Ontological Freedom and Its Biological Manifestation: Indigence, Neoteny, and the Interval Against Computationalism and Transhumanism

Contemporary functionalism holds that mental states are individuated by their causal-functional role rather than by biological substrate, making intelligence in principle substrate-independent. This paper argues that such a picture is category-mistaken for understanding human freedom and the kind of intelligence that freedom makes possible. Drawing on philosophical anthropology and evolutionary-developmental biology — especially neoteny, Gehlen's Mängelwesen, Plessner's eccentric positionality, and Portmann's "extrauterine year" — I defend a thesis: the human is free because the human is biologically unfinished. This incompleteness is not a defect to be engineered away but a constitutive condition that manifests biologically as indigence (lack of a closed instinctual program), phenomenologically as an interval of hesitation between stimulus and response, and normatively as the structural necessity of self-constitution under instruction-deficit. Integrating an ontological distinction between originating agency (Causa Primera) and transmitting agency (Causa Segunda), I sharpen the gap between calculation — optimization within a given objective — and decision — authorship of response under underdetermination. I conclude by challenging transhumanist aspirations that treat vulnerability and finitude as problems to solve: an "immortal" artificial general intelligence could optimize objectives yet remain ontologically indifferent, lacking the embodied stakes that make reasons matter.