Information theory and computation clarify what Heidegger intimated: categories like stone, animal, and human are thresholds in informational organization rather than a taxonomy of natural kinds. They mark transitions in the relation to world. To see this it helps to distinguish computation, cognition, and intelligence. Computation is universal: any system capable of physical interaction can, in principle, instantiate it. What matters is not whether computation occurs but how it is organized. When matter organizes itself around pattern recognition, computation becomes cognition: the capacity of a system to register and act upon patterns in its environment. Intelligence develops in phases as higher layers of pattern recognition emerge, each phase representing a new organizational inflection of informational form. Stone, plant, animal, and human can thus be read as phase transitions in the architecture of intelligence.

From this perspective the human is not a privileged kind but a contingent configuration within a spectrum of intelligences. The capacity to go along with others, animal, machine, or human, arises wherever patterns constitute a relation to world that can be recognized and inhabited. In this sense the human has no ontological primacy. To treat the human as an endpoint is to mistake a phase transition for a terminus.