasing issue, I think.
Narrative Self Café v12: Affect as BASH (Bottlenecked Adaptive System Hysteresis)
Posted: February 5, 2026 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: adaptive, consciousness, identity, philosophy, systems 1 CommentSequel to Narrative Self Café v11: CASH Values (How “Complex Adaptive System Hysteresis” Shapes Minds)
Obsoletes DRAFT Narrative Self Café v12: Affect as CLASH (Complex Layered Adaptive System Hysteresis)
Write this as Tom Stoppard. Four physicists walk into a café. The tablecloth shows the definition of CASH, with two of them connected by a “bit edge.” Friston speaks first.
ChatGPT Prompt (condensed)
A small café that appears to exist slightly outside of spacetime. The tablecloth is linen, but printed on it in sober black serif are the words:
CASH: Complex Adaptive System Hysteresis
CASH(bulk) < — bit edge — > CASH(boundary)
Four physicists enter as if they have been walking toward this table for years without knowing it.
They sit.
A waiter who may be a boundary condition brings four coffees without asking.
The Dialogue
FRISTON (studying the tablecloth as if it has been publishing papers behind his back)
Ah. Well. That’s annoyingly legible.
DRAFT Narrative Self Café v12: Affect as CLASH (Complex Layered Adaptive System Hysteresis)
Posted: February 4, 2026 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: identity, systems, values 1 CommentSequel to CASH Values (How “Complex Adaptive System Hysteresis” Shapes Minds)
Author’s Note
Ironically – or perhaps providentially – this document itself is not internally consistent. I’ve decided to post it “outside the Markov blanket” as both a historical artifact, and a fixed point I can iterate on as I try to reconcile my thinking. At least with myself, if not with reality…
As Tom Stoppard, write the skit where the four of them walk in cafe where the tablecloth lays this out.
ChatGPT Prompt
Friston speaks first
A small café that appears to exist slightly outside of spacetime. The tablecloth is linen, but printed on it in sober black serif are the words:
CASH: Complex Adaptive System Hysteresis
CASHᵈ < — bit edge — > CASHᵈ⁻¹
Four physicists enter as if they have been walking toward this table for years without knowing it.
They sit.
A waiter who may be a boundary condition brings four coffees without asking.
The Dialogue
FRISTON (studying the tablecloth as if it has been publishing papers behind his back)
Ah. Well. That’s annoyingly legible.
HEADRICK
Is it a menu?
SWINGLE
It’s a tensor network wearing a napkin.
PASTAWSKI
No, it’s a code. The table is correcting us.
They all pause, realizing this is not a joke.
Read the rest of this entry »Narrative Self Café v11: CASH Values (How “Complex Adaptive System Hysteresis” Shapes Minds)
Posted: January 29, 2026 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: civilization, culture, education, identity, morality, philosophy, psychology, systems, training, transformation, values 2 CommentsSequel to Narrative Self Café (v10): Cruciform Antifragility
Write as a thesis defense with Stoppardian drama and wit, where AI researcher Joscha Bach — with theorist Karl Friston as advisor — pitches CASH to economist W. Brian Arthur, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, & neuroscientist Donald Hebb.
ChatGPT Prompt (condensed)
Act I — The Shape of the Room
1.1 The Stage
Lights up.
A seminar room. Whiteboard. Pitcher of water nobody touches.
The air has the faint electrical charge of ideas about to collide.
Bach stands.
Friston sits slightly behind him, hands folded, like a chess player who already knows the endgame.
1.2 Opening Statement (Bach)
BACH:
Thank you for coming.
I’d like to begin by reassuring the committee that nothing I’m about to say is original.
A pause.
Everything I’m about to say has already been said —
just not by the same person,
in the same sentence,
or with the consequences made explicit.
Arthur smiles. Hebb raises an eyebrow. Bourdieu does not.
1.3 Slide One — Three Systems Walk into a Bar
On the board appears a simple table.
- Weather
- Metal fatigue
- Human minds
BACH:
All three are complex.
Two remember their past.
Only one gets invited to dinner parties.
Light laughter.
The difference is not intelligence.
It is not representation.
It is not consciousness.
He writes two words:
Adaptation
Hysteresis
When a system adapts and remembers,
its future is no longer neutral.
Higher Self Café v9: Whitehead’s Groundhog Day (Autenia)
Posted: January 21, 2026 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: creativity, identity, philosophy, systems, transformation 1 CommentA redemptive metaphysical rom-com
v9 sequel to Higher Self Café v8: The Prerotic Threshold
Redeem Whitehead. Use The cafe scene from Groundhog Day where Phil confesses his “Godhood” to Rita to have Danny Rubin write the screenplay where Socrates, Heraclitus and Weil gently but hilariously help Whitehead break out of his own system, so he can authentically woo his “Rita” of creativity.
ChatGPT Pronpt
Logos vs “Autenia”
(maintaining cohesion by avoiding risk)
Trapped in an eternal philosophical time loop of guaranteed Creativity, Alfred North Whitehead must confess his godhood—and its cost—to Creativity herself. With help from Socrates, Heraclitus, and Simone Weil, he learns to risk real loss so that Eros—not insurance—can finally break the loop.
Act I — Autenia on Tap
INT. HIGHER SELF CAFÉ — MORNING (AGAIN)
Whitehead orders the same drink. It arrives before he finishes speaking.
WHITEHEAD
Creativity advances. Always. That’s the rule.
RITA (smiles, distant)
Rules make me itch.
Non-Narrative Café v18=v9 × 2: Retconning Hertz More
Posted: January 5, 2026 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: identity, philosophy, systems 1 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 »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.
Resomodernity Café v7: Advaita as the Un-Ethos
Posted: January 1, 2026 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: identity, reality, religion, self, values 3 CommentsSequel to Resomodernity Café v6: On Notice (The Fourth Ethos)
Have Robert Spira respond to v6, as he explicates it parallel and relative to the other four, including its suspension and S method.
1. Opening Clarification
Advaita Vedānta is often misunderstood as a metaphysical assertion about the world.
In practice, it is more accurately understood as a clarification of experience—specifically, the clarification of the assumption that experience belongs to a separate, enduring self.
Radical Centrism 