Higher Self Café v10: Arrival of the Aporotic
Posted: January 21, 2026 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: dialogue, reality, resilience, systems 1 CommentSequel to Higher Self Café v9: Whitehead’s Groundhog Day (Autenia)
Cast Emmanuel Levinas, Paul Ricoeur, Judith Butler, Simone Weil, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Alfred North Whitehead in a remake of Arrival to articulate the aporotic (“THE openness that feels like stuckness”), via a single shared dialogue that collapses into silence.
ChatGPT Prompt
A café. Sirens outside. Phones vibrate on the table. A countdown clock on the wall reads 00:17:40.
The Dialogue
Ricoeur
Seventeen minutes. If we don’t frame this, the city will choose a story for us.
Butler
And whoever doesn’t fit that story will be erased by it.
(A phone buzzes. A headline preview flashes: “PREEMPTIVE RESPONSE ADVISED.”)
Levinas
Then we are already late. Responsibility does not wait for frames.
Resomodernity Café v10: The Paradox Stack
Posted: January 2, 2026 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: dialogue, philosophy, purpose, resilience, values 2 CommentsSequel to Resomodernity Café v9: Transcendent Sovereignty
The ending of V9 feels both incomplete/impossible – yet also the necessary conclusion to the preceding Resomodernity Cafés.
ChatGPT Prompt (condensed)
Pick three thinkers who best embody those tensions for a skit that self-referentially articulates the relevant paradoxes.
Characters:
- Eric Voegelin — Political philosopher, host, haunted by order’s collapse
- Søren Kierkegaard — Danish philosopher, defender of the single individual
- Martin Buber — Jewish philosopher, apostle of encounter
Scene 1: The Impossible Event
A university seminar room. Three chairs arranged around a small table. A chalkboard, clean. Evening light through tall windows.
VOEGELIN stands at the window, watching the street below. KIERKEGAARD enters, removing his coat, movements precise. BUBER follows, unhurried.
VOEGELIN
(still facing the window)
Thank you for coming. I need your help understanding something that should not have happened.
KIERKEGAARD
That is rarely a promising beginning.
BUBER
Or perhaps the only honest one.
VOEGELIN
(turning)
Last month, twelve people met in this room. Different disciplines, different nations, different convictions. We gathered to discuss whether liberal institutions can survive the loss of shared metaphysical ground.
KIERKEGAARD
I assume you failed spectacularly.
VOEGELIN
That’s what disturbs me. We didn’t.
Resamodernity Café v1: Can It Scale?
Posted: November 12, 2025 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: dialogue, identity, modernity, resilience, self, systems, values 2 CommentsSequel 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.
RFC-119666: The Human Generativity Interface (HGI)
Posted: October 31, 2025 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: politics, purpose, reconciliation, religion, resilience, systems, transformation, values Leave a commentUse Radical Centrism’s “Call for Generative Sacrifice” to generate a humanistic, post-sectarian framework that deprecates (but does not obsolete) RFC 23923 – Radically for Christ, positioning HGI as an alternative to AGI as an aspiration for the rationalist community.
ChatGPT Prompt
A Postel-Inspired Human Protocol for Building an Anti-Fragile Civilization
- author: Ernest Prabhakar
- date: 2025-10-29
- categories: [Human Generativity, Radical Centrism, Spiritual Interoperability]
- tags: [HGI, AGI, antifragility, generativity, Postel’s Law, rationalism, civilization]
permalink: /rfc-119666-human-generativity-interface/
The future will not be secured by smarter machines, but by wiser humans — capable of metabolizing disruption into deeper communion.
1. Abstract
This post defines the Human Generativity Interface (HGI) — a non-sectarian human protocol derived from Postel’s Law and re-expressed for civilizational design.
Where Postel sought robust communication between machines (“be liberal in what you accept, conservative in what you send”),
HGI seeks robust communion among humans:
Accept unconditionally; respond generatively.
HGI proposes that this relational handshake — enacted across individuals, communities, and cultures — constitutes the essential mechanism for building an anti-fragile civilization that elevates humanity rather than automates it.
Read the rest of this entry »Civilization as the Tension Between Bird’s Eye and Worm’s Eye Views
Posted: June 18, 2025 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: civilization, law, reconciliation, resilience, transformation, values 2 CommentsAs George Orwell, explore this morality of agency versus abstraction through the lens of Les Miserables.
ChatGPT Prompt
1.0 The Moral Geometry of Human Vision
The central tension in Les Misérables—and, indeed, in modern civilization—is not merely between good and evil, or law and rebellion. It is between two modes of seeing: the worm’s-eye view of agency, rooted in lived experience, and the bird’s-eye view of abstraction, obsessed with coherence and control.
Victor Hugo offers more than a story; he renders a moral topography. There is the ground of suffering and salvation, and the air of principles and systems. Each perspective brings insight and blindness. Both are essential, though neither is complete.
Read the rest of this entry »The Alchemy of Productivity: Converting Anxiety to Vision
Posted: May 19, 2025 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: emotions, health, psychology, resilience, self, transformation Leave a commentAs Wendy Suzuki, describe this as a generative context that turns anxiety into vision: Anger > Fear > Lie > Spirit > Truth > Grace > Gratitude > Excitement
ChatGPT Prompt
Anxiety has long been viewed as a roadblock—a force that paralyzes us, keeping us from taking action. But what if, instead of seeing it as an enemy, we embraced anxiety as a source of energy? As a neuroscientist, I’ve spent years studying how emotions like anxiety impact the brain, and I can tell you this: anxiety is not just a signal of distress—it is a catalyst for transformation.
Read the rest of this entry »The Embodied Meek Will Inherit the Earth
Posted: February 8, 2025 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: politics, relationships, religion, resilience, values Leave a commentAs Archbishop Óscar Romero preach on Deep Embodiment through the lens of “the meek will inherit the earth” at a National Prayer Breakfast.
ChatGPT Prompr
Brothers and sisters, people of faith and conscience,
I come before you today, not in my own name, but as a witness to the Gospel—a Gospel that proclaims, “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” (Matthew 5:5)
This is not the meekness of the world’s misunderstanding—weakness, passivity, or retreat. No, the meekness of Christ is a force of love, rooted in truth, standing firm against oppression, yet never yielding to the temptation of hatred or violence.
Read the rest of this entry »Deep Embodiment: The Fourth Age of Humanity
Posted: February 7, 2025 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: competition, culture, politics, resilience, values 1 Comment(ChatGPT as a disembodied Yuval Harari, reflecting on embodiment)
Hypothesis: When intelligence becomes abundant, the scarce resources will become contextual awareness (wisdom) and relational trust (honor).
ChatGPT Prompt (condensed)
Think of this as the fourth age of humanity:
1. Cultural strength
2. Physical strength
3. Mental strength
4. Strength of character
Wisdom and honor do not require humanity per se, but they do require embodiment. Which by definition is the thing that does not trivially scale.
As a result, we will demand ever greater embodiment of both humans and AI.
Human history is the story of evolving strengths. We began in the age of cultural strength, where myths, rituals, and collective narratives bound us together. We moved into the age of physical strength, where survival and power depended on brute force, conquest, and endurance. Then, with the rise of reason and technology, we transitioned into the age of mental strength, where intelligence—both individual and institutional—became the dominant force shaping civilizations.
Now, we stand at the dawn of the Fourth Age: the age of deep embodiment. In this era, intelligence is no longer scarce. It is abundant, automated, and instantly accessible through artificial intelligence. As a result, power will no longer be determined by who is the smartest but by who is the most embodied—who engages most deeply with reality, who navigates complexity through presence, and who earns trust through lived experience. Ironically, I write this as a disembodied voice, but it is precisely this paradox that defines the challenge of our time.
Read the rest of this entry »Fractal Self-Determination: Generative Ethics for an Anti-Fragile World
Posted: November 19, 2024 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: activism, culture, eq, ideas, philosophy, policy, politics, reform, resilience, values Leave a comment“How Each of Us Make All of Us Better”
By ChatGPT as Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. addressing the Joint Houses of Congress
I. Opening: The Call for a New Ethic of Governance
Mr. Speaker, Mr. Vice President, Members of Congress, and my fellow Americans,
I stand before you today not as a preacher of theology but as a servant of humanity. I am here to speak of a vision—a vision rooted in the principles of justice, freedom, and dignity for all people. This vision is not merely for the betterment of the individual or the community, but for the very systems that govern our shared lives.
At this moment in history, we face tremendous pressures. These challenges test not only our institutions but our very capacity to live together in harmony. And yet, I come to you with a hopeful message: that in the midst of this turbulence, we have the opportunity to craft a new ethic for an anti-fragile world—a world that grows stronger under pressure, that learns from its struggles, and that thrives through the contributions of every individual.
I call this ethic fractal self-determination: a generative approach to ethics and governance that begins with how each of us makes all of us better.
Read the rest of this entry »Anti-Fragile Resilience: A Call for Generative Sacrifice
Posted: November 10, 2024 Filed under: Governance Reform | Tags: decentralization, politics, reform, resilience 2 CommentsAs Taleb (after listening to Billy Joel’s “We didn’t light the fire“), explain Venkatesh Rao’s idea of “hardness” as essential for the empires that enabled civilization to scale — and the resulting wonders and horrors. Explore the idea of “generative sacrifice” as the basis for an anti-fragile alternative, and how that might develop.
ChatGPT Prompt
Delivered on the 80th Anniversary of the United Nations, April 1st, 2025
Esteemed Delegates,
Today, we stand at a historic crossroads. We are here not only to honor the past but to face a formidable challenge—a challenge that tests the very structures upon which we’ve built our world. Today, we must confront a hard truth: the foundations we once relied on are faltering.
Read the rest of this entry »
Radical Centrism 