Non-Narrative Café v8: Recurrence + Violation = Surprise
Posted: December 28, 2025 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: meaning, systems Leave a commentWrite 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 Leave a commentWrite 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 