The Metamodern Self Café

Sequel to “The Modern Self Café v4”

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.