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.
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.
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.
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.
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.