Ontological Freedom and Its Biological Manifestation: Indigence, Neoteny, and the Interval Against Computationalism and Transhumanism

Contemporary AI discourse often presupposes a computationalist picture of intelligence: cognition as software-like information processing, detachable from embodiment. This paper argues that such a picture is category-mistaken for understanding human freedom and the kind of intelligence that freedom makes possible. Drawing on philosophical anthropology and evolutionary-developmental biology—especially neoteny, Gehlen’s Mängelwesen, Plessner’s eccentric positionality, and Portmann’s “extrauterine year”—I defend a thesis: the human is free because the human is biologically unfinished. This incompleteness is not a defect to be engineered away but a constitutive condition that manifests biologically as indigence (lack of a closed instinctual program), phenomenologically as an interval of hesitation between stimulus and response, and culturally as the necessity to create institutions, norms, and techniques. Integrating the ontological distinction between Causa Primera and Causa Segunda developed in LA CAUSA PRIMERA, I sharpen the gap between calculation (optimization within a given objective) and decision (authorship of response under instruction-deficit). I conclude by challenging transhumanist aspirations that treat vulnerability and finitude as problems to solve: an “immortal” artificial general intelligence could optimize objectives yet remain ontologically indifferent, lacking the embodied stakes that make reasons matter.