Animation (Self-Generated Movement)

Animation is Sheets-Johnstone's technical term for self-generated movement originating from an organism's own center of activity. Traced to the Latin anima but stripped of mystical connotations, it names the observable, empirical capacity that distinguishes a bacterium swimming toward a nutrient gradient from a stone rolling down a hill. The bacterium generates its movement from within; the stone is moved by forces external to it. This distinction — not complexity, not information-processing capacity — is for Sheets-Johnstone the foundational ontological category separating the living from the nonliving. Cognition, in her framework, is a dimension of animation: an elaboration of self-generated movement that retains its kinesthetic origins even at the highest levels of abstraction. To ask whether an inanimate system can think is a category error.