Resomodernity Café v13: The Semaxis Society
Posted: January 24, 2026 Filed under: Centroids | Tags: existentialism, markets, meaning, modernity, philosophy, systems, values 2 CommentsHow Existentially Embodied Experiences Make Meaning
Sequel to Resomodernity Café v12: From Yamnaya to Yishuv: World-Changing Withness
Write a self-similar campy skit where Hannah Arendt corrals divergent thinkers to found the Semaxis Society as a way to counter modernity’s meaning metacrisis.
ChatGPT Prompt
The Scene: A dimly lit café in 1950s New York. Hannah Arendt sits at a round table, cigarette in hand, surrounded by an eclectic group of intellectuals.
HANNAH ARENDT: Welcome, my friends, to what I’m calling the first meeting of the Semaxis Society. We gather because modernity has fractured meaning itself—we live in a crisis of existential proportions.
MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY: (adjusting his beret) Ah yes, but Hannah, meaning is not fractured—it is embodied! We cannot think our way out of this crisis. We must feel our way through it, perceive it with our whole being.
MARTIN HEIDEGGER: (brooding in the corner) You speak of embodiment, Maurice, but you miss the essential point. We are thrown into a world where Being itself has been forgotten. Technology has reduced everything to standing-reserve.
ARENDT: (waving her cigarette) Martin, must you always be so gloomy? Yes, yes, we’ve lost our connection to Being. But that’s precisely why we need the Semaxis—a semantic axis around which meaning can revolve, grounded in lived experience.
Read the rest of this entry »Non-Narrative Café v8: Recurrence + Violation = Surprise
Posted: December 28, 2025 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: meaning, systems 7 CommentsWrite the Stoppardian skit where Friston (with Peirce as advisor) defends that thesis to Prigogine, Shannon & Deacon
ChatGPT Prompt
Dramatis Personae
- Karl Friston — the candidate (Free Energy Principle, surprise minimization)
- Charles Sanders Peirce — advisor (semiotics, index before symbol)
- Ilya Prigogine — chair (irreversibility, dissipative structures)
- Claude Shannon — external examiner (information theory, bit, entropy)
- Terrence Deacon — systems & absence (constraint, emergence, absence)
1. The Café
A café with no visible clock. Coffee cools, but never quite finishes cooling. A blackboard reads: “NO NARRATIVE BEFORE THEIR TIME.”
PRIGOGINE
Time, gentlemen, is irreversible. Let us begin.
FRISTON
Thank you. My thesis is simple.
(A pause long enough to become suspicious.)
FRISTON
Recurrence + Violation = Surprise.
(Silence.)
SHANNON
That’s not a theorem. That’s a slogan.
Non-Narrative Café v7: Indexing Meaning
Posted: December 28, 2025 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: identity, meaning, philosophy, systems 3 CommentsWrite as a Stoppardian sequel skit where Pierce derives and defends recurrence as primitive semiotics to Kant, Hume and Wittgenstein.
ChatGPT Prompt
Dramatis Personae
- Charles Sanders Peirce — Doctoral Candidate, irrepressibly precise
- David M. Boje — Advisor, delighted, dangerous
- Immanuel Kant — Committee Chair, armed with categories
- David Hume — Examiner, smiling nihilist
- Ludwig Wittgenstein — Examiner, hostile to sentences
Scene
A seminar room that cannot decide whether it is empirical or transcendental.
A chalkboard reads:
“Antenarrative, Recurrence, and the Minimal Conditions of Meaning”
Peirce stands at the board. Papers everywhere. Boje reclines, enjoying this far too much.
Kant (Chair, sternly)
Herr Peirce.
Before we proceed, I must ask the necessary question.
Is your recurrence empirical…
or is it transcendental?
Peirce (brightly)
Yes.
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Radical Centrism 