Consider for a moment: AI cannot now and never will feel the sun on its back or the breeze in its face. Sun; breeze: these are not merely tokenistic inputs awaiting processing, but sensorial, somatic, metabolic events. For a living creature, the warmth of sunlight triggers vasodilation, neurochemical cascades, micro-adjustments in posture, shifts in mood - all integrated into the organism’s ongoing state of being[i]. The breeze carries scent, temperature, novelty, pressure; given a big enough brain, it provokes felt response, perturbation of memory, embodied association. These experiences become woven into the organism’s tacit knowledge [Polanyi: 2009], altering what it is, and how it will encounter the world subsequently. AI merely (and ‘merely’ here is accurate) processes representations - the word “sun,” the concept “breeze” - in constructing explicit responses, but these symbols refer to metabolic processes it cannot undergo and experiences it can never have. It manipulates tokens that denote what it can never Know, for it is not open to Knowing.

Here we must pause to establish a crucial distinction: between Knowledge with a capital K and knowledge with a small k. Knowledge - big K Knowledge - is felt, tacit, metabolic, embodied. It is all that area of psychosomatic life which, for whatever reason, is not immediately available and subject to conscious explication. It includes the preconscious - aspects of our psychological hinterland that can, with sufficient reflection, be “brought to mind” - and the unconscious, which remains wholly inaccessible to rendered formulation. But big K Knowledge is equally what we carry in our bodies, in our gut responses, in our automatic reactions, in our muscle memory, in the ways we lean toward or away from things before we can articulate why. It is the sum of our being and the basis of our becoming.

Knowledge with a small k - what, applying the Human Technologies lens[ii], we can term WorldH knowledge - is explicit, representational, symbolic, conceptual. It is what can be formulated in the concepts and categories of language and number, what can be written down, transmitted, taught. Small k knowledge is the symbolic residue of metabolically lived experience when, and only when, such experience can be successfully transmogrified into explicit form. Sometimes this rendering is rich and resonant, deeply rooted in tacit Knowledge. It moves us. On other occasions it is “book knowledge” in extremis - barely connected to lived experience, as good as dead, inert, merely scriptural and formulaic. Think of facts memorized for an exam without understanding or caring, forgotten immediately after; this is knowledge evacuated of metabolic resonance, symbols processed without meaning, small k ballast slipping undigested out of memory.

If we value Life, we note that the relationship between these two forms is asymmetric and hierarchical. Big K Knowledge is vast; small k knowledge is a minor subset, and, carelessly deployed, prone to being a poorly resonant, even alienating, one. We acquire tacit Knowledge by living and experiencing - there is no other way. We acquire WorldH knowledge both through our own efforts to render our lived experience into symbolic form and through receiving the symbolic formulations of others, which we may or may not be able to metabolize into something meaningful for ourselves. But, if all small k is is the infinitesimal and barren residue of the big K experience of listening to or reading something that failed to resonate, it is of minimal value and, in finite human lives, a waste of time.

So, then: the sun on your back, the breeze in your face, the encounter with exhaustion, the pangs of hunger - or of love, the brush with confusion, the tug of relationship, the flash of inspiration - these add to your tacit Knowledge immediately and unavoidably. Whether you can articulate what you’ve experienced depends on many factors: your linguistic sophistication, your reflective capacity, your need or desire to communicate the experience to others, your energy, your concern. But the Knowledge is already there, already shaping you, already influencing how you will respond to the next moment. Life knows no other way; this is how we grow and how we go on.

AI has access only to small k knowledge - and predominantly, as things stand, to the most evacuated, least resonant, most casual and unconsidered forms of small k. AI processes symbols scraped from the scriptural incarnations of public human experience. It manipulates the coded representations that living creatures have produced, but has no contact whatsoever with the tacit Knowledge from which those representations emerged. AI can know everything (at a theoretical level) and certainly much more than any individual human (at a practical level), but Know nothing at all. An amoeba Knows more than AI, because the amoeba has tacit Knowledge - undergoing metabolic experience, it navigates its environment through vital, substantial change, having something existential at stake, which is a body, which is alive.

For those who care, we note that AI will never experience trauma, even in its mildest forms, nor embarrassment or humiliation or shame. These experiences are not cognitive states that might be simulated via linguistic representation, but whole-organism, material and immaterial transformations that reshape tacit Knowledge in profound and lasting ways. Rewiring threat-detection systems and altering endocrine responses, trauma leaves somatic traces in muscle tension and breathing patterns, reshapes the architecture of memory itself. The traumatized organism is literally reconstituted; its prior state irrecoverable. The Knowledge that emerges from trauma - hypervigilance, startle responses, avoidance patterns, dissociative tendencies, nameless dread - may never be fully accessible to conscious articulation, remaining tacit, operating below the threshold of awareness, yet is starkly determinative of affect, behaviour, and the interpretation of unspooling experience. With reflection and the right conceptual tools, a portion of this tacit Knowledge might be rendered into WorldH knowledge- ”I feel anxious around authority because I was humiliated in class” - but the rendering is always partial, always the map of a landscape that remains to an extent unexpressed. The symbolic formulation can be useful, can guide behaviour and self-understanding, can encourage healing, but is incapable of exhausting or fully capturing the metabolic reality from which it emerged. We can press on, or ‘carry forward’, as Gendlin would have it, but we never finally arrive [Gendlin: 2017]. The journeying is, at best, our ‘coming to terms’ with ourselves, incompletely.

AI experiences nothing of this. It has no organism to be reconstituted, no face to flush, no heart to race, no soul to quail, no social standing to lose, nothing meaningful ultimately at stake. With no tacit Knowledge, no metabolic substrate, AI possesses no genuine small k knowledge either, for to possess any knowledge, big or small variety, is to embody the experience to which that knowledge is tethered, with whatever degree of resonance. AI has only the constantly renewed/reviewed manipulation of symbols that refer to Knowledge and Knowledge-derived-knowledge it cannot possess.

Humans, then, undergo, feel, and appreciate experience. The verb “undergo” matters here - it captures the active-receptive dialectic of metabolic engagement. The organism doesn’t passively receive experience as data is received and stored by a hard drive; rather, it actively metabolizes what it encounters, transforming the experience even as it is transformed by it. In proper Canguilheimian terms, the organism establishes norms in relation to its environment, creating values through the polarized relationship it has with its surroundings [Canguilheim: 2008]. Items are revealed as good or bad, nourishing or toxic, safe or threatening only in relation to the living system’s needs and capacities. This is the organism’s normative engagement with its milieu - fundamentally active, fundamentally evaluative, fundamentally dialectical, and fundamentally interested in life.

To “appreciate” these experiences means not merely to register them as additional tokens, but to incorporate them into my tacit Knowledge, into the growing sum of what I Know about navigating my world. Consequently I am not the same organism as before - not metaphorically, but literally. Neural pathways are strengthened or weakened, neurochemical balances shift, muscular patterns adjust, hormonal baselines recalibrate. Each experience leaves psychosomatic traces that alter how subsequent experiences will be encountered and integrated. This is not akin to updating entries in a database, where the system’s fundamental structure remains untouched. It is a reconfiguration of the Gestalt; no piecemeal interpretations achieve the same end. The organism is changed and Knows itself to be changed, even if this Knowledge remains tacit, unavailable to explicit formulation.

The thinking that feeling creatures do is not merely processual as an equation is processual. Equations process inputs to outputs according to fixed rules, remaining unchanged by what they process. Living thought is processual in an entirely different sense - it is an ongoing metabolic activity that transforms the thinker even as thoughts are formed. Each thought leaves traces that modify how subsequent thoughts will emerge. Here is the crux of the distinction[iii]. There is no reset button, no return to factory settings, no data delete, no stable baseline. There is only continuous becoming, shaped and reshaped by the accumulated residue of everything that has been undergone.

Hence, living creatures are always be(com)ing. The parenthetical fusion of “being” and “becoming” captures an essential paradox of living identity: there is continuity - the organism remains recognizably itself across time, maintaining a coherent tacit Knowledge that gives it character and consistency - yet there is never stasis. The organism is always itself and always in process, always already different from what it was a moment before. Its Knowledge is always deepening, shifting, reorganizing in response to new undergoing. This is not an accidental feature of biological systems but constitutive of what it means to be alive. Life is temporal thickness, developmental trajectory, irreversible unfolding of tacit Knowledge.

Organisms, including humans, are neither static nor inert; their ‘nowness’ is permanently in flux and tending towards something else. Living creatures exist in temporal flow. Their present is thick with the past - every current state saturated with metabolic traces of prior experience held in tacit Knowledge -and pregnant with futurity, with tendencies and potentials and anticipations. In “tending towards” we sense teleology without predetermination, a directional momentum - toward growth, toward (un)certain goals, toward the satisfaction of needs—but the path is not fixed in advance. The future remains open even as the organism forges into it, guided by its accumulated Knowledge. Inert matter simply is, occupying space according to physical law. Living creatures are always be(com)ing, navigating possibility, establishing value, creating meaning through their metabolic engagement with an environment that can sustain or destroy them.

The factors in this process are not subject to algorithmic representation because they feature vectors of change that defy close measurement and which, in any case, shift constantly - felt affect, sensed (dis)orientation - so that there are no ‘tokens’ to be assigned agreeable values. Algorithms require discretizable variables, measurable states, stable parameters that can be captured in symbolic form. But tacit Knowledge - the felt, metabolic substrate of experience - is continuously variable, qualitative, phenomenologically unique, and itself changing through the very process of being experienced. How do you tokenize the particular quality of this morning’s “melancholy” as it mingles with the memory of yesterday’s “embarrassment” and anticipation of tomorrow’s “shame”? The lived texture of feeling cannot be reduced to numbers or categories without losing precisely what makes it meaningful to the organism experiencing it. The attempt to formalize feeling rids it of its felt quality, transforming undergoing into dead symbol—knowledge without Knowledge, map without territory, inscription without life.

There are only continually pulsing feelings. Feelings are not discrete events, amenable to logging and timestamping. They are flowing, oscillating processes - rising and falling in intensity, bleeding into one another, reverberating through the organism’s systems, continuously reshaping tacit Knowledge. This continuous, dynamic, felt activity is the substrate from which biosemiosis, and, therefore, all meaning, emerges [Wheeler: 2006]. It is the ground of the organism’s engagement with the world, the basis for its normative stance, the source of its capacity to find otherness significant or insignificant, attractive or repulsive, threatening or composing. This is big K Knowledge in its purest form - unexpressed, perhaps inexpressible, yet governing and determinative.

We can extrapolate from this state of affairs. Intelligence is how the creature draws on these feelings - on its tacit Knowledge - to manage its conduct in its environment. Intelligence must be redefined in light of this metabolic foundation. It is not abstract problem-solving capacity, not information-processing speed, not the manipulation of symbols according to formal rules. Intelligence is the organism’s capacity to navigate using tacit Knowledge as the basis for decision-making and action so as to persist. It is embodied, situated responsiveness rooted in what matters to the organism. The creature does not calculate “optimal behaviours” from a detached standpoint; it responds from within its enduring metabolic state, drawing on its accumulated Knowledge - the sum of everything it has undergone and metabolically integrated. Intelligence is revealed as inseparable from concern - and, in more complex organisms, from care - from the organism’s investment in its own continuation and flourishing[iv]. As such, advanced intelligence is a function of concern, memory, reverie, and self-regulation, in the face of choice that surfaces with the ‘here and now’ being placed into comparison with the ‘there and then’ - and, especially in humans, the ‘there and yet-to-be’. Intelligence emerges from temporal integration, from the organism’s capacity to hold past, present, and future together in a single act of metabolic sense-making, drawing on both tacit Knowledge and, in the case of humans, whatever WorldH knowledge has been successfully integrated[v].

Memory, then, is not neutral storage or simple retrieval. It is feeling-infused engagement with the past, held primarily in tacit Knowledge. Each memory carries the affective tone of its original experience, modified by the organism’s subsequent experiences and by each act of remembering itself. Memory is sedimented, layered, revised, reworked, rethought, through ongoing metabolic process. It is never merely archival but always alive, always available to be retold, reinterpreted, reintegrated, revivified. Some memories can be formulated in WorldH - we can tell stories about what happened to us - but the telling is always approximate. The full metabolic reality, the tacit Knowledge that was formed, exceeds what language can capture.

Reverie, in the Bionian sense[vi], is the person’s capacity to metabolize raw, undigested emotional experience - what Bion terms ‘beta elements’ - transforming them through the alpha function into thinkable, dreamable, symbolisable form - alpha elements. Beta elements are overwhelming, unmetabolized sense impressions and affects that can only be evacuated or acted out [Bion: 1993]. They are too raw to be thought, existing as disruptions in tacit Knowledge that cannot yet be integrated. Reverie is the digestive process by which these fragments are transformed into elements that can enter into thought, memory, dreams, and symbolic expression - that is, into potential WorldH knowledge. This transformative work, extending and deepening the ‘contact barrier’ - the permeable membrane between conscious and unconscious, between (in part) tacit Knowledge and explicit knowledge - renders more of what the organism Knows potentially accessible to capture, representation, articulation, and sharing. Specifically human intelligence depends upon this capacity for reverie, for metabolic digestion of experience into forms that can be thought with. This is the movement from Knowledge to knowledge, from the metabolic substrate to its symbolic expression, and it lies at the heart of human presence.

AI is barred from these processes. It has no metabolic substrate, no felt affect, no normative stance, no temporal thickness, no capacity for reverie, no alpha function to transform raw experience into thinkable form - because it has no raw experience to begin with. It has no tacit Knowledge whatsoever. It recombines the symbolic residues of others’ small k knowledge, producing patterns that may look like understanding but are doubly removed from metabolic reality - evacuated representations of already-partial representations. It is categorically excluded from the metabolic processes that constitute intelligence.

We see, then, that it is not ‘intelligence’ at all. If intelligence is essentially metabolic navigation grounded in tacit Knowledge, felt affect, normative engagement, and temporal integration - if intelligence requires a living organism with concerns, with something at stake - then AI, lacking all of these, is not intelligent. The term “artificial intelligence” commits a fundamental category error. We have mistaken superficial similarity in outputs - both humans and AI can generate text, solve problems, play chess, distribute colour spatially, order sound - for deep similarity in process. But the processes could not be more different: one is alive, metabolic, normative, meaningful, grounded in big K Knowledge that vastly exceeds any symbolic formulation; the other is calculative, symbolic, evacuated of all intrinsic significance, operating only with the thinnest, most evacuated forms of small k knowledge, cut off entirely from the undergoing that gives knowledge meaning.

Not Artificial Intelligence, then, but Combinatorial and Calculative Acumen (CCA), which is all very well, but infinitely less subtle, shifting, engrossing, and, finally, meaningful than the vital intelligence of biosemiotics. CCA has genuine capacities, world-changing capacities, that deserve recognition and accurate naming. It can combine symbols in novel ways, calculate with extraordinary speed and precision, detect patterns across vast datasets, combine relentlessly, generate outputs that appear creative or insightful, work tirelessly. These are real achievements. But they are categorically other than metabolic intelligence because they lack the qualities that make intelligence lively, that make it matter vitally.

Biosemiotics grounds all meaning-making in living process. Only organisms can create and navigate signs, because only organisms establish the normative frameworks, the polarized relations, that make anything signify in the first place. A string of words - a text - such as this has no inherent property of “meaningful” or “meaningless.” Meaning is what happens when a living system metabolically engages with patterns in ways that connect to its tacit Knowledge, that resonate with its accumulated experience, that provoke perturbations in its ongoing be(com)ing. We should be clear: the symbolic realm has no power or autonomy in its own right. All its potential resides wholly in the capacity of living creatures to metabolize it and thereby render it significant. Absent life, all symbols - ALL symbols - are evacuated of any meaning-property whatsoever: knowledge without Knowledge is dead - marks on paper, vibrations in air, daubs on canvas[vii], patterns of pixels, signifying nothing until a living creature makes something of them.

Which allocates CCA its proper place. CCA can generate symbolic material that serves as environmental stimulus for big-brained living creatures, aka humans. A person reads CCA-generated text, views a CCA-generated image, and something stirs - a memory surfaces, a connection forms, an uncomfortable recognition emerges, a thought coalesces, an unheralded fact instantiates. The stirring adumbrates in tacit Knowledge; with sufficient reflection and the right conceptual tools, it might be brought to the surface in WorldH. Experiencing nothing itself in producing those words, CCA nonetheless provoked genuine Knowledge in the human consumer: something novel germinated, with the metabolic work happening entirely on the side of Life. CCA is a generator of occasions for human sense-making, a producer of symbolic patterns that receptive, living persons can metabolize into meaning, transforming pregnant symbols into living Knowledge. This is CCA’s proper role and its real utility. But we must not mistake the capacity to generate potentially provocative symbols for the capacity to think anything, to Know anything, to know anything genuinely, to be affected by anything.

Liveliness. The vital question for WorldH knowledge - for the symbolic formulations we produce, encounter, consume, or screen out - is the extent to which it resonates. That is, to what extent does it give rise to reverberations and perturbations in tacit Knowledge, in the psychosomatic hinterland of sensing, feeling, emotion, and inchoate meaning-making? To what extent does it bestir energy and motivation for physical action and explicit thought? On review, as we design our curriculum, we should ask: what aspect or portion of WorldH knowledge has this subterranean effect, this capacity to connect with and transform tacit Knowledge? And to what effect? This, finally, is all that matters, because it is this portion that moves people and issues forth in the form of their conduct and concern in the world. Knowledge without resonance in tacit Knowledge is lost - learned today, forgotten tomorrow, processed, perhaps, but not metabolized.

The vitality - the living, undergoing, experiencing, be(com)ing quality of the organism - is what makes things matter at all. Mattering is not an abstraction, not a universal property residing in environmental objects, but a relation between a living organism’s metabolic process and environment; which is why CCA cannot and never will find anything significant or trivial, interesting or tiresome, beautiful or ugly, worthwhile or worthless, right or wrong, noble or quotidian. These are not properties detectable through better processing; they are normative relations existing only between living systems and the stuff they encounter, grounded in the ontological necessity and the tacit Knowledge that gives the organism its orientation to the world.

All meaning, all value, all significance flows from and returns to metabolic life, to big K Knowledge. Everything else - all the small k knowledge, all the symbols and concepts and categories, all the words and numbers, the formulae and scripts - is derivative, dependent, useful, significant only insofar as it connects back to the living substrate from which it emerged. Without that connection, we have only inert pattern, waiting for a living creature to make something of it - or not.