Featured Essays

Featured

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.

The Return of Fate

The more we have sought to bring nature’s processes under our control, the more we live within a lack of control.

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 6/10/26 Greg Laugero 6/10/26

Stoic Assent, Emotion, and Reason: Intelligence as Elbow Room Within Necessity

Assent names the capacity to find some elbow room in the causal chain set off by the trigger. I am not a cylinder; I do not have necessity programmed into me beyond the necessity of experiencing the trigger. What I do with the triggering cause downstream requires my assent—consciously granted or not.