Featured Essays
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.
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’.
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.
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.
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?
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.
The Return of Fate
The more we have sought to bring nature’s processes under our control, the more we live within a lack of control.
Cultivating Purpose and Discernment in a Computational World
Reflections on how ill-prepared our traditional moralities are for the world in which we live. The speed and spread of computational power is forcing a revaluation of values that we are not equipped to handle.
Life at the Speed of Computation
A meditation on what happens to judgment and responsibility when action outpaces reflection.