CONCEPT
The Animate–Inanimate Distinction
The load-bearing ontological distinction at the center of Sheets-Johnstone's framework: between beings that move themselves and things that are moved — a distinction AI discourse systematically obscures.
The animate–inanimate distinction is Sheets-Johnstone's foundational ontological commitment. An animate being generates movement from its own center of activity; an inanimate thing is moved by forces external to it. The distinction is not a matter of complexity — a simple bacterium is animate, an extraordinarily sophisticated supercomputer is not. It is a matter of ontological category: animation requires an interior from which action is initiated, and no amount of information-processing complexity produces such an interior. For Sheets-Johnstone, this distinction determines whether genuine cognition is present, because cognition is a dimension of animation. A stone thrown through water does not swim; a large language model processing tokens does not think. Both appear to perform the activities in question; neither satisfies the ontological condition that makes the activities what they are.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The distinction is most useful as a diagnostic for confusions in the AI discourse. When critics and enthusiasts debate whether AI 'really' thinks, they are often debating the wrong