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.

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.

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.

Greg Laugero 1/5/26 Greg Laugero 1/5/26

Practice: Deep Dives

Deep dives are not about finishing books—they are about letting difficult ideas change how you experience time. This practice explores how sustained engagement with science, history, and philosophy can stretch certainty and widen the horizon of experience.

Greg Laugero 12/17/25 Greg Laugero 12/17/25

Saving the Phenomenon: Panchrone, Assembly Theory and Thinking in Time

A brief exploration of how theoretical physicists such as Lee Smolin and Sara Imari Walker are not only rethinking time but changing our capacity for experience.

Greg Laugero 1/23/24 Greg Laugero 1/23/24

Birth of Physics - Michel Serres

Michel Serres makes Lucretius our contemporary. Published just before Le Parasite, Le Naissance de la physique was a key moment in the history of chaos theory and the ability to see order emerging from disorder -- a reversal of the Enlightenment's formula. Serres finds in Lucretius' De rerum natura a pre-Modern text that offers a more relevant way of thinking about order and disorder free of eternal natural laws.