Featured Essays
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.
What Is Religion?
At some point, anyone who seriously reflects on their place in the world encounters a deeper question than what to do next. The question is whether we are being called—called to attend to something that exceeds us and yet moves through us. This essay explores religion not as belief or law, but as a cultivated openness to purpose arriving from beyond the self. It argues that discernment, not certainty, is what keeps purpose from hardening into dogma, and that metanoia names an orientation to the future that remains alive to what has not yet taken shape.
Revaluation of Values
What looks like a loss of meaning may instead be a revaluation of values—one forced by technologies that move faster than our ability to localize responsibility or foresee consequences.
The Growing Gap Between Purpose and Discernment
We are not facing a collapse of meaning, but a growing gap between purpose and discernment. As computational power accelerates action faster than ethical habits can keep pace, disorientation hardens into resentment or withdrawal. This essay reframes our moment as a problem of tempo—and offers practical disciplines for learning to judge consequences in motion.
Practice: Discerning Accursed Shares
A practice of time that focuses on discerning how good intentions can create excessive energies that outrun good intentions. We live in a world where consequences spread faster than we can assess or predict. Learning to discern accursed shares as they happen will help us better navigate our growing power.
Practice: Ressentiment Check
Ressentiment is not a psychological weakness or a moral flaw. It is a signal that judgment has outrun discernment. This practice offers a way to notice when critique hardens into condemnation, suspend withdrawal that feels like moral clarity, and reopen ethical engagement in a world moving faster than inherited values can keep pace.
Exo-Darwinism and the Compression of Time in Michel Serres’ The Incandescent
Modern technology does more than accelerate life—it reshapes how time itself is experienced. Drawing on Michel Serres’ reflections in The Incandescent, this essay explores how intention, speed, and exo-Darwinism compress the past into background, turning history into a resource rather than a place we still inhabit.
Practice: Repentance or Metanoia?
Metanoia is not repentance by another name. It is an orientation to time that delays meaning, resists judgment, and learns by moving forward. Drawing on Mark’s Gospel, this practice explores how patience, listening, and restraint can open a different experience of the future—one not governed by ressentiment or premature certainty.
A Crisis of Purpose: Panurgy in Michel Serres’ L’Incandescent
Michel Serres names our moment a crisis of purpose rather than meaning. In L’Incandescent, he calls it panurgy: the human power to act at the scale of the world itself. As computation accelerates and intelligence becomes a wager, fate gives way to responsibility—and purpose outruns its bearings.
Fate, Computation, Purpose
What if our moment is not a crisis of meaning, but a crisis of purpose—one born from the ability to compute the future faster than the values meant to guide it?
Energy and Epiphany in the Later Works of Michel Serres
A brief reflection on Michel Serres’ understanding of our ongoing power to expand our understanding and harnessing of energy to overcome fate and destiny. He re-reads the experience of religion in this context.
Practice: The Origins of Life
What happens to our sense of time when we stare into the origins of life? This practice invites contemplation of emergence, contingency, and delayed order—where meaning, purpose, and consciousness have not yet arrived, and nothing is guaranteed.
Practice: Deep Dives
Deep dives are not about finishing books—they are about letting difficult ideas change how you experience time. This practice explores how sustained engagement with science, history, and philosophy can stretch certainty and widen the horizon of experience.
Out-Computing the Gods
This essay examines how the discovery of computation transformed humanity’s relationship to fate. Beginning with Babylonian astronomy, it shows how early techniques of prediction turned omens into foresight, allowing humans to anticipate and intervene in processes once attributed to the gods.
Reading The Incandescent: Human Scale and Accursed Shares
This essay reads Michel Serres’s The Incandescent as an argument that modern ethics must be extended, not replaced, to meet the speed and scale of global, computational human activity. Drawing on accursed shares, Pan, and traditions of impulse control from Stoicism and Christianity, it shows how moral life today depends on individual refusals of violence that dissipate harm locally even as consequences propagate globally.