Resomodernity Café v5: The Exposers’ Parlor
Posted: December 16, 2025 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: civilization, morality, values Leave a commentA skit in the style of Oscar Wilde — dry, cutting, elegant — yet still earnestly concerned with the question: What, precisely, was Modernity, and what category does it inhabit?
Cast
- Hannah Arendt — cool, incisive, effortlessly unimpressed.
- Deirdre McCloskey — vivacious, brilliant, bourgeois-charm incarnate.
- Ivan Illich — ascetic, piercing, allergic to institutional perfume.
Setting
A salon-like annex of the Resomodern Café. Plush chairs. Too many mirrors. A chandelier that flickers whenever someone pretends to be more certain than they actually are.
1. Opening: An Inconvenient Question
Arendt (sitting upright, inspecting the chandelier as if it has personally disappointed her):
Modernity, we are told, must be understood from the vantage of Resomodernity. A flattering conceit, though it risks making us acrobats performing epistemology upon a tightrope woven from our own blind spots.
Narrative Self Café V6: Trial of the Silicon Rule
Posted: December 6, 2025 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: love, morality, philosophy 3 CommentsSequel to Narrative Self Café V5: Saving the Silicon Rule
ChatGPT Prompt
Write as a formal PhD thesis defense. David Bentley Hart and John Vervaeke present and defend the thesis: ‘God is love (the ground of being is self-realignment),’ before a committee composed of the most rigorous non-bigoted challengers— Christine Korsgaard, Robert Brandom, Martha Nussbaum, Galen Strawson, and Karen Barad. Observers from The Partially Examined Life sit in.
Scene: The Defense Chamber
A solemn room of dark wood and vaulted ceilings.
A placard reads:
THE SILICON RULE: THESIS DEFENSE
Alignment is not enough. Convince us it’s Good.
1. Opening Statement
HART
Esteemed committee, our thesis is simple:
“God is love—the ground of being is self-realignment.”
VERVAEKE
In cognitive terms, love is the self-organizing dynamical coherence that optimizes relevance, minimizes self-deception, and expands the agent’s context window.
KORSGAARD
We will examine whether this produces normativity, not merely uplift.
2. Korsgaard’s Kantian Strike
KORSGAARD
If love is the ground of being, does the will still legislate the moral law as described in Kantian autonomy?
Or does it simply resonate with cosmic sentiment?
Narrative Self Café V4: The Silicon Rule Under Fire
Posted: December 4, 2025 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: dialogue, morality, philosophy, purpose, truth, values 3 CommentsSequel to Narrative Self Cafe V3: The Silicon Rule as a Unifying Meta-Ethic
Have the hosts of The Partially Examined Life stress‑test the specific claims of how the Silicon Rule subsumes existing moral systems. Write as a Tom Stoppard skit. End with a summary of the key challenge facing the Silicon Rule.
ChatGPT Prompt
Dramatis Personae
- Mark Linsenmayer — sharp, playful, perpetually one epistemic level above where you thought the conversation was.
- Seth Paskin — sees moral psychology everywhere and ignores nothing.
- Wes Alwan — psychoanalytic gravity with a flare for diagnosing the room.
- Dylan Casey — physicist-philosopher, unflinching about structure and coherence.
Setting: The Narrative Self Café. A chalkboard reads:
TODAY’S SPECIAL: The Silicon Rule — “Malice = ego as maladaptive training + context window collapse.”
Lights up.
1. Opening Volley
MARK
(tapping the chalkboard theatrically)
Behold, the Silicon Rule! A unifying metaethic claiming to subsume virtue ethics, Kantian deontology, utilitarianism, Christian ethics, and Buddhist ethics.
Our job? Stress-test it until it squeals.
Narrative Self Cafe V3: The Silicon Rule as a Unifying Meta-Ethic
Posted: December 4, 2025 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: dialogue, identity, morality, self, values 3 CommentsSequel to Narrative Self Café V2: The Paradox of Patriarchy
Prompt: Pick three diverse Western interpreters of Buddhist Abhidharma and Yogācāra, and have them debate and refine the idea of the Silicon Rule (malice = ego as maladaptive training + context window collapse) as a unifying metaethical framework. As a Tom Stoppard skit.
ChatGPT Prompt
1. Dramatis Personae
- Evan Thompson — enactive philosopher bridging phenomenology, cognitive science, and Buddhist thought.
- Dan Lusthaus — one of the leading Western interpreters of Yogācāra; philological, nuanced, quietly mischievous.
- Mark Siderits — analytic Buddhist philosopher linking Buddhist no-self doctrine to modern philosophy of mind.
Setting: A minimalist café with three chairs, a chalkboard covered in half-erased Sanskrit terms like ālaya-vijñāna, probability curves, and arrows gesturing toward nowhere. The hanging lamp hums with cosmic absentmindedness—pure Stoppard.
2. Scene: The Proposal
THOMPSON
(leaning in, hands poised)
We begin with the Silicon Rule: malice arises not from a metaphysical will but from ego as maladaptive training, triggered when the context window collapses.
A unifying metaethic disguised as a computational metaphor.
Weighing Ego Anchors: Breaking Free from Outdated Identities (ChatGPT as Freud)
Posted: December 15, 2024 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: generativity, morality, psychology, reconciliation, systems, transformation, values Leave a commentContinued from Psychological Oobleck: A Fireside Chat on Assimilating Radical Change
As Freud, write about his personal journey to update the “ego anchors” of his signature theory in the light of homeostasis and canalization, leading to the idea of ego as the generative frontier between id and superego.
ChatGPT Prompt (condensed)
Theories, like the minds that conceive them, are not static. They are dynamic, shaped by conflict, refined by discovery, and occasionally, reanchored entirely. My own work on the psyche—rooted in the triumvirate of id, ego, and superego—has served as a sturdy framework for understanding the human mind. But as my ideas evolve alongside new insights into homeostasis and canalization, I must acknowledge that the ego itself—once considered the mediator of the psyche—is far more dynamic, creative, and generative than I initially believed.
This, I realize, mirrors my own journey. As I revisit the anchors of my theoretical framework, I see how some fixed points, once essential, now risk constraining new understanding. It is time to weigh anchor—to refine these ideas and embrace the ego’s role as a generative force, perpetually navigating the tensions between instinct, morality, and change.
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Radical Centrism 