Featured Essays
Key Themes
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.
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.
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.