Interesting article talking about honoring the late philosopher Brian Cantwell Smith from the University of Toronto. There's some good stuff here, including the difference between 'judgement' and 'reckoning', and a discussion of how we come to know about objects. This is the part that interests me most. In On the Origin of Objects, Smith had "outlined a picture of the world in which objects, properties, and other ontological furniture of the world were recognized as the results of registrational practices, rather than being the pregiven structure of the world." The question is, does this happen before the 100-millisecond level - the time it takes to recognize your mother - or after? I'm in the 'before' camp. Writing about AI (but, I think, generalizable to humans), Smith says object recognition requires participation in and commitment to the world. "To register an object as an object, that is, not only must there be right and wrong for it, but that difference must matter." Hence the emphasis on how essential a sense of self is to an intelligent agent.
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