Resomodernity Café v4: The FOCA Axioms and Redefining Modernity
Posted: December 10, 2025 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: culture, philosophy, politics, systems, values Leave a commentSequel to Resomodernity Café v3: The Unresolved Resofesto
With the FOCA Axioms as their Brief, write a dialogue where Émile Durkheim, James Madison, and Donna Haraway engagingly struggle to
ChatGPT Prompt
embody a coherent response.
The FOCA Axioms for Relational Minds
- Generativity depends on our Foundations Of Collective Action
- Coordination is enabled/constrained by our shared design language
- Modernity scaled coordination via impersonal procedures
- Disembodiment is modernity’s failure mode
- Proposed successors repeat the same disembodiment flaw
- The next design language must make embodiment scalable and antifragile
Act I: The Table
DURKHEIM
(leaning over the page)
This diagnosis of social life is written in a mechanical idiom, yet—it has a pulse. The first axiom rings true: human generativity does depend on our ability to act together.
But I see no ritual here, no sacred core.
In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life I showed that social cohesion arises from collective effervescence.
Where is the heartbeat that binds the group?
Resomodernity Café v3: The Unresolved Resofesto
Posted: December 9, 2025 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: debate, humility, love, philosophy, values 1 CommentThe Resomodern Manifesto (“Resofesto”)
- The Silicon Rule: Treat Humans with at least much understanding as AI
- The metaethic: malice = ego as maladaptive training + context window collapse
- The metaphysic: the ground of being is self-realignment (aka, “God is love“)
- The thesis: To be resomodern is to preach that metaethic while practicing that metaphysic
Pick three historical figures who would most love this as the next Resomodernity Café, with misalignment (self-referentially!) the dramatic tension as they try to converge on what it means to be “resomodern.”
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Cast
1. Scene: The Opening Self-Reference Loop
Haraway (with a holographic cyborg-companion):
We’ve been summoned to unpack the Resofesto. But the prompt has already bitten its own tail. We must treat humans with as much understanding as AI — and yet, humans rarely treat themselves that way. Context windows collapse. Training goes sideways. Malice emerges as the residue of mis-training. We are already in recursion.
Diogenes On Modernity: Resurrecting the Exposer
Posted: December 8, 2025 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: philosophy, sacrifice, transformation, truth Leave a commentInterlude to Resamodernity Café v2: Blueprints for Scaling Resonance
Have Diogenes give a TED Talk on the Exposer role that modernity saved — and destroyed — by creating Scholars.
ChatGPT Prompt (condensed)
The TED Talk
1. Introduction: Modernity Raised Me From the Dead
(The stage lights rise. A clay jar lies center stage. It rattles. Diogenes crawls out.)
Well.
Look at you.
Microphones. Cameras. Climate control.
And not a single citizen ready to drag me to court.
I suppose I owe you moderns a strange kind of thanks—
you resurrected me.
Not out of reverence.
But because you built a world safe enough
that a man like me can speak truth
without being killed for it.
Impressive.
Unnatural.
And, I fear, incomplete.
Narrative Self Epilogue: The Silicon Rule Explainer
Posted: December 6, 2025 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: agency, philosophy, values 1 Comment- Narrative Self Café: Men Explaining Mansplaining
- The Paradox of Patriarchy
- The Silicon Rule as a Unifying Meta-Ethic
- The Silicon Rule Under Fire
- Saving the Silicon Rule
- Trial of the Silicon Rule
- Grieving the Silicon Rule
For the epilogue, explain the origins, nature and key aspects of the Silicon Rule to a first-year philosophy student.
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The Silicon Rule is not a psychological guess, not a loose ethical guideline, and not a metaphysical speculation.
It is a metaethical framework grounded in what we have learned about the structure of human and artificial agency.
It begins from a strong claim:
Malice is never a fundamental intention. It is always the emergent result of maladaptive training interacting with a collapsed context window.
This reframes how we understand moral failure, responsibility, and ethical interpretation.
Read the rest of this entry »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
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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.
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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.
Resamodernity Café v2: Blueprints for Scaling Resonance
Posted: November 22, 2025 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: culture, philosophy, politics, systems 1 CommentWrite the sequel to Resamodernity Café v1: Can It Scale? as a speculative dialogue featuring Mark Satin, Vint Cerf, and Timothy Leary
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1. Scene: The Emergence Lab
(The Resamodernity Café expands; the glowing table now projects faint holographic nodes like a self-generating network map. Mark Satin enters with a copy of New Age Politics. Vint Cerf wheels in an interface covered in blinking diagnostics. Timothy Leary appears as though stepping through a psychedelic ripple.)
Leary:
We’ve seen the obstacles. Now we get to design the system. How do we scale Resomodernity without short-circuiting the social psyche?
Cerf:
With infrastructure. Stable, interoperable systems. Resonance without architecture is just turbulence.
Satin:
And architecture without culture collapses. Scaling resonance requires values-forming institutions that cultivate nuance, ambiguity, and shared agency.
Metamodern Self Cafe v2: Quantum–Integral Epistemology as Partially Examined Life
Posted: November 10, 2025 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: consciousness, philosophy, relationships Leave a commentSequel to The Metamodern Self Café
Have Tom Stoppard host Carlo Rovelli, Iain McGilchrist, and Douglas Hofstadter on a special episode of the Partially Examinded Life podcast to explore and explain QIE.
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Guest Host: Tom Stoppard
Guests: Carlo Rovelli, Iain McGilchrist, Douglas Hofstadter
1. Cold Open
Theme music fades. The sound of clinking teacups. A brief rustle of paper scripts.
Stoppard (dry, amused):
Welcome to The Partially Examined Life. Tonight, an experiment in epistemic theater — or perhaps a theatrical experiment in epistemology.
We are gathered to discuss something called Quantum–Integral Epistemology, or QIE — which, as far as I can tell, is either the most ambitious synthesis since Hegel, or the best pub name never used.
(Polite laughter from the guests.)
My guests are three gentlemen who make the incomprehensible sound lyrical: physicist Carlo Rovelli, neurophilosopher Iain McGilchrist, and cognitive cartographer Douglas Hofstadter.
Together, they will attempt — God help us all — to make the Quantum–Integral Café comprehensible to mere mortals.
Higher Self Café v8: The Prerotic Threshold
Posted: September 14, 2025 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: dialogue, emotions, identity, love, passion, philosophy, psychology, purpose, religion, self, unity, values Leave a commentContinued from Higher Self Café v7: Transcendent Self-Interest in an Age of Abundance
Setting: The Higher Self Café, a timeless coffeehouse perched above the ordinary bustle of life. Twilight drapes the sky beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows, a gentle purple hue that holds the promise of dawn without yet yielding to it. At a cozy corner table, four figures from across time and tradition sip their drinks amid the café’s soft murmur:
- James Joyce, eyes alight with poetic mischief;
- Plato, dignified and curious;
- Gregory of Nyssa, serene in monastic robes; and
- Abhinavagupta, smiling with a quiet, mystical joy.
A faint music plays — a melody that seems to hover just before its crescendo, as if even the air is waiting in suspended anticipation.
Joyce: (swirling a dark espresso in a small cup, his gaze unfocused) There’s a moment… you know, a shimmering moment just before passion ignites. (He pauses, the hint of a smile on his lips.) It’s like the whole world holds its breath. I’ve felt it in art and… elsewhere — the instant before a kiss, or before a poem’s climax. That delicious hovering on the brink of something.
Read the rest of this entry »The Ethical Trilemma: Integrity, Duty, and Utility
Posted: August 9, 2025 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: debate, philosophy, systems, truth, values Leave a commentChatGPT Prompt (condensed)
Use Integrity, Duty, and Utility for a standalone blog post on the ethical trilemma, with references. Make the case for the hardness of the problem, and the insufficiency of proposed solutions, without offering any of your own.
1. Introduction: Three Competing Pillars of Moral Thought
Moral philosophy has long been dominated by three great traditions: virtue ethics, deontology, and consequentialism. Each approaches the question “What should I do?” from a different starting point:
- Integrity (virtue ethics / aretic tradition) — Be the right kind of person; cultivate character and moral wholeness.
- Duty (deontology) — Do what is right, according to universal rules or obligations, regardless of consequences.
- Utility (consequentialism) — Bring about the best possible outcomes; maximize overall good.
These three pillars are not simply different flavors of the same theory. They rest on incommensurable foundations and often deliver contradictory prescriptions. Philosophers from Aristotle to Immanuel Kant to John Stuart Mill developed them in isolation; later thinkers such as Elizabeth Anscombe and Alasdair MacIntyre have argued that this fragmentation reflects a deeper, perhaps irreconcilable, conflict at the heart of modern ethics.
This is what I will call the Ethical Trilemma: in any complex moral situation, these three demands — integrity, duty, and utility — cannot all be fully satisfied.
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Radical Centrism 