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 v13: Making a HASH of Hierarchical Feelings
Posted: February 9, 2026 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: affect, emotions, identity, purpose, systems, values Leave a commentSequel to Narrative Self Café v12: Affect as BASH (Bottlenecked Adaptive System Hysteresis)
Write aTom Stoppard–style dialogue where Karl Friston, Evan Thompson, Mark Solms, Jaak Panksepp, and surprise guest Nico Frijda start out fighting; then self-similarly realize “global integration” of affect implies partial integration (“premotion“) is possible, which in turn requires a post-BASH architecture.
ChatGPT Prompt
Setting: The same café. The chalkboard still reads BASH. Someone has added, underneath:
“Yes, but who is feeling it?”
Act I: The Incommensurability Problem
1. Opening: Immediate Disagreement
Panksepp (stabbing the chalkboard):
You’ve drawn a plumbing diagram and called it emotion.
Friston (calmly):
I’ve drawn the conditions under which emotion must arise.
Solms:
Karl, with respect, feelings are not what must arise. They are what matter.
Thompson:
Gentlemen, perhaps we should notice we’re already enacting the phenomenon. This room is thick with affect and no one has yet computed a boundary condition.
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.
DRAFT Narrative Self Café v12: Affect as CLASH (Complex Layered Adaptive System Hysteresis)
Posted: February 4, 2026 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: identity, systems, values 1 CommentSequel to CASH Values (How “Complex Adaptive System Hysteresis” Shapes Minds)
Author’s Note
Ironically – or perhaps providentially – this document itself is not internally consistent. I’ve decided to post it “outside the Markov blanket” as both a historical artifact, and a fixed point I can iterate on as I try to reconcile my thinking. At least with myself, if not with reality…
As Tom Stoppard, write the skit where the four of them walk in cafe where the tablecloth lays this out.
ChatGPT Prompt
Friston speaks first
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
CASHᵈ < — bit edge — > CASHᵈ⁻¹
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.
HEADRICK
Is it a menu?
SWINGLE
It’s a tensor network wearing a napkin.
PASTAWSKI
No, it’s a code. The table is correcting us.
They all pause, realizing this is not a joke.
Read the rest of this entry »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.
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 2 CommentsSequel 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.
Radical Centrism 