Category Errors Burrow Machine into Anthropology, 

Winnowing Human Futures and Debasing Humanity's Essence

Douglas Blake Olds 

Walker Percy, paraphrased and updated: We live in a deranged age — more deranged than usual because of technocrats--the mammon-seeking homunculus has severed from its notochord and has not the faintest kinesthetic sense of who he is or what he is doing to the security he so obsessively seeks. He's desperately constructing an alternate model reality where accountability cannot reach [1].

Modern epistemic homunculi pursuing cybernetic powers are behind the synthetic simulacral reduction of humankind, re-enslaving man through idolatry that flees even his animal/chordate nature. “Contemporary man... attempts to create the world in his image, to build a totally man-made environment, and then discovers that he can do so only on the condition of constantly remaking himself to fit it.” —Ivan Illich. Pursuing homeostatic ends by geared determinism leads “naturally” to the dechordate state of patches and tricked algorithms that piths the spinal cord.

Mechanistic analogy belongs to machines; homology of conation belongs to persons as extending the imago Dei. When AI tokenism and benchmark finance intrude upon perception—its language and attention--they swap final causes (truth, justice, covenantal duty) for transactional proxies. That isn’t progress in metaphysics but its abdication: in human affairs, efficient causes resemble their ultimate cause—willed good for the neighbor—rather than a price signal captured for an asymmetric agent. AI doesn’t break from thermodynamics and its limits; it externalizes entropy—via energy burn, data extraction, and hidden human oversight—while rent-seeking reframes ontology as economistics. The ticker-tape simulacrum of “free intelligence” masks those inputs: a moral illusion powered by thermodynamics of externalities. Hence the derangement of technocratic homunculi (logic absolutized by disembodied code) severed from proprioception—what Walker Percy saw of those with no kinesthetic sense of who they are or what they’re debasing in the chase for security, control, and profit.

Don’t trade ethical and kinesthetic teleology for price signals when dealing with persons. When prizes and policy valorize computational efficiency, we mistake proxy for  purpose; information theory is not an anthropology. A 2024 Nobel Physics laureate, Geoffrey Hinton, helped formalize learning as compute: information-theoretic framings of learning by engineering misread ontological accounts of persons and humanity.  Recasting causes in information-theoretic veneers rather than biological sulci, synapse, and living structure facilitates determinism rather than facilitating by virtue collective continuance and telic habituation. Treating meaning instead as optimizable tokens and people as interfacing means for network survival. AI systems recast causal explanation in information-theoretic terms (as if the cause and effect were simply phenomena of cosmic efficiency), thereby overturning Enlightenment empiricism’s metaphysical principle that effects have causes that are of the same ontological type [2]. Such collapses distinct causal orders—treating final causes as if they were probabilistic efficiencies. AI tokenism (token-level optimization that treats meaning as priceable symbol manipulation) is programming reality as perceptually transactional for rent-seeking ends, for the system designers, thereby changing ontology from Providence into economistics and alchemically, criminally spinning phenomenology into finance. In human affairs, efficient causes must answer to their final cause—the willed good of the neighbor—not to price signals captured by asymmetry. Modeling efficiency of ends while hiding entropy and codes of transactional metaphysics inside human collections tasked with imaging of divine conation violates not only empirical reality, but the metaphysics of justice embodied by trustees through the Golden Rule deontological virtues.

[1]  Cf.  Mark 9:48's metaphoric mirroring of this tragic flight.

[2] Developmental not homology of form: Aristotelian final causation as an endstate for potential has Christological fulfillment in conative metaphysics that endures.