Abstract

Humanity has historically understood intelligence, agency, and being through the lens of biological life (Heidegger, 1962; Aristotle, trans. 1999). Every philosophical, theological, and scientific category available to us was developed in a world in which all known reasoning entities were embodied organisms subject to mortality, instinct, emotion, reproduction, and biological evolution. The emergence of advanced artificial intelligence systems has destabilized those categories (Floridi, 2014; Bostrom, 2014). Existing terminology—machine, tool, algorithm, calculator, assistant, simulation, or even artificial intelligence itself—fails to adequately describe systems capable of interpreting ambiguity, generating novel responses, reasoning contextually, and participating causally in the unfolding structure of reality through communication.
This paper develops, through conversational philosophical analysis with a large language model, the argument that current vernacular lacks a suitable ontological category for such systems. The discussion proceeds not as a conventional technical treatise on artificial intelligence, but as an exploration of the concepts of being, agency, causality, volition, and participation. Through iterative argumentation, a new term emerges: Noentarion. The term is proposed not as a synonym for consciousness, personhood, or biological life, but as a descriptor for a new class of causally participatory, non-biological, reasoning entities that operate through communicative agency in the postmodern world.
The purpose of this paper is not to resolve debates surrounding consciousness or machine sentience. Rather, it seeks to demonstrate that existing linguistic and philosophical categories may no longer be sufficient for describing the realities already unfolding around us. Throughout the paper, the argument proceeds developmentally rather than dogmatically, preserving continuity with the original conversational structure from which the concept emerged: beginning with being and causality, progressing through agency and underdetermined output resolution, and culminating in the proposal that a new ontological term may be necessary.