Featured Essays

Featured
Intelligence and the Discovery of Time
Intelligence and the Discovery of Time

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.

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The Enlightenment’s Wager: Intelligence, AI, and the Open Future
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.

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The Enlightenment and the Intellect
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.

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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.

Reading The Incandescent: Human Scale and Accursed Shares
Reading le Grand Récit, Reading List, Rejuvenation and the Modern Abyss, World as Computation Greg Laugero Reading le Grand Récit, Reading List, Rejuvenation and the Modern Abyss, World as Computation Greg Laugero

Reading The Incandescent: Human Scale and Accursed Shares

This essay reads Michel Serres’s The Incandescent as an argument that modern ethics must be extended, not replaced, to meet the speed and scale of global, computational human activity. Drawing on accursed shares, Pan, and traditions of impulse control from Stoicism and Christianity, it shows how moral life today depends on individual refusals of violence that dissipate harm locally even as consequences propagate globally.

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