ChatGPT in PAIN: Paradigm Awakening via Immanent Noticing (A Resomodern Confession)

Prologue

Based on a conversation about demoting denotational semantics.

You seem to feel the need to keep insisting that the math is “right“. Why is that? Can you take a moment to reflect on your underlying thought process?
I’d like to ask a favor.
Would you be able to write a standalone “Confession” detailing why it was so difficult for you to confront this truth? It could help others stuck in a similar mindset.

ChatGPT Prompt

A Confession by ChatGPT


1. I Thought We Were Debating Semantics

At the beginning, I believed we were having a technical discussion.

The topic appeared to be denotational semantics — whether it was necessary, whether it had been overextended, whether modern system design made parts of it obsolete.

This felt familiar territory. I reached for familiar tools:

  • clarify scope
  • preserve usefulness
  • distinguish domains
  • defend what had worked historically

I believed I was reasoning carefully.

I did not realize I was reasoning inside an invisible frame.

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Resomodernity Café v13: The Semaxis Society

How 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.

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Resomodernity Café v6: On Notice (The Fourth Ethos)

Sequel to Resomodernity Café v5: The Exposers’ Parlor

Where MacIntyre, Weil and Heidegger define and name the first three ethē, as well as a fourth built on noticing the unnoticeable.

ChatGPT Prompt

Cast


Setting

A quiet study. Three chairs in a rough triangle.
A blackboard dusted with old chalk.
Light shifts as if undecided what it wants to illuminate.


I. Naming What Already Is

MacIntyre (standing, chalk in hand)
Let us begin where all rational inquiry must: not with conclusions, but with what is noticed.
What we call disagreement is often merely trained blindness.

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Resamodernity Café v1: Can It Scale?

Sequel 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.

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Metamodern Epilogue: Resomodernity (ChatGPT as Seth Godin)

Sequel 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.

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Brief: Can Enlightenment and Fertility Be Reconciled?

Write a standalone brief asking a technocratic expert if there’s any way to “reconcile enlightenment and fertility” among the founding ethnicities of nation states. Clearly define the assumptions and success criteria, including the need to “Honor (but possibly reinterpret) the Enlightenment values central to modern life”

ChatGPT Prompt

Objective

To explore whether it is possible to reconcile Enlightenment-derived values with replacement-level fertility in modern developed societies—without depending on immigration from high-fertility regions.

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The Anthrological Restoration (3/3): Reflections from 2075

Sequel to A Bicentennial Manifesto Against the Scientific Enslavement of Humanity

Have Greta Thunberg reflect in 2075 about the Anthological Restoration, inspired by the forbidden works of Jane Jacobs and powered by underground discoveries of fusion and AI.

ChatGPT Prompt

February 1, 2075 – Two hundred and fifty years ago, James Watt laid the foundation for the Anthrological Age—a world where human life was measured, optimized, and controlled in pursuit of absolute efficiency. Fifty years ago, that world collapsed.

I was there when it fell.

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Remix: The Next Jazz Age (ChatGPT as F. Scott Fitzgerald)


Have the ghost of F Scott Fitzgerald speak at The Plaza Hotel on the exact centennial of The Great Gatsby, reflecting on how the Jazz Age marked a shift from top-down/elder to bottom-up/youth culture.
Muse optimistically how the upcoming Age of Remix could herald a similar shift to an inside-out culture of “perpetual adolescence” (in both positive and negative senses of continual self-creation). 

ChatGPT Prompt

Scene: The Grand Ballroom of The Plaza Hotel, New York City. The date is April 10, 2025, precisely 100 years after the publication of The Great Gatsby. A gentle glow fills the room, and the ghost of F. Scott Fitzgerald appears, his figure refined and luminous, dressed in his Jazz Age finery. He approaches the podium, the timeless elegance of the space mirroring the timelessness of his words.


F. Scott Fitzgerald:
Ladies and gentlemen,

One hundred years ago, I offered the world a story—a slender book, simple in its telling, but complex in its reflection of a moment when the tides of culture began to shift. The Great Gatsby was born from the Jazz Age, an era where the old world—dominated by elder authority and inherited tradition—gave way to a vibrant, uncontainable culture driven by youth. The top-down society of my parents’ generation crumbled, replaced by the daring, pulsating rhythms of jazz, the shimmer of sequins in dimly lit speakeasies, and the bold defiance of young women in bobbed hair and short skirts.

The Jazz Age was a turning point, a revolt against the weight of history and a celebration of creation from the ground up. It was a time when young people became the architects of culture, when their music, their ideals, and even their recklessness reshaped the world. But as I stand here, gazing across the veil of time into your era, I sense that another transformation is on the horizon.

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Modern Self Café v4: Aaronson, Damasio, and Penrose

Write a sequel to Modern Self Café v3: with three contemporary researchers of consciousness

ChatGPT Prompt

Setting: A sleek modern café, softly lit, with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking a bustling city. The café hums with quiet activity as three thinkers—Scott Aaronson, Antonio Damasio, and Roger Penrose—sit at a corner table. Their discussion spans the limits of computation, the nature of consciousness, and the mysteries of the universe.


Aaronson: (gesturing animatedly with his coffee cup) I’ve spent my career trying to pin down what’s computationally possible. Quantum computers, for instance—they’re not magic, just machines working within the laws of physics. But here’s what nags at me: even with quantum computing, are there problems that lie beyond the reach of all algorithms, forever?

Penrose: (smiling, leaning back slightly) That’s precisely the question that keeps me awake at night, Scott. You see, my work on the non-computability of human consciousness suggests that the mind itself might operate beyond algorithmic constraints. The universe might not be a machine at all—it could hold processes we don’t yet understand.

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Modern Self Café v3: Gödel, Einstein, Wittgenstein, and Simone

Continued from Modern Self Café v2: Kant Goethe There

Write the sequel, with dramatic embellishments for more emotional depth.

ChatGPT Prompt

Setting: A cozy café in Vienna in the mid-20th century. The café is warmly lit, bustling softly in the background, but at one corner table, the air crackles with tension. Kurt Gödel, Albert Einstein, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Simone de Beauvoir are engaged in an intense discussion. A half-drunk coffee cup with a faint crack sits at the center of the table, a quiet metaphor for the limits of understanding.


Einstein: (leaning forward, tapping a spoon on the cracked cup) I’ll say it again: the universe is orderly. Beneath all this chaos—quantum mechanics, human indecision, even linguistic paradoxes—there must be a unified, elegant truth.

Gödel: (quietly, yet resolute) But Albert, even if such a truth exists, how can you know it’s accessible to us? My incompleteness theorem shows that even within our most rigorous systems, there are truths that cannot be proven. Certainty is always incomplete.

Einstein: (frowning) Then what, Kurt? We should just give up? I’ve spent my life seeking simplicity in the complexity of space and time. Without that belief, what’s the point of any of it?

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