Featured Essays
Intelligence and the Revaluation of Interruption: From Ant Roads to Enlightenment Roads
What separates the ‘roads’ of army ants from the roads of the Enlightenment? This essay explores intelligence not as a fixed function, but as life’s expanding capacity to turn fate into possibility. Moving from bacteria and ant colonies to Augustine, temptation, and British inland navigation, it argues that intelligence emerges through the widening gap between function and orientation—the opening of time itself into an unfinished field of possibilities.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Fate, Computation and the End of Christian Time
This brief essay traces how Enlightenment calculation reshaped humanity’s experience of time, fate, and foresight—from biblical chronology to geological deep time and modern predictive control. Rather than condemning the Enlightenment, it argues for renewing its legacy by learning how to live responsibly within the futures we now help to compute.
The Cave Paintings of Tito Bustillo
Reflections on my May 2025 visit to the caves of Tito Bustillo in Spain’s Asturias region.
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.
New Gods for a New Time
The Enlightenment pushed God and gods to the sidelines, but as our time continues to evolve, are we letting them back in?
Enlightenment, Negation, Re-Reading
Cartesian Infinity and Certainty
Disconnecting the Cogito from the Aufklarung
