We learn to navigate the world by drawing lines through it. Self and other. Mind and world. Human and machine. These distinctions help us function, the way handrails help us walk down unfamiliar stairs. They stabilise action and expectation. But they are not where reality begins. They are not built into the fabric of existence. They are ways of speaking that make a continuous, shifting world easier to handle.
Language is doing most of this work. We do not simply use language; we are shaped by it. It teaches us where to draw lines, what counts as a thing, what counts as a cause, what counts as responsibility. Over time, these lines feel solid, even natural. But they are tools, not truths. They are temporary cuts made in something that never really stops flowing. Beneath words and categories, life is not divided into neat boxes. It is a continuum of processes, signals, bodies, environments, and feedback loops, all affecting each other all the time.
Technology extends this pattern. Every tool is a frozen decision about how the world should be divided and handled. Language technologies, especially generative ones, take this further. They do not understand the world; they reproduce patterns of how we have talked about it. They work by prediction, not by presence. That makes them powerful, but also narrow. They reflect one definition of intelligence, built around speed, scale, and pattern matching. That definition is not wrong, but it is very small.
Human intelligence is not a thing you can isolate and copy. It is not an object. It is a field effect. It arises from bodies in environments, from memory and delay, from error and correction, from culture and history. Remove those conditions and you still get output, but you lose understanding. The mistake is thinking that because our descriptions work, they must be what reality is. When language and technology forget they are interfaces, we start living inside our own abstractions. The task is not to abandon distinctions, but to remember that they are provisional, and to keep them flexible enough to let reality speak back.
Daedelus Kite 