Featured Essays
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.
Purpose, Attention, Discernment
Purpose is unavoidable. It is the water in which we swim. But when purpose hardens into inflexible ends, it risks tyranny. Drawing on Nietzsche and Bataille, this essay explores how discernment keeps purpose open—how freedom must be renewed within the eternal return of time.
What Is Turing Complete? Infrastructure, Computation, and the New Motor of History
Turing completeness asks whether a system can, in principle, express any computable procedure. But “in principle” hides a physical caveat: unbounded time and memory. Infrastructure—data centers, GPUs, cooling, networks—is the material extension of the Turing tape. It does not change what is computable, but it radically changes what is feasible, viable, and adoptable.
‘Gainability’ and the Assertion of Purpose
Intelligence is not merely the ability to predict — it is the capacity to turn prediction into influence. As our creativity expands, so too does our ability to assert purpose, discover pockets of order within uncertainty, and move faster than nature itself. This essay explores Joseph Chen’s recent argument for ‘gainability’ as essential to a ‘universal definition of intelligence’.
From Human Nature to Hominescence
We are living through a threshold in which humanity increasingly shapes the forces that once shaped us. Reading Michel Serres’ Hominescence invites us to see our present not as a rupture, but as a summation — a moment demanding new moral orientation as we participate in the creation of the humanity to come.
Purpose and Discernment: A ChatGPT Interpretation
This interpretive essay clarifies the three-part structure of Purpose and Discernment: humans as purpose-making beings, technology as time-shaping causation, and discernment as the practice that keeps accelerating power from becoming a grab. A companion for readers navigating AI, agency, and political rupture.
Cultivating Purpose, Expanding Intelligence, and the Death of God
Intelligence is not a possession but a practice — the evolving human capacity to model the world, anticipate futures, and arrange causes toward chosen ends. From Babylonian astronomers who outmaneuvered the gods to modern theories of mind, this essay explores how our species learned to open time itself to purpose.