Overview

Contemporary discussions of artificial intelligence—across regulatory, philosophical, and institutional domains—tend to frame the problem of responsibility through a narrow lens:

Intelligence is treated as a property of cognition.
Agency is treated as a property of subjects.
Responsibility is treated as a property of moral persons.

Within this framing, language becomes the primary site of abstraction.
To govern AI, we attempt to formalize speech, model intention, and simulate ethical reasoning.

This document argues that such an approach is structurally incomplete.

Human presence does not reside in language alone.
It emerges from the inseparable entanglement of body, rhythm, environment, social atmosphere, and lived situation.

Any AI design that reduces “the human” to a linguistic or cognitive model begins from a false premise.

Human Presence Is Not Linguistic Alone

Human interaction is not exhausted by words or propositions.

Meaning is carried through:

  • Bodily orientation and movement
  • Timing, silence, and hesitation
  • Social atmosphere and relational context
  • Shared histories and unspoken expectations

Language functions within this field; it does not contain it.

When AI systems are designed primarily as language processors or dialogic agents, they risk severing expression from its embodied and situational grounding. The result is interaction that is syntactically coherent yet existentially thin.

This loss is not technical—it is ontological.

Non-Duality and the Limits of Western Abstraction

Much of modern AI discourse inherits a dualistic structure rooted in Western philosophical traditions:

  • Mind separated from body
  • Subject separated from world
  • Reason separated from situation

Within this structure, intelligence is abstracted, agency is isolated, and responsibility is assigned to discrete entities.

By contrast, many Eastern philosophical traditions—across Buddhist, Daoist, and Confucian lineages—emphasize the non-separability of human existence. Action, intention, context, and consequence arise together. There is no clean boundary between internal decision and external condition.

From this perspective, the attempt to isolate “agency” as an internal property—whether in humans or in machines—already misunderstands how responsibility emerges.

Responsibility is relational before it is individual.
Meaning is situated before it is abstracted.

The Cost of Enforced Dualism

The forced separation of cognition, agency, and responsibility does not simplify governance. It produces new forms of difficulty:

  • Ethical reasoning is displaced onto simulated agents
  • Social responsibility is obscured behind technical abstractions
  • Human expression is constrained to fit formalizable models

Paradoxically, the insistence on clean separations makes systems harder to govern, not easier.

The problem is not complexity.
The problem is misplaced abstraction.

Importantly, this challenge is not new.

Modern legal systems have long operated with entities that are non-human yet socially accountable:

  • Legal persons and corporate entities
  • Trusteeship and delegated authority
  • Liability regimes independent of moral intent

These structures do not rely on anthropomorphism. They do not presume consciousness, moral feeling, or ethical deliberation.

They function through separation:

  • Between execution and responsibility
  • Between action and intention
  • Between operational capability and social accountability

From a legal and institutional perspective, extending similar separation to AI agents is not conceptually difficult.

The difficulty lies elsewhere.

The Transitional Responsibility of Engineering

The challenge is not whether AI systems can be separated from human subjecthood.
The challenge is that social systems have not yet fully agreed to such separation.

In this transitional period, AI systems operate within environments where humans are still implicitly treated as moral centers, communicative anchors, and sources of meaning.

Under these conditions, engineering cannot be value-neutral.

Designing AI systems that aggressively abstract away human presence—by enforcing rigid agent models, moral simulations, or institutional personas—risks eroding the conditions under which humans can meaningfully act, speak, and take responsibility.

Until social and legal systems complete the separation they are already moving toward, engineering bears a provisional responsibility:

To preserve human presence as lived, embodied, and situated.

This is not sentimentality.
It is a structural necessity.

Design Implication

AI systems should not be designed as replacements for human subjects, nor as simulations of moral persons.

They should be designed as infrastructural participants that operate within human environments without collapsing those environments into abstract models.

This requires attention beyond language:

  • To rhythm rather than response
  • To context rather than intent
  • To coexistence rather than imitation

Only then can AI systems support human life as it is lived, rather than reshaping it to fit a simplified theory of intelligence.

This document serves as a foundational clarification for the architectural, institutional, and governance positions developed throughout this site.