The Anthropological Ceiling: Human Finitude as the Effective Limit of Civilizational Complexity

The binding limit on civilizational complexity in the modern regime is often not an ultimate physical constraint (energy, computation, thermodynamics), but an effective one: finite human and institutional capacity to sense, interpret, coordinate, correct, and justify complex social systems. Because administrative decision-making operates under persistent constraints of attention, information, time, and organizational throughput, complexity can become ungovernable well inside the physical envelope. This paper formalizes the anthropological ceiling as a set of capacity inequalities linking coordination burden, epistemic difficulty, error-to-burden conversion, and recovery load to finite governance bandwidth, yielding a portable framework for diagnosing when correction cannot keep pace with error generation. The framework clarifies why artificial intelligence is structurally sign-ambiguous: it can increase effective epistemic capacity and technical steerability while also expanding domain variety, tightening coupling and tempo, and shifting error costs. Even when AI relaxes the technical governability constraint, it can tighten a second ceiling: democratic legitimacy depends on intelligibility, accountability, reviewability, and contestability at scale, all of which can be degraded by opacity and infrastructural concentration.