From Vesica Press

The Person at the Boundary

Intelligence in a Person-Shaped Reality

The machines are getting smarter. And something unexpected is happening: the better they get, the more clearly they reveal what they are not.

AI writes, diagnoses, translates, consoles. It does nearly everything — as if it understood, as if it cared, as if it judged. And “as if” turns out to be a boundary that no advance has ever moved. The closer the simulation comes, the sharper the line.

In The Person at the Boundary, Alan McCann traces that line from three independent directions: the mathematics of formal systems, which prove — in 601 machine-checked theorems anyone can verify — exactly where computation stops; the Catholic understanding of the human person, which names what stands on the other side; and a working AI architecture he built, which discloses the boundary in running code. Three paths. One conclusion: reality is not machine-shaped, with persons as accidental passengers. Reality is person-shaped — and the most powerful formal systems ever built are the instruments revealing it.

Written in the wake of Pope Leo XIV’s landmark encyclical on artificial intelligence, this is both a report on a discovery and a guide to living with it: what to delegate and what to take back, how to raise children and build communities at the boundary, and why the question was never what can I do that the machine cannot? — but what am I that the machine is not?

You are more real than you think. This book shows you why — and what to do about it.

Ebook

$9.99

Publisher

Vesica Press