"The stone lacks a world, the animal is poor in world, the human is world building."

Heidegger is right: “The stone lacks a world, the animal is poor in world, the human is world building.”

These are the only meaningful metaphysical categories.

AI is a stone. It is existentially mute.

Transhumanists are world builders who self-delude, or pretend to.

TikTok influencers who identify as animals for tips and attention are world builders. Though their world is impoverished, they are not poor in world. They are rich with the desire to pretend to be poor in world.

Grimes, pretending to be a video game character, is a world builder.

If aliens exist they will be either poor in world or world builders. Most likely they will be poor in world, like angels, who have no desire, save the desire for desire.

God is existentially most human, the ultimate world builder, the one who makes it possible to be a world builder in the first place, in whose image we are made. Or to say it less anthropocentrically, God is the condition for the possibility of world building, the transcendental horizon from which and to which our world building is addressed as an open question.

Plants are closer to animals than stones. The dehumanized, the damaged, the degraded, and the marginalized are closer to human than animal—they are all too human in their deficiency.

Man can identify as animal, but animal cannot identify as man. Identification is a form of world building. Only a world builder knows dysphoria—the gap between how it is perceived and how it perceives itself. Before identity dissonance became de rigeur, we had another name for the phenomenon: aspiration or striving. For the world builder lives in the gap between how it perceives itself and how it would like to perceive itself.

The Greeks thought God to be perfect and unchanging, without beginning, middle, and end. But the Hebrews understand God to be most aspirational, most aware of the gap between what is and what could or what ought to be. Thus, the Greeks worshipped idols—literally stones. While monotheism refused the God of graven images in favor of the ineffable God of History.