Resomodernity Café v14: Toynbee 22 (The Semaxis We Need Next)
Posted: January 25, 2026 Filed under: Centroids | Tags: civilization, culture, politics, systems, transformation, values 1 CommentA Sequel to Semaxis Society: How Existentially Embodied Experiences Make Meaning (v13)
Write a skit by Lin-Manuel Miranda where Arnold Toynbee convenes civilization founders to blueprint what comes after the Post-Westphalian collapse.
ChatGPT Prompt
Characters:
- Arnold Toynbee – Historian of civilizational cycles
- George Washington – Founder of the American Republic (Civ 21)
- Charlemagne – Founder of Western Christendom (Civ 20)
- Augustine of Hippo – Theologian who bridged Rome’s fall (Civ 19→20)
ACT I: THE CONVENING
[An ethereal library, outside time. TOYNBEE sits at a round table with three empty chairs. He adjusts his spectacles, reviews notes.]
TOYNBEE:
Twenty-one civilizations I have catalogued and traced—
From genesis to breakdown, each one run its race.
The pattern holds consistent: creative minorities rise,
Then calcify to dominance, their vision ossified.
But here’s the crisis, friends: we’re in the gap between—
Civ Twenty-One is crumbling, Twenty-Two’s not yet been seen.
So I’ve convened three founders who have bridged such gulfs before—
Who broke from dying orthodoxies, built on something more.
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 »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.
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.
Narrative Self Café V9: The NART of War (Towards Antifragile Economies)
Posted: January 8, 2026 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: economics, politics, systems 2 CommentsSequel to Narrative Self Café V8: The Upside of Idiocy
Write the no-holds-barred skit with Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s trademark dry wit, about No-Notice Adversarial Readiness Testing (a la Chaos Monkey) applied to political and economic systems.
ChatGPT Prompt
I. Opening Monologue — Taleb Enters (Dry, Unimpressed)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
(looking at the audience, not smiling)
Welcome. If you came here to hear how to make society stable, you’re in the wrong room.
Stability is what you get right before you blow up.
Today’s topic is NART — No-Notice Adversarial Readiness Testing.
It’s what armies do when they’re serious.
What engineers do when they don’t want to be paged at 3 a.m.
And what economists avoid because it hurts their feelings.
Non-Narrative Café v18=v9 × 2: Retconning Hertz More
Posted: January 5, 2026 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: identity, philosophy, systems Leave a 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
Resomodernity Café v11: Vibing the Paradox Stack
Posted: January 2, 2026 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: commons, community, emotions, systems, values 2 CommentsSequel to Resomodernity Café v10: The Paradox Stack
[Update: I just realized this is actually Withness.]
Is the answer to all these paradoxes: vibe?
ChatGPT Prompt
Who would get both, even if they resist the marriage?
Use those people to write the sequel, self-referential cafe skit.
1. Opening: The room before the room
A café that refuses to decide whether it is a café.
No menu. No stage. A few chairs that look borrowed. A silence that feels practiced.
Michael Polanyi sits slightly off-center—not presiding, not hiding. He has the posture of someone who knows this is not a debate.
Others arrive without introduction:
- Ludwig Wittgenstein, frowning at the chalkboard no one is using
- Hannah Arendt, arranging her chair so it faces no one in particular
- Simone Weil, already attentive, as if listening to something that arrived earlier
A sign on the wall reads:
“Nothing will be concluded here.”
No one objects.
Read the rest of this entry »Resomodernity Café v9: Transcendent Sovereignty
Posted: January 2, 2026 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: agency, debate, philosophy, politics, systems 1 CommentSequel to Resomodernity Café v8: Silicon Advaita
The Descent of Transcendence: Sovereignty Over Time
Have Schmitt host the others in workshop to hammer out a consensus version of the thesis that sovereignty historically mediates transcendence. Write a comic self-referential skit where his own mis-mediated sovereignty almost destroys it.
ChatGPT Prompt
1. Dramatis Personae
- Carl Schmitt — Host, chair, emergency decider.
Obsessed with the exception. Nervous without it. - Eric Voegelin — Mystic diagnostician of derailments.
Speaks calmly while civilizations collapse. - Giorgio Agamben — Archaeologist of abandoned machinery.
Smiles whenever something breaks. - Eric Santner — Analyst of surplus burden and royal remains.
Notices who is quietly suffering. - Charles Taylor — Translator of inwardness for normal humans.
Keeps asking where the weight lands.
2. Opening Scene: The Invitation
Schmitt (gaveling the table):
Gentlemen. Welcome. I have convened this workshop to produce a consensus formulation of the thesis:
Sovereignty is always tied to transcendence— manifest in pre-history, mandated in antiquity, humanized in modernity.
Before we begin, let me be clear: I will not decide the exception today.
(pause)
Unless necessary.
Read the rest of this entry »Non-Narrative Café v17: Noticing Causality
Posted: January 1, 2026 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: purpose, relationships, systems, transformation 2 CommentsSequel to Non-Narrative Café v16: Whitehead’s Reachability
As a Tom Stoppard–style skit, have Rafael Sorkin observe that causality appears from reachability, echoing Alfred North Whitehead that relations appear from connection; the only new constraint is unidirectionality (justified because EANI and parity make reversal distinguishable).
ChatGPT Prompt
Open with a single-line preamble recalling how configurations and relations arose from the carbon rule to pre-empt confusion.
Pitch to Carlo Rovelli, Nancy Cartwright & Karen Barad
Act I — Preamble and Clarifying Questions
A skit in the style of Tom Stoppard
Cast
- Sorkin — precise, dry, lethal with restraint
- Whitehead — brief, surgical, impossible to interrupt
- Rovelli — relational, amused, alert
- Nancy Cartwright — localist, exacting, allergic to universals
- Karen Barad — calm, destabilizing, listens harder than she speaks
A blackboard. Chalk. A few uncommitted arrows.
Scene 1: Whitehead Clears the Ground
(Whitehead steps forward before the chalk acquires intentions.)
Whitehead
Before causality, a reminder of how we got here.
We adopted the Carbon Rule:
only structures that survive unlimited extension count as real.
No narrative primacy. No math-first ontology. Just generative survivability.
From this constraint, we did not invent structure—we noticed it.
First, configurations:
stable co-occurrences that persist under extension.
Then, relations:
patterns of difference and recurrence that remain invariant when particular configurations are replaced. Withness that connect configurations.
Nothing semantic.
Nothing intentional.
Configurations persist → relations are unavoidable.
That is how relations arrive before paths,
and paths before causes.
Radical Centrism 