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Title: On the Origin of Objects by Brian Cantwell Smith ISBN: 0-262-69209-0 Publisher: Bradford Book Pub. Date: 09 January, 1998 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $30.00

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Average Customer Rating: 4.67 (3 reviews)

Rating: 4
Summary: Theory of Reference, Latour-style
Comment: The argumentation is uneven, but the good stretches contain
enough new ideas to make it a good read. The core of
the book is the notion that referential links have to
be *maintained*. A subsidiary theme is that your metaphysics
should satisfy two constraints: it should make sense of
computer science, and it should allow for the world being
intrinsically very, very messy. If you like Bruno Latour,
and you're interested in metaphysics and epistemology, you'll probably like this. (If you dislike Latour, you'll probably dislike this.)

Rating: 5
Summary: A difficult but fascinating
Comment: Fascinating!, Riveting!, Exquisite!. But. This is not an easy book. This is not an easy reading. From the first page, B. Smith throws at the reader the whole apparatus of the philosophical jargon. And it does not ease up towards the end. So, if you are not a philosopher but merely a computer scientist you could be lost. The difficulty of the topic (more about it later) is magnified by the writing style: Smith's style does not have a clarity of Gallileo letters. Nor does it have the brilliance and illuminating simplicity of Russell's essays. It is more like a style of someone who is struggling with his topic and with the language. You have an impression that the author is trying to shake the shackles of the language to express some deep thoughts that are intuitively understandable but are impossible to express, that those ideas he is trying to tell us about, are beyond the normal grasp of the language, beyond its expressive powers. And he makes us fully participate in this struggle. So what is the topic of the book? Smith attempts to answer the oldest of questions man/woman dared to ask- the question of what is out there. And while the question for a long time remained mainly of interest to philosophers, with the advent of computers and computer models it entered the mainstream of the human thought. Anyone who has been struggling with the computer (or computerized) representations and computer models of any system or any process (in fact of anything), will appreciate Smith's discourse.

Smith's thesis is that there is nothing out there such as a box, a house, a river, a cloud, etc.(examples are a bit simplistic and Smith goes beyond them). What is out there is a " constant flux" and we, through our participation in the flux, by our intentional stance "make things" out of it. We segment the reality into what make sense to us because of our intentions (intention in a larger, than everyday, sense) Thus, every struggle to nail down the models of reality using Yes/No abstract logic, will fail because the One reality has multiple realizations, each of them is true and the key to them (and what is missing in our Yes/No models) is the "participation" or the intentional stance. Smith asks questions that strike at the very heart of our understanding of the world and at the very essence of what we think computers are, do, or can do, and how they do. If you are brave enough to probe the same depths of human experience this book is for you.

Rating: 5
Summary: A tough read but worth it
Comment: This book is not for the faint of heart, and if you believe that reading is an intellectual investment rather than just a casual pastime you will certainly benefit from this book. Once you get past Smith's academic language you realize that he has a very important message - that all computational systems are based upon a fundamental philosophical foundation, or ontology as he puts it. Every computational system we design and use is based upon our perceptions(subject) of objects - and the objects and models that arise from the subject-object no-man's land. There is no true platonic ideal, but rather a fuzzy metaphysical boundarys and objects that kinda work sometimes. If you are looking for a book that makes you take a big step in your day to day thinking and how you apply it, this is the book