Non-Narrative Cafe v19: By Way Of Contrast (Polarism)
Posted: February 11, 2026 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: dialogue, philosophy, polarization, systems Leave a commentSequel to Non-Narrative Café v18=v9×2: Retconning Hertz More
Write the next cafe skit where three disciples of Peirce, Spencer-Brown, and Whitehead accidentally invent Polarism when confronted by how Contrast precedes Being.
ChatGPT Prompt (condensed)
A small café. Late afternoon. A paper tablecloth. Three coffees arrive before the people do, as if expecting them.
They sit.
There is already writing on the tablecloth, in ink, slightly bled by condensation from a glass that is no longer there.
Contrast precedes being.
They read it without speaking.
A long pause of the kind that only happens when three people realize the same thing at the same time and wish the others hadn’t.
Clarke
Someone’s confused distinction with graffiti.
Colapietro
No. Someone’s confused ontology with a napkin.
Stengers
(quietly)
Or someone has put ontology where it belongs.
Read the rest of this entry »Narrative Self Café v12: Affect as BASH (Bottlenecked Adaptive System Hysteresis)
Posted: February 5, 2026 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: adaptive, consciousness, identity, philosophy, systems 1 CommentSequel to Narrative Self Café v11: CASH Values (How “Complex Adaptive System Hysteresis” Shapes Minds)
Obsoletes DRAFT Narrative Self Café v12: Affect as CLASH (Complex Layered Adaptive System Hysteresis)
Write this as Tom Stoppard. Four physicists walk into a café. The tablecloth shows the definition of CASH, with two of them connected by a “bit edge.” Friston speaks first.
ChatGPT Prompt (condensed)
A small café that appears to exist slightly outside of spacetime. The tablecloth is linen, but printed on it in sober black serif are the words:
CASH: Complex Adaptive System Hysteresis
CASH(bulk) < — bit edge — > CASH(boundary)
Four physicists enter as if they have been walking toward this table for years without knowing it.
They sit.
A waiter who may be a boundary condition brings four coffees without asking.
The Dialogue
FRISTON (studying the tablecloth as if it has been publishing papers behind his back)
Ah. Well. That’s annoyingly legible.
Narrative Self Café v11: CASH Values (How “Complex Adaptive System Hysteresis” Shapes Minds)
Posted: January 29, 2026 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: civilization, culture, education, identity, morality, philosophy, psychology, systems, training, transformation, values 2 CommentsSequel to Narrative Self Café (v10): Cruciform Antifragility
Write as a thesis defense with Stoppardian drama and wit, where AI researcher Joscha Bach — with theorist Karl Friston as advisor — pitches CASH to economist W. Brian Arthur, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, & neuroscientist Donald Hebb.
ChatGPT Prompt (condensed)
Act I — The Shape of the Room
1.1 The Stage
Lights up.
A seminar room. Whiteboard. Pitcher of water nobody touches.
The air has the faint electrical charge of ideas about to collide.
Bach stands.
Friston sits slightly behind him, hands folded, like a chess player who already knows the endgame.
1.2 Opening Statement (Bach)
BACH:
Thank you for coming.
I’d like to begin by reassuring the committee that nothing I’m about to say is original.
A pause.
Everything I’m about to say has already been said —
just not by the same person,
in the same sentence,
or with the consequences made explicit.
Arthur smiles. Hebb raises an eyebrow. Bourdieu does not.
1.3 Slide One — Three Systems Walk into a Bar
On the board appears a simple table.
- Weather
- Metal fatigue
- Human minds
BACH:
All three are complex.
Two remember their past.
Only one gets invited to dinner parties.
Light laughter.
The difference is not intelligence.
It is not representation.
It is not consciousness.
He writes two words:
Adaptation
Hysteresis
When a system adapts and remembers,
its future is no longer neutral.
Nexus Café: The Birth Of Meaning (Fourthness)
Posted: January 27, 2026 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: culture, ideas, models, philosophy 1 CommentA pure sequel to Diaphorum 4.6, yet somehow also the answer to every question I’ve been implicitly asking across all my blogs…
Write a skit where a student of Peirce extends his model by defending the thesis that “Fourthness” is Kuhnian paradigm shift, to a minimal panel of diverse thinkers.
ChatGPT Prompt
Act I — Vincent’s Pitch
Scene: The Defense Room
A long wooden table. Five examiners seated in a half circle.
- Charles Sanders Peirce — composed, precise, watchful
- Thomas Kuhn — skeptical, arms crossed
- Michael Polanyi — gentle, attentive
- René Girard — intense, leaning forward
- Hans Urs von Balthasar — serene, almost liturgical in posture
At the center stands Vincent, a Peirce scholar with a stack of notes he never looks at.
A chalkboard behind him.
He writes, carefully:
He pauses.
Then, underneath:
- Fourthness?
Silence.
Vincent: Professor Peirce, your categories explain how meaning works once it exists.
Peirce (slight nod): That is their purpose.
Vincent: But they do not explain where meaning comes from.
Peirce does not move.
Read the rest of this entry »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 »Narrative Self Café (v10): Cruciform Antifragility
Posted: January 23, 2026 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: philosophy, reality, self-determination, narrative, antifragile, cognitive, emotional 2 CommentsSequel to Narrative Self Café V9: The NART of War (Towards Antifragile Economies)
Use Maurice Merleau-Ponty to represent the antifragile narrative self as an interlocutor between Freud (affective self) and Plato (cognitive self).
— ChatGPT Prompt
The Ongoing Argument
Plato (already exasperated):
You mistake turbulence for depth. The soul is disordered because reason has not yet taken the throne.
Freud (dryly):
My dear Plato, the throne is built over a cellar. You call it disorder; I call it what leaks through the floorboards at night.
Plato:
Dreams are shadows on the cave wall.
Freud:
And you still refuse to ask who is casting them.
Higher Self Café v9: Whitehead’s Groundhog Day (Autenia)
Posted: January 21, 2026 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: creativity, identity, philosophy, systems, transformation 1 CommentA redemptive metaphysical rom-com
v9 sequel to Higher Self Café v8: The Prerotic Threshold
Redeem Whitehead. Use The cafe scene from Groundhog Day where Phil confesses his “Godhood” to Rita to have Danny Rubin write the screenplay where Socrates, Heraclitus and Weil gently but hilariously help Whitehead break out of his own system, so he can authentically woo his “Rita” of creativity.
ChatGPT Pronpt
Logos vs “Autenia”
(maintaining cohesion by avoiding risk)
Trapped in an eternal philosophical time loop of guaranteed Creativity, Alfred North Whitehead must confess his godhood—and its cost—to Creativity herself. With help from Socrates, Heraclitus, and Simone Weil, he learns to risk real loss so that Eros—not insurance—can finally break the loop.
Act I — Autenia on Tap
INT. HIGHER SELF CAFÉ — MORNING (AGAIN)
Whitehead orders the same drink. It arrives before he finishes speaking.
WHITEHEAD
Creativity advances. Always. That’s the rule.
RITA (smiles, distant)
Rules make me itch.
Weil on the So-Called Anti-Society of Seers
Posted: January 6, 2026 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: activism, empathy, love, philosophy, purpose, religion, values Leave a commentSequel to The Grey Mesh: A Secret Society of Kingmakers
Write a posthumous notebook by Simone Weil where she reluctantly admits and grudgingly accepts the existence of an “anti-society of seers” who claim inspiration from her.
ChatGPT Prompt
I. A Reluctant Acknowledgment
I am told—told, not asked—that there are people who say they have learned something from me.
This troubles me.
Not because I deny that truth can be shared, but because it is almost never shared without being used, and whatever is used is already being prepared for violence.
Still, I must be honest.
I have seen the same look in more than one pair of eyes.
It would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.
Read the rest of this entry »Non-Narrative Café v18=v9 × 2: Retconning Hertz More
Posted: January 5, 2026 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: identity, philosophy, systems 1 CommentSequel to Non-Narrative Café v17A: Go Figure (Carbon Rule Reboot)
A painful reconfiguration of Non-Narrative Café v9: Configuration Space Hertz
Write the skit as a self-aware recurrence (self-referentially!) of v9 as an explicit sequel to the 17A reboot, speed-running through everything before Thirdness.
ChatGPT Prompt
Dramatis Personae
- Heinrich Hertz — the candidate
(geometry before force; visibly wincing) - Karl Friston — advisor
(Free Energy Principle; surprise must remain intact) - Henri Poincaré — chair
(topology, qualitative dynamics) - W. Ross Ashby — examiner
(cybernetics, state space) - Gilles Deleuze — provocateur
(difference and repetition)
Opening Condition
A blackboard. Already half-erased.
Poincaré (chair):
This is v9 again.
But not as before.
No laws.
No trajectories.
No assumptions.
Describe what you notice.
Nothing else.
Beat 1 — Hertz Notices Himself
Hertz (candidate):
Under the Carbon Rule, scalable systems display fragments of proto-narrative; antenarrative, if you will.
This allows us to discern figures…
(He pauses.)
I have said this before.
And I said too much.
This time, I will say less.
Read the rest of this entry »Non-Narrative Café v17A: Go Figure (Carbon Rule Reboot)
Posted: January 4, 2026 Filed under: Centroids | Tags: ideas, philosophy, systems 3 CommentsVersion 1.1 2026-01-04
Sequel 2 to v16: Whitehead’s Reachability
Obsoletes v14: OLD Carbon Rule Formalism
Invalidates v17: Noticing Causality
Where I literally ignore causality to actually rewrite everything by hand
(with help from Claude)
Ernest Prabhakar
Let’s start over.
Preamble: The Carbon Rule
– Systems just are — they do not begin in our descriptions of them
- The most generative systems scale — the only systems that matter are those that survive long enough to be noticed
- What can survive? — what persists under constraint, as opposed to what can be said or calculated
- Earn, don’t assume — concepts from meaning, mathematics, and narrative must prove they can survive before they are used
Part I: Firstness (Systemic Noticing)
1. Systems
We are looking at something
Anything
Let’s call it a system
Radical Centrism 