THE FIRST CAUSE. A Philosophical Symphony in Five Movements with Overture

La Causa Primera argues that artificial intelligence should not be understood primarily as a technical problem of engineering, regulation, or efficiency, but as an ontological threat to human agency. The treatise develops this claim through a systematic architecture in five movements. It first argues that freedom is not an ethical ideal or a political right, but the fundamental ontological structure of the human being. This freedom becomes visible as indigence, interval, and burden: the human being is biologically unfinished, exposed to a gap between stimulus and response, and condemned to bear the weight of judgement. On that basis, the work reconstructs the history of prosthesis as the necessary exteriorisation through which humans compensate for their constitutive lack. Yet every prosthesis is ambivalent: it extends and limits at once. This ambivalence reaches a critical threshold in contemporary AI, especially in large language models, whose opacity, scale, and simulated linguistic competence enable what the treatise names the capture of the medium. The result is not merely misinformation or bias, but the gradual erosion of the capacities to initiate, judge, and answer. Against this, the final movements develop an ethics and politics of resistance centred on the Face, reflective judgement, signature, and sovereignty. The treatise concludes by proposing sovereignty as a practical and institutional architecture for preserving imputable judgement, responsible action, and the distinctly human capacity to act as First Cause under the regime of the Black Box.