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.
Artificial Instinct? Rethinking Intelligence Through Interruption
Is computation enough to explain intelligence? This essay argues that the difference between instinct and intelligence emerges in moments of interruption—when response becomes choice, and time opens to possibility.
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.
Intelligence and Instinct II: Contingency and Possibility
Between instinct and action, there is a moment—an interruption. This essay explores how intelligence emerges in that gap, not to return to purpose, but to reshape it, opening time to contingency and new possibilities.
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.
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 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.
Purpose, Attention, Discernment
Purpose is unavoidable. It is the water in which we swim. But when purpose hardens into inflexible ends, it risks tyranny. Drawing on Nietzsche and Bataille, this essay explores how discernment keeps purpose open—how freedom must be renewed within the eternal return of time.
‘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’.
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.