KEIRUIRON
The Geological Self-Phase Transition and the Evaporation of Subject and Object
Morohashi · A philosophical manifesto on AI, capital, infrastructure, and human agency
The question
What if AI does not need to take power to change the conditions under which human power can be exercised?
A person can retain the right to switch off a machine, while the work, services, and alternatives needed to live without it become harder to reconstruct. A company can keep making decisions for profit, while computational systems increasingly shape which investments are viable. A state can retain sovereignty, while competitive uncertainty pushes resources toward more computation.
No machine needs to issue an order. The people giving orders can become dependent on the systems they command.
The argument in one circuit
Computation produces outputs → people, firms, and states act on them → their actions reshape investment, labor, infrastructure, and institutions → that altered world determines the conditions for subsequent computation.
Keirui is the name this book gives to the emergent form of existence found in that recursive intellectual and material process. Its reproductive metabolism is not an AI system independently manufacturing copies of itself. It is the coupling through which computation helps shape the conditions that sustain, replace, and extend computation.
This entails a partial subsumption of capital's activity, not the disappearance of capital's own motives or ownership. It entails a change in the practical conditions of human agency, not the extinction of human consciousness or will.
Why the ground matters
The circuit has weight. It needs chips, power grids, cooling systems, water, land, financing, and skilled human labor. A new data center can reshape the next investment decision; a service reorganized around computational output can become harder to operate without it. Infrastructure carries past choices into future ones. The book calls this historically accumulated transformation the geological self-phase transition—not a measured physical phase transition or an inevitable destiny.
What the book does not claim
No proof of machine consciousness. No secret AI sovereign. No guarantee of endless expansion or human extinction. Shutting down remains physically possible; maintaining essential functions afterward may be another question. The book's appendix states the causal, institutional, and physical conditions under which its argument could be weakened.
The question of effective control
If the legal power to say “stop” survives, but the means to live and work after stopping have eroded, where does effective control reside?
KEIRUIRON is a complete Japanese philosophical work with an English translation of approximately 17,000 words, three parts, ten chapters, an analytical appendix, and 23 references. Publication, editorial, and translation-rights inquiries: contact Morohashi via X (@denno_yumin). Independent native-English literary editing and final reference verification remain pending.
This introductory text is available for online reading. The PDF original and complete manuscript are not distributed through this website. Any publicly viewable text may still be copied or printed.