Featured Essays

Featured

The Enlightenment did more than champion reason. It transformed humanity’s experience of time itself. As geology shattered the chronology of Genesis and time expanded in both directions, intelligence became something new: the capacity to orient ourselves toward an open future without relying on inherited certainty. In the age of artificial intelligence, that unfinished project deserves renewed attention.

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.

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.

Greg Laugero 7/22/26 Greg Laugero 7/22/26

Dogged by Automatism

I’ve asked Claude to interview me based on various essays that I’ve written. It’s an interesting experiment in reversing the relationship of the prompt. Instead of me prompting Claude, I’ve asked Claude to read specific essays and ask me questions that help complicate and clarify my thinking. I present the result here with minor edits for clarity.

Greg Laugero 7/1/26 Greg Laugero 7/1/26

What does it mean to call our era ‘unintelligent’?

The paradox is that AI enters history promising an expansion of intelligence just as our collective ability to imagine a future beyond the present seems to be collapsing. We have become extraordinarily capable of optimization, but increasingly uncertain about what we are optimizing toward.Intelligence, I suggest, is not merely the ability to produce better outcomes. It is the ability to transform what appears to be fate into possibility.

Greg Laugero 6/17/26 Greg Laugero 6/17/26

Where is intelligence? From Foedera Fati to Foedera Naturae

A philosophical exploration of intelligence through Lucretius’ De rerum natura, examining the clinamen, volition, contingency, and the transformation from fate (foedera fati) to nature (foedera naturae). Intelligence is understood not as a fixed property of minds or machines, but as the Universe’s adaptive capacity to turn necessity into possibility.