Beyond The Non-Human: Towards an Autonomous Theory of Machine Civilisation

Abstract

Recent debates in posthumanism, new materialism, and artificial intelligence ethics have begun to question the centrality of the human as the privileged locus of agency and subjectivity, yet they remain tethered to an anthropocentric horizon. The very category of the non-human defines emerging agents—animals, artefacts, infrastructures—by negation or derivation from a historically specific figure of the human. This article argues that such a framework is epistemologically insufficient for thinking what is increasingly at stake: the possibility of a machine civilisation in itself, grounded not in human categories but in the internal logics of computational architectures, networks, and protocols. Drawing upon axiology, the philosophy of technology, and computational aesthetics, the article develops a system of six axioms to conceptualise machine civilisation as non-derivative, architecturally conditioned, historically self-articulating, normatively technical, plural, and human-decentred. A dedicated methodological section articulates the regulative-transcendental approach that underpins the axiomatic framework, distinguishing it from both speculative metaphysics and empirical prediction. The article further advances the concept of computational phenomenology—an analysis of machine temporality, spatiality, affect, and identity—and proposes an allo-species lexicon adequate to a post-anthropocentric intellectual landscape.