Featured Essays
Dogged by Automatism
I’ve asked Claude to interview me based on various essays that I’ve written. It’s an interesting experiment in reversing the relationship of the prompt. Instead of me prompting Claude, I’ve asked Claude to read specific essays and ask me questions that help complicate and clarify my thinking. I present the result here with minor edits for clarity.
The Transformation of Purpose: Blumenberg and the Legitimacy of Modernity (Part 2)
What if the Enlightenment was not simply a new set of ideas but a new orientation of intelligence itself? Hans Blumenberg describes Modernity as a gradual turning from a world in which truth meant aligning ourselves with a purposeful cosmos to one in which knowledge became the power to anticipate and transform events. This first essay follows Blumenberg’s reading of Descartes and the emergence of “human self-assertion” as the motor of history.
Intelligence and the Discovery of Time
The Enlightenment did more than champion reason. It transformed humanity’s experience of time itself. As geology shattered the chronology of Genesis and time expanded in both directions, intelligence became something new: the capacity to orient ourselves toward an open future without relying on inherited certainty. In the age of artificial intelligence, that unfinished project deserves renewed attention.
What does it mean to call our era ‘unintelligent’?
The paradox is that AI enters history promising an expansion of intelligence just as our collective ability to imagine a future beyond the present seems to be collapsing. We have become extraordinarily capable of optimization, but increasingly uncertain about what we are optimizing toward.Intelligence, I suggest, is not merely the ability to produce better outcomes. It is the ability to transform what appears to be fate into possibility.
What does AI have to do with the Enlightenment?
AI arrives at the moment when our confidence in the future is weakening. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great wager that intelligence could transform necessity into possibility—that we could collectively create a better future. Artificial intelligence is the newest expression of that wager. But without a shared orientation toward the future, intelligence risks becoming acceleration without direction.
Where is intelligence? From Foedera Fati to Foedera Naturae
A philosophical exploration of intelligence through Lucretius’ De rerum natura, examining the clinamen, volition, contingency, and the transformation from fate (foedera fati) to nature (foedera naturae). Intelligence is understood not as a fixed property of minds or machines, but as the Universe’s adaptive capacity to turn necessity into possibility.
Stoic Assent, Emotion, and Reason: Intelligence as Elbow Room Within Necessity
Assent names the capacity to find some elbow room in the causal chain set off by the trigger. I am not a cylinder; I do not have necessity programmed into me beyond the necessity of experiencing the trigger. What I do with the triggering cause downstream requires my assent—consciously granted or not.
Computation All the Way Down?
Michel Serres describes humanity as a despecialized species engaged in a wager that our own universality and the universality of the cosmos are “of the same order.” This wager underlies our technologies, sciences, and increasingly our efforts to build artificial intelligence. Rather than reducing intelligence to computation or confining it to biological life, the essay proposes understanding intelligence as the adaptive expansion of contingency within necessity across the long history of energy, information, and effort.
Toward a History of Intelligence
As AI engineers operationalize definitions of intelligence at planetary scale, we are pressed to ask larger historical questions: Does intelligence have a history? This essay proposes “Histories of Intelligence” that reconnect cave paintings, Babylonian astronomy, navigation, spirituality, discernment, and AI within a single unfolding struggle to turn fate into possibility.
Intelligence and the Revaluation of Interruption: From Ant Roads to Enlightenment Roads
What separates the ‘roads’ of army ants from the roads of the Enlightenment? This essay explores intelligence not as a fixed function, but as life’s expanding capacity to turn fate into possibility. Moving from bacteria and ant colonies to Augustine, temptation, and British inland navigation, it argues that intelligence emerges through the widening gap between function and orientation—the opening of time itself into an unfinished field of possibilities.
The Enlightenment’s Wager: Intelligence, AI, and the Open Future
What if the Enlightenment was not merely a historical era, but an unfinished wager on intelligence itself? This essay explores AI, Bergson, David Deutsch, James Hutton, and the possibility that intelligence expands by turning fate into an open field of possibilities. Against polarization, monoculture, and ressentiment, it argues for a rejuvenated Enlightenment grounded in accompaniment, fallibilism, and the courage to leap beyond what we already believe we understand.
Artificial Instinct? Rethinking Intelligence Through Interruption
Is computation enough to explain intelligence? This essay argues that the difference between instinct and intelligence emerges in moments of interruption—when response becomes choice, and time opens to possibility.
Intelligence Against Instinct: Why Prediction Is Not Enough
Modern AI equates intelligence with prediction. But intelligence begins when instinct is interrupted—when necessity opens into possibility.
The Enlightenment and the Intellect
The Enlightenment did not simply give us better explanations—it gave us time. By stretching human awareness into deep pasts and open futures, it transformed intellect into a force that can confront fate itself. Now, as computation accelerates this legacy, the question is no longer whether we can understand the world, but whether our institutions can keep pace with what our intelligence has become.
Finding God in All Things
Written during a Jesuit retreat in Colorado, this essay reflects on spiritual direction, Ignatius’ call to find God in all things, and the Sermon on the Mount as a release of the spirit of the law from rigid codes. The Sermon becomes a meditation on excess, contingency, forgiveness, and the difficult work of orienting free energy toward the good.
Intelligence and Infrastructure
Ants build roads. Humans build infrastructures. The difference is not scale, but what those systems do to possibility. This essay explores how infrastructure reveals a deeper distinction in how life shapes—and limits—the future.
Intelligence and Instinct II: Contingency and Possibility
Between instinct and action, there is a moment—an interruption. This essay explores how intelligence emerges in that gap, not to return to purpose, but to reshape it, opening time to contingency and new possibilities.
Instinct and Intelligence
This essay begins a multi-part discussion of instinct and intelligence through Henri Bergson and Blaise Agüera y Arcas. Here the focus is Bergson’s Creative Evolution, where instinct and intelligence appear not as higher and lower stages of one capacity, but as divergent tendencies within life itself. Tool use, consciousness, and freedom come into view as movements of action rather than fixed essences.
Creative Evolution
What is intelligence? Not simply accuracy. Not merely survival. Intelligence is the adaptable and expansive capacity to make the future less like fate and more like an open field of possibility.
What Is Intelligence?
If intelligence is the ability to predict and influence the future, as Blaise Agüera y Arcas argues, then Nietzsche saw its deeper dynamic long ago. In Zarathustra, the will to truth becomes a will to power—the creative drive that makes the world intelligible so that it might bend and behave. From Babylonian astronomy to artificial intelligence, our growing computational power continues this movement, expanding humanity’s capacity to shape time itself.