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.
Inventing Behavior After the Neolithic: Michel Serres and the Moral Problem of Auto-Evolution
This essay introduces Michel Serres’ late philosophy by emphasizing its moral core rather than its metaphysics. Drawing on The Incandescent and le Grand Récit, it explores auto-evolution, violence, and the challenge of inventing moral orientation after the Neolithic age.
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.
Living with Our Intelligence
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.
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?
Metanoia and the Experience of Time: Beyond Repentance and the Practice of Change in Mark’s Gospel
This brief essay revisits metanoia in Mark’s Gospel as a radical change in our experience of time. This poetic reflection reframes one of Jesus’ first words — often mistranslated as ‘repent’ — as an invitation to loosen expectation and inhabit a time of possibilities.
Rejuvenation
Have we lost the power of rejuvenation? For a democracy to work, time needs to be oriented toward progress and continuous renewal.
Reading the Iliad: Wisdom and Violence
The first of an ongoing re-engagement with the Iliad. Here we have an untimely meditation that holds up the mirror of violence to a culture desparately in need of alternatives to vendettas.