The Ontological Limits of Hybridity: Why Technological Extension Does Not Produce a Hybrid Human

The language of hybridity is widely used to describe relations between humans, artefacts, organisms, machines, cognitive tools, and artificial intelligence. This paper argues that such usage requires stricter ontological discipline. Through conceptual and categorial analysis, it treats hybrid as a result-term rather than a use-term: hybridity names a produced configuration arising from distinct constitutive sources, not the mere fact that one element supports, mediates, or extends another. The paper reconstructs major philosophical grammars of hybridity and develops a level-sensitive distinction between linguistic, biological, technical, functional, and subject-level claims. Its central thesis is the Subject–Artefact Non-Hybridity Principle: a human subject does not become ontologically hybrid with artefacts of human making merely because those artefacts extend, mediate, reorganise, or intensify human capacities. Strong hybridity requires co-constitution, not causal dependence, functional integration, prosthetic support, or technological intimacy. The paper applies this framework to cyborg embodiment and human–AI collaboration, arguing that technological extension does not by itself produce a hybrid human. It further identifies three recurrent errors in human–AI hybridity: derivative intelligence is not derivative consciousness; functional complexity is not ontological transition; and parasitic subsumption is not co-constitution. The contribution is a critical ontology of hybridity that preserves coherent biological and technical hybrids while resisting the inflation of human–technology relations into ontological fusion.