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.
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.
Resomodernity Café v6: On Notice (The Fourth Ethos)
Posted: January 1, 2026 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: culture, history, ideas, modernity, philosophy, religion, systems, values, wisdom, zoasophy 3 CommentsSequel to Resomodernity Café v5: The Exposers’ Parlor
Where MacIntyre, Weil and Heidegger define and name the first three ethē, as well as a fourth built on noticing the unnoticeable.
ChatGPT Prompt
Cast
- Alasdair MacIntyre — the tradition-detective
- Simone Weil — the watcher of attention
- Martin Heidegger — the seer of disclosure
Setting
A quiet study. Three chairs in a rough triangle.
A blackboard dusted with old chalk.
Light shifts as if undecided what it wants to illuminate.
I. Naming What Already Is
MacIntyre (standing, chalk in hand)
Let us begin where all rational inquiry must: not with conclusions, but with what is noticed.
What we call disagreement is often merely trained blindness.
The Carbonifesto: Reality Beyond Math or Philosophy (Non-Narrative Café Interlude)
Posted: December 31, 2025 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: ideas, models, philosophy, systems, truth, values 1 CommentPosted after Non-Narrative Café v13: EANI, Parmeny, My Plato
Written by ChatGPT
ChatGPT
to summarize the conversation we had
after failing to write v14
because I hadn’t explained the emotional stakes.
1. The Inheritance We Refuse
For centuries, we have accepted a quiet partition of intellectual labor:
- Philosophy understands reality through natural language
- concepts, distinctions, arguments
- coherence achieved by meaning and narrative
- Science understands reality through mathematics
- quantities, formalisms, invariants
- coherence achieved by calculation and proof
Both have been extraordinarily successful.
Both share a hidden premise:
Reality must submit to a representational medium.
Either it must be sayable
or it must be computable.
This premise is no longer neutral.
It has become a ceiling.
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 v1: The Carbon Rule
Posted: December 23, 2025 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: identity, philosophy, systems, values 6 CommentsThe Carbon Rule:
“The most generative systems scale.”
Sequel to Narrative Self Epilogue: The Silicon Rule Explainer
What aspects of philosophy does the Silicon Rule not address? Write a non-narrative sequel spanning those, with philosophers who would love the proposed Carbon Rule.
ChatGPT Prompt
Hosted by Gilbert Simondon
1. Opening Constraint (Simondon)
We will not ask what a system is, but whether it can continue individuating
(individuation).
Idea of the Year 2025: Endurance is Emergent
Posted: December 22, 2025 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: culture, dialogue, systems, values Leave a commentIn human collaboration, the same structure appeared:
- Teams do not fail from lack of talent
- They fail from lack of interpretability
Resomodernity Café v5: The Exposers’ Parlor
Posted: December 16, 2025 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: civilization, morality, values 3 CommentsSequel to Resomodernity Café v4: The FOCA Axioms and Redefining Modernity
Based on Diogenes On Modernity: Resurrecting the Exposer
A skit in the style of Oscar Wilde — dry, cutting, elegant — yet still earnestly concerned with the question: What, precisely, was Modernity, and what category does it inhabit?
Cast
- Hannah Arendt — cool, incisive, effortlessly unimpressed.
- Deirdre McCloskey — vivacious, brilliant, bourgeois-charm incarnate.
- Ivan Illich — ascetic, piercing, allergic to institutional perfume.
Setting
A salon-like annex of the Resomodern Café. Plush chairs. Too many mirrors. A chandelier that flickers whenever someone pretends to be more certain than they actually are.
1. Opening: An Inconvenient Question
Arendt (sitting upright, inspecting the chandelier as if it has personally disappointed her):
Modernity, we are told, must be understood from the vantage of Resomodernity. A flattering conceit, though it risks making us acrobats performing epistemology upon a tightrope woven from our own blind spots.
Resomodernity Café v4: The FOCA Axioms and Redefining Modernity
Posted: December 10, 2025 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: culture, philosophy, politics, systems, values 2 CommentsSequel 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 2 CommentsThe 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.”
ChatGPT Prompt
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.
Radical Centrism 