---
title: "Biomorphism (deep anthropomorphism)"
description: "Bratton's name in After Alignment for the AI–human correspondence that Reflectionism obscures."
type: "glossary-term"
canonical_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/terms/biomorphism-deep-anthropomorphism"
md_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/md/terms/biomorphism-deep-anthropomorphism"
last_updated: "2026-09-06"
site: "Antikythera Wiki"
---

# Biomorphism (deep anthropomorphism)

> A working definition written for this wiki from the reading notes; not Antikythera's own wording. From Antikythera Wiki (https://antikythera.wiki/terms/biomorphism-deep-anthropomorphism), an independent guide to Antikythera's published work.

Bratton's name in *After Alignment* for the AI–human correspondence that Reflectionism obscures. "Against a shallow anthropomorphism that insists that AI present itself as thinking how humans think that humans think, there is also a deep anthropomorphism, or better, a deep *biomorphism* that may correspond to how humans and other animals do really think, even if they don't experience thinking in that way." The evidence: "iterative predictive dynamics of transformer models do correspond with the iterative predictive dynamics of biological neurons. This was not the plan, but there it is." It makes AI "a kind of experimental organism — like a lab rat" (the *model superorganism*), reclaims "stochastic parrot" as a description of us, and grounds the rewrite of AGI as *artificial generic intelligence*: one substrate-general mechanism rather than human-equivalence. Agüera y Arcas's functionalism is the book-length argument; *Xenophylum* uses "biomorphic" in the unrelated design sense.

## Appears in

- [What Is Intelligence?](https://antikythera.wiki/work/book/what-is-intelligence) (2025-09-23)
- [Cognitive Infrastructures](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/coginfra) (2025-05-10)
- [After Alignment](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/afteralignment) (2025-05-10)

_Glossary generated 2026-09-06._