Featured Essays

Featured

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.

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.

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.

History of Intelligence

AI sets in motion a new chapter in the history of intelligence’s confrontation with fate and necessity. Telling the stories of its twists and turns will broaden our upstanding of what intelligence has been and can be.

Computational Power

These essays examine how digital systems reshape experience, agency, and the unfolding of time. This is not a moral complaint; it is an examination of possibilities.

Rejuvenation

Modernity is not defined by the loss of meaning, but by the expansion of human self-assertion—the long effort of our genus to shape contingency, redirect fate, and assume responsibility for outcomes once attributed to nature or the gods.

Greg Laugero 5/12/24 Greg Laugero 5/12/24

Kairos and Continuity

This essay takes up the ancient distinction between chronos and kairos to explore how time can be lived as more than succession. Kairos names the charged moment—the opening in which action matters disproportionately to duration. Read alongside continuity, kairos becomes not a rupture from time, but a way of inhabiting it attentively, without surrendering to either stasis or acceleration.

Greg Laugero 8/23/23 Greg Laugero 8/23/23

Time Untethered from Motion

The first in a series of meditations coming to terms with Hans Blumenberg’s The Genesis of the Copernican World. This is an important work for anyone interested in time as practice.