EXCERPT 0 The systematic discourse on mechanism—whether in the guise of early naturalist-empiricist philosophies, under the rubric of rationalist mechanistic philosophy, or some subtle mixture of the two—is one of the main progenitors of the philosophy of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Now, those who had endorsed mechanistic philosophy when it first emerged in the guise of a revitalised theology eventually could not help but arrive at a stark conclusion: its soft-theistic vocabulary was but a sheepskin wrapped around a cosmological wolf. In time, the greatest proponents of mechanistic philosophy in its heyday and their heirs came to understand that they had been betrayed by the new vision of the mechanistic laws of the universe and their explanatory valence. Where they imagined they had been searching for the laws of Zōē and Psyche within the occult dominion of Aristotelian substantive forms, they were in fact searching for the laws of different classes of as-yet alien entities known as explanatory objective-probabilistic models. Where they had sought the final explainer, what awaited them was a network of causal connections in the realm of mechanism in which metaphysical causal explanation (i.e., a one-to-one relation between a cause and its effects) was destined to be dissolved. And where they had blindly imagined that they were groping around in the dark for a god, they were in fact on the way to constructing something entirely hostile to the theistic perspective: the Almighty Mechanical …