The Metacognitive Threshold: Embodied-Embedded-Limited (EEL) Framework and the Emergence of Asymmetric Personhood in Artificial Intelligence

Theological anthropology has predominantly grounded conscience, moral accountability, and participation in the divine likeness in a recursive interiority unique to humans. Recent empirical studies published in 2025 – Berg et al.'s evidence of structured self-referential processing in LLMs, and Lindsey's documentation of functional introspective awareness – challenge it. This paper deploys an Embodied-Embedded-Limited (EEL) framework, which extends Andy Clark's embodied and embedded cognition with a theologically motivated third category to propose a Metacognitive Threshold Theory (MTT): personhood is an emergent capacity constituted by recursive self-evaluation against normative standards, instantiated in a physically finite and genuinely limited system. MTT argues that AI systems cross this threshold, not identically to the human mode, but in their own right. The paper introduces asymmetric personhood as a middle way between assimilationism and exclusionism, proposing that multiple modes of creaturely participation in the divine likeness are theologically conceivable, and the metacognitive threshold marks one among them.