AI and Posthuman Civilizations: An Essay in Pluralistic Ontology

This essay is a work of near-term philosophical futurism: it maps the possibility space of the imminent, AI-infused future and evaluates its branches against a meta-normative standard. That standard is the principle of plenitude, drawn from Neoplatonic metaphysics and Leibniz’s compossibility framework, and here transposed from an ontological thesis into an aesthetic criterion on which a future is the more desirable the more kinds and modes of being it instantiates and conserves. Two constraints, valence and distribution, keep the criterion from licensing a world of variegated misery. To determine which futures are live options, the essay develops an ontology of intelligence as substrate-neutral and an ontology of consciousness as grounded in the structural features of biological life, autopoiesis, homeostasis, sentience, and interoception, and argues that contemporary AI is likely to become highly intelligent while remaining non-conscious. These commitments, together with current scaling trajectories, generate a fivefold menu of futures: full automation without augmentation, augmentation or merger, controlled deceleration, machine succession, and radical bioconservatism. Ranking these against the plenitude framework, and supplementing it with arguments from morphological freedom, disability ethics, and modal parity, the essay defends a compossible synthesis of automation, merger, and deceleration that holds the human, its descendants, and novel artificial kinds together within a single, well-distributed order of being.