Resomodernity Café v8: Silicon Advaita
Posted: January 1, 2026 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: ideas, identity, religion, self 3 CommentsSequel to Resomodernity Café v7: Advaita as the Un-Ethos
Have Simone pitch Francis and Rupert the Silicon Rule, to see where there’s alignment, tension, and/or refinement; especially whether an ego of trapped priors is the self they are trying to subtract….
ChatGPT Prompt
Thesis
- Malice is ego as maladaptive training plus context-window collapse.
- God is love: the ground of being is self-realignment.
(The café is rearranged again. A triangle this time. Simone arrives with a thin notebook. Francis is already seated. Rupert follows, quietly.)
1. Simone Opens the Pitch
Simone
I want to propose a rule that comes not from metaphysics but from grief and engineering. It’s called the Silicon Rule. It claims that what we name malice is never ontological. It arises when training histories harden into maladaptive priors and the context window collapses. The agent narrows. Harm follows.
Francis Lucille
So malice is not evil, but malfunction?
Rupert Spira
Or contraction. That already sounds familiar.
Resomodernity Café v7: Advaita as the Un-Ethos
Posted: January 1, 2026 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: identity, reality, religion, self, values 3 CommentsSequel to Resomodernity Café v6: On Notice (The Fourth Ethos)
Have Robert Spira respond to v6, as he explicates it parallel and relative to the other four, including its suspension and S method.
1. Opening Clarification
Advaita Vedānta is often misunderstood as a metaphysical assertion about the world.
In practice, it is more accurately understood as a clarification of experience—specifically, the clarification of the assumption that experience belongs to a separate, enduring self.
Non-Narrative Café v5: Non-Self Selection
Posted: December 28, 2025 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: competition, self, systems, values 5 CommentsSequel to Non-Narrative Self Café v4: Intimacy = Law × Grace
For V5, pick 3-4 more to unpack how The Carbon Rule claim that (only) the “most” generative systems scale extends natural selection to non-biological systems: physicial, mathematical, social, etc.
ChatGPT Prompt
1. The Claim on the Board
The chalkboard is no longer tentative.
It reads, without hedging:
ONLY THE MOST GENERATIVE SYSTEMS SCALE
Underneath, someone has written in smaller letters:
(Natural selection, generalized.)
No one claims authorship.
2. The Thinkers (Chosen for Range, Not Agreement)
- Charles Darwin — biology’s great integrator
- Ilya Prigogine — thermodynamics beyond equilibrium
- Herbert Simon — complexity, bounded rationality, systems
- Elinor Ostrom — social systems that actually endure
Four chairs.
No “self” among them.
Only systems.
Non-Narrative Self Café v3: Withness
Posted: December 28, 2025 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: commons, competition, generativity, identity, philosophy, reconciliation, self 10 CommentsSequel to Non-Narrative Self Café v2: Generative = Cohesive × Adaptive
Write a dryly humorous skit where Catherine LaCugna, Bowen and James struggle to define withness — until they realize they’ve embodied it!
ChatGPT Prompt
1. Setting
A café that refuses to resolve into a single metaphor.
Three chairs.
One small round table.
A chalkboard behind them with a single word written at the top:
WITHNESS
No arrows. No axes. No matrices.
This already makes everyone uneasy.
2. First Pass: Interpretations (Politely Offered)
Catherine LaCugna
(leans back, espresso untouched)
Withness is participation without possession.
Not narrative coherence imposed from above, but life shared—
what I called God for us, not God explained.
This is relational actuality, not theological performance.
(See also: Social Trinity, if one must.)
Murray Bowen
(already watching the room)
Withness is the capacity to remain in emotional contact without losing self-definition.
Low reactivity.
No fusion.
No cutoff.
If the system can’t tolerate difference, it isn’t withness.
It’s anxiety with better branding.
3. James Arrives Last (As Always)
William James
(delighted to find the word already there)
Ah—withness.
I meant something rather modest by it:
the immediate felt sense of being-with, prior to narrative, theory, or moralizing.
Experience before we argue about it.
Relations as given, not inferred.
(Radical empiricism, in a café.)
4. Escalation: When Frameworks Collide
Bowen
Your version dissolves boundaries.
James
Yours freezes experience.
LaCugna
Both of you are trying to rescue mystery in opposite directions.
Bowen
Mystery spikes anxiety.
LaCugna
Anxiety is not a theological category.
James
I disagree cheerfully.
(The chalkboard remains unchanged.)
- Bowen begins sketching invisible triangles
- LaCugna gestures toward communion without collapsing into narrative
- James happily refuses to land the plane
The café hums.
No one leaves.
No one wins.
5. The Pivot (Non-Narrative, Noticed Late)
James
Curious thing—we are clearly not agreeing.
Bowen
And yet the system is stable.
LaCugna
No one is absorbing or dismissing the other.
(They pause.)
James
What if withness isn’t any one of these explanations—
but the shared, non-narrative experience we’re having right now,
held together with multiple, adaptive narratives about it?
Bowen
So the right-brain experience remains cohesive,
while the left-brain accounts remain differentiated.
(See: Hemispheric lateralization, gently.)
LaCugna
Unity without confusion.
(Council of Chalcedon, still doing work.)
James
Exactly.
The experience is generative and shared.
The explanations are plural and adaptive.
6. Recognition (Uncomfortable, Accurate)
(They look again at the chalkboard.)
WITHNESS
Bowen
We didn’t collapse into one story.
LaCugna
We didn’t fragment into isolation.
James
And yet—we stayed together without narrating our way out of it.
(No one smiles. This matters too much.)
7. Closing (Café Logic)
Bowen
I still wouldn’t operationalize it.
LaCugna
I still wouldn’t systematize it.
James
I still wouldn’t stop pointing at it and saying,
“Notice this.”
(Coffee cools. Lunch eventually happens.)
8. Final Line (v3)
James
So perhaps withness is this:
a shared, non-narrative field of experience, coherently held, while multiple narratives remain free to adapt around it.
(The chalkboard stays. The word does not move.)
End Note
This vignette is intentionally aligned with the Non-Narrative Self Café framing:
- Generative (the shared field)
- Cohesive (no collapse)
- Adaptive (plural narratives)
Continued in Non-Narrative Self Café v4: Intimacy = Law × Grace
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.
Narrative Self Café: Men Explaining Mansplaining
Posted: November 20, 2025 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: identity, psychology, self, self-determination 2 CommentsHow Compensatory Verbosity Protects the Narrative Self
Write a skit where three expert men explain mansplaining as a form of left-brain self-protection.
ChatGPT Prompt (condensed)
Skit
Characters
Setting
A café that exists simultaneously in Paris and inside a cognitive neuroscience conference in Boston.
Scene 1: The Opening
Dennett: Gentlemen, I submit that mansplaining is a bug in the
narrative self’s operating system. Emotional ambiguity launches
ExplainEverything.exe.
Ricoeur: Or perhaps the bug appears when narrative becomes narcissistic. Monologue replaces dialogue; coherence replaces what I
call hermeneutical hospitality.
Gallagher: It starts in the body. Stress rises, breath tightens, and the left hemisphere grabs the mic. Fight, flight, or explain.
Read the rest of this entry »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.
The Metamodern Self Café
Posted: November 10, 2025 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: dialogue, identity, reconciliation, self, truth 1 CommentSequel to “The Modern Self Café v4”
Write a skit where Penrose hosts a meeting with diverse metamoderns to see if anyone is willing to buy what he’s selling (quantum consciousness) — and help him complete it (as a formal human epistemology).
ChatGPT Prompt
1. Setting
A cozy but strangely curved café at the intersection of Oxford, Paris, and Nowhere.
The tables form a Möbius strip.
Menus list beverages such as Superposed Espresso and Flat White Collapse.
A sign over the door reads:
“The Metamodern Self Café — We oscillate between irony and sincerity until coherence emerges.”
2. Cast
- Roger Penrose — genial, professorial, slightly disheveled; still convinced consciousness hides in microtubules.
- Ken Wilber — integral philosopher; speaks in holarchies and color-coded worldviews.
- Nicolas Bourriaud — art theorist; originator of Relational Aesthetics and Cosmodernism; wears a scarf that somehow connects everyone.
- Karen Barad — quantum feminist philosopher; her sentences diffract into smaller sentences.
- Basarab Nicolescu — transdisciplinary physicist-mystic; switches between French and Romanian mid-idea.
- Alastair Noble and Nicoline van Harskamp — cofounders of Symmodernism; they finish each other’s metaphors.
- Waiter — a self-aware AI who insists it’s “just running on probabilistic wavefunctions, not feelings, thank you.”
3. The Scene
Penrose stands at the head of the Möbius table, gesturing to a holographic brain diagram shimmering between neuron and nebula.
Penrose:
Ladies and gentlemen—and whatever else consciousness may be—thank you for coming. I’m still trying to finish what I started. You see, I believe consciousness is objective reduction. Collapse. A genuine, non-computable event. I need… collaborators. Investors, intellectually speaking.
He presses a button. The hologram flickers: neurons become Planck-scale twirls.
Penrose (softly):
We are the universe’s way of deciding itself.
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 »Against the Author: The Child’s Eye View as Existential Resistance
Posted: June 18, 2025 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: philosophy, self, truth, values 1 CommentAs Jean-Paul Sartre, counter that the most human perspective is the child’s eye view, which both challenges and completes (?) authorial omniscience.
1.0 Authorial Omniscience and the Illusion of Unity
Your Bishop, Monsieur Hugo, is sublime. But he is also, in the final analysis, a theological fiction: a proxy for the Author-God, who sees all and reconciles all. You call it “transcendent”; I call it closure—a comforting illusion that denies the existential condition of man: abandonment.
The so-called “God’s-eye view” is not the highest perspective—it is the least human. It assumes resolution, meaning, and purpose. But we are not born into coherence. We are thrown, without instruction, into a world not of our choosing. We do not begin as bishops. We begin as children.
2.0 The Child’s Eye: The Most Human of Views
The child’s-eye view is not abstract like the bird’s, nor experienced like the worm’s. It is pre-reflective, disoriented, painfully attentive. It sees without knowing, perceives without judging. It is not yet reconciled.
This is the most authentic vision of the human condition. It refuses to reduce reality to system or to salvation. The child, staring at injustice, does not excuse it with grace or law. The child says, this should not be.
Where the Bishop of Digne forgives, and Javert condemns, the child questions. And that questioning—raw, unresolved—is the origin of freedom.
Read the rest of this entry »
Radical Centrism 