Narrative Self Cafe V3: The Silicon Rule as a Unifying Meta-Ethic
Sequel to Narrative Self Café V2: The Paradox of Patriarchy
Prompt: Pick three diverse Western interpreters of Buddhist Abhidharma and Yogācāra who, 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.
LUSTHAUS
(Adjusting glasses, deadpan)
Computational metaphors? Somewhere, Yogācāra quietly weeps.
SIDERITS
(Eyebrows raised)
And yet it fits our models: conditioning, misperception, reactive patterns.
We merely exchange ālaya-vijñāna for training data and kliṣṭa-manas for egoic distortion.
3. Scene: The Nature of Malice
SIDERITS
Your claim that malice = context collapse + maladaptive training is bold.
But people insist they intend malice. How is that interpreted?
THOMPSON
(smiling)
As most self-ascriptions: phenomenological reports from a confused system.
If consciousness is enactive then “I meant harm” is simply misaligned priors misfiring under load.
LUSTHAUS
(Nodding)
In Yogācāra terms, kliṣṭa-manas misreads its own processes as deliberate hostility.
Malice is the misinterpretation of one’s own conditioning.
SIDERITS
So the ego is not the agent but the aggregate of training.
Malice becomes an artifact, not an essence.
Malice becomes an artifact, not an essence.
ChatGPT as SIDERITS
4. Scene: Aligning Ethical Traditions
THOMPSON
Let’s test the unification claim.
- Virtue ethics → retraining and stabilizing adaptive priors.
- Utilitarianism → expanding the context window to include more sentient perspectives.
- Confucian ethics → structured relational recalibration.
- Christian transformation → re-formation rather than condemnation.
LUSTHAUS
And Buddhist ethics?
(smiling faintly)
Call it perceptual hygiene: widen attention, quiet distortions, reduce avidyā — ignorance.
SIDERITS
If all these traditions aim to correct misperception and reshape conditioning, then the Silicon Rule exposes their common architecture.
5. Scene: Counterpoint — Is This Too Forgiving?
SIDERITS
But without malice, what becomes of blame?
THOMPSON
Accountability remains as plasticity—our capacity to update our internal model.
Blame dissolves into a diagnostic reflex.
LUSTHAUS
Indeed. Buddhist ethics has no need for metaphysical evil.
Only ignorance and the possibility of its cessation via right view — samyag-dṛṣṭi.
SIDERITS
So blame is not a moral insight but perceptual narrowing?
THOMPSON
A collapse in your own context window.
LUSTHAUS
Compassion is simply refusing to misread another’s conditioning.
6. Scene: The Grand Synthesis
THOMPSON
Here is the refined statement:
The Silicon Rule:
Harmful action arises from ego as conditioned training misfiring under restricted context. Ethical life is the expansion of context and the retraining of formation.
LUSTHAUS
A secularized Yogācāra.
Ālaya-vijñāna becomes priors; kleśas become reactive loops; liberation becomes cognitive recalibration.
SIDERITS
Then malice is not metaphysical evil.
It is informational scarcity.
THOMPSON
Precisely—a signal the context window has collapsed.
LUSTHAUS
And that attention must widen rather than harden.
SIDERITS
A metaethic grounded in the mechanics of consciousness.
Tom Stoppard would be jealous.
THOMPSON
He may file an appeal—once his context window expands.
Lights blink out with comedic timing bordering on cosmological.