Featured Essays
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.
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.
Powers of Time - David Lapoujade
One of the best explanations of Bergson’s thought. Lapoujade connects duration with motion and in the process exposes why Bergson’s thought is more than conceptual philosophy. It is the transformation of how we experience ourselves and the world.
Time Out of Joint
How do we compose time?
Civitas Peregrina and Affirmation
A Tenth of a Second - Jimena Canales
Modernity didn’t just apply technologies of measuring time at more minute levels. Modernity and time measurement are bound together much more intimately.
