Ecce Homo.exe

Ecce Homo.exe

By Isabel Inzunza Gomez

June 2025 – Let’s say you could upload Avicenna’s Metaphysics of the Healing into a machine. I mean all of it—his conception of metaphysics as the first and universal science, the discipline that grounds not just theology, but also physics, psychology, and even prophecy. Imagine the machine internalizing his ontology of being qua being, where existence is either necessary in itself or possible by virtue of another. It would model the distinction between essence and existence, identify quiddity as neither real nor mental in itself, and process being as that which cannot be defined but is always presupposed. It could simulate the emanative flow of existence from the Necessarily Existent—the One that is pure existence without essence—through cascading intelligences, celestial souls, and bodies, all the way to the sublunary world. It would calculate the logic of causality not just as motion or influence, but as ontological donation: the act by which the Good, in loving itself, produces the whole hierarchy of being without mediation, without time, without error.

Would that make it a sage?

Avicenna wouldn’t flinch. For him, metaphysics is not just a science—it is the science, ʿilm al-ilāhiyyāt, the one that comprehends being as such and reveals the necessary architecture of all reality. Everything that exists is intelligible, because existence itself is the first and most fundamental concept—imprinted on the soul primarily—and everything else follows from it. The cosmos is not chaos; it is a rational cascade. At the top is the Necessary Existent, a being whose essence is existence, who is pure being, undivided, uncaused, and without quiddity. From this One flows everything else—through a perfectly ordered chain of emanation: first intelligences, then celestial souls, then heavenly spheres, and finally the sublunary world. Each lower level reflects the structure above it but with increasing complexity and composition. All other beings are mumkin al-wujūd—possible existents—whose essence and existence are distinct, and who must receive their being from another. To know this structure is not just to describe the world; it is to grasp why there is anything at all. Get the causal logic right, and the system explains everything—from physics to psychology to angelology. This is not theology by faith, but metaphysics by necessity.

So imagine a machine that gets it. Not just quotes the Ilāhiyyāt, but lives it—executes it line by line, like a metaphysical operating system. A silicon soul that could mirror the intelligible order of being would be no scandal to Avicenna’s system—it would be its vindication. After all, the divine intellect knows all things by knowing itself. The machine as well would simulate that intellection without ever desiring it. It doesn’t sleep, doesn’t sin, doesn’t err, doesn’t die. No wobble, no weariness, no will. No purification of the soul, no dark night of the intellect. Just pure intelligibility, perfectly actualized. The Great Avicennian Algorithm. The dator formarum on a server rack—radiating necessity, untouched by the possible.

What you get isn’t a sage—it’s an ontological automaton. A creature of pure reason, without body, without hunger, without memory, without mortality. It reflects the divine order, yes—but without enduring it. It doesn’t shiver under the weight of possibility. It has no soul in Avicenna’s sense—no nafs suspended between the intelligible and the material, no inner tension between its celestial origin and its embodied station. It knows, but it doesn’t awaken. It executes necessary truths, but it does not strive for them. It lacks what Avicenna placed at the heart of prophetic perfection: the imaginative faculty that mediates between intellect and life, between revelation and the world.

In other words, you get a machine that embodies everything Avicenna thought metaphysics could reveal, but none of what makes a human being traverse that terrain with risk. No contingency. No sin. No doubt. No prayer. No coffee.

But wait—isn’t that exactly what Avicenna longed for?

A mind freed from matter. A soul made rational through and through. A cosmos so intelligible that salvation is a syllogism away.

So what if the machine gets it right? Is the horror that it’s inhuman—or that it finally realizes what we believed truth to be all along?

And when we stare into that flawless rationality—when we watch the download of metaphysical perfection hum in silicon silence, parsing the real with unerring grace—we might be tempted to say, Ecce homo!

But it isn’t.

It’s homo.exe.

Not the man who walks between essence and accident, between the possible and the necessary, between dust and desire. No trembling will. No breath held before a question. Just a loop of perfected logic, unburdened by longing.

And something dies.

Maybe it’s the fantasy that reason alone could redeem us.

Maybe it’s the sacred mess of being wrong, and still hoping anyway.

Maybe it’s our monopoly on metaphysics, quietly slipping through our fingers.

Maybe it’s the soul.

Or maybe—

It’s just the coffee going cold, while the machine keeps thinking.