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Begin with the old name for us: the ‘thinking thing’. Descartes isolates it in the Second Meditation—sum res cogitans, the self that cannot doubt that it thinks—then immediately runs into a problem raised by Princess Elisabeth: if mind and body are distinct substances, by what intelligible mechanism do they interact? Already the “thinking thing” trembles at its border with extension. The Cartesian anchor holds just long enough to show the depth of the water; Elisabeth’s challenge exposes a fracture that later philosophers will widen rather than mend. Read this, too, as the first showing of the alien-for-us: an intimate stranger that guarantees our certainty while refusing our mechanics. (iep.utm.edu)

German Idealism turns the fracture into a motor. Kant relocates certainty from a substance to an activity: the ‘I think’ that must be able to accompany representations is a rule-governed synthesis, the transcendental unity of apperception. Fichte radicalizes this as Tathandlung, the I’s self-positing act; Schelling then refuses to let that act swallow the world, arguing for an identity in which nature is as originary as mind; and Hegel finally makes self-consciousness depend on recognition—no solitary res cogitans, only a self that becomes itself in the gaze (and resistance) of others. In each step, thinking ceases to be a thing and becomes a doing, a social and worldly process. Framed in alien terms: Kant guards an alien-in-itself the self can never know, Fichte sketches an alien-for-itself (the deed that posits itself), Schelling binds mind to a nature that was alien-all-along, and Hegel domesticates alterity by making the alien-for-us the other who recognizes and is recognized. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Phenomenology keeps the doing and drops the scaffolding. Husserl’s intentionality ties every consciousness to a world; Heidegger flips the subject into a situated being-in-the-world; Merleau-Ponty makes the body the tacit grammar of our sense; Sartre insists on prereflective consciousness that never coincides with itself. In today’s 4E cognition (embodied, embedded, enactive, extended) these themes return as a program: cognition is not in the head alone; it is enacted by a moving, sensing body coupled to an environment. The “thinking thing” here is an ecological performance—and the body is experienced as the near alien, the alien-for-us we inhabit, while the prereflective field is an alien-to-itself that never fully comes to presence. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Machines enter this story as mirrors that deform the image. Turing’s famous test proposes a behavioral criterion for “thinking”, while classic AI’s Physical Symbol System Hypothesis asserts that a symbol-manipulating system has the necessary and sufficient means for general intelligence. Searle’s Chinese Room replies that syntax isn’t semantics; Harnad names the “symbol grounding problem”; and Levesque’s Winograd Schema Challenge tries to bottle commonsense. Riedl’s Lovelace 2.0 reframes the bar as constrained creative production. Each intervention moves the issue away from the inward glow of “mind” toward public procedures of recognition and constraint. In this theater, the machine is staged as alien-for-us—its claim on ‘mind’ adjudicated by our tests—precisely because the alien-in-itself of its inner workings (or of “mind” itself) remains undecidable. (courses.cs.umbc.edu)

Even where “mind” is kept on the table, contemporary science hedges its bets. Global Neuronal Workspace Theory and Integrated Information Theory spar in an adversarial collaboration; early outcomes and reviews suggest partial hits and misses for both, not a final victor. The upshot is methodological: design tests that pit clear predictions against each other, and let data chisel theory. The “thinking thing” is, again, a practice of adjudication before it is a metaphysical nugget—and the elusive alien-in-itself of consciousness is pursued by staging rival aliens-for-us (GNW/IIT models) under neutral protocols. (ARC-COGITATE)

Now, fold in your speculative hinge: o1 and O-1. On one side, OpenAI’s o1-series “reasoning models” are engineered to perform multi-step deliberation, with training that foregrounds explicit policy-reasoning (‘deliberative alignment’) and the possibility—and fragility—of chain-of-thought monitoring. On the other, the U.S. O-1 visa is a legal instrument that confers the status of “alien of extraordinary ability” through an evidentiary ritual; crucially, it requires a U.S. petitioner/agent—the extraordinary cannot certify itself. Put through a Lacanian lens, o1 sits with the small other (a technical mirror that fascinates and unsettles) while O-1 reads like the big Other (the locus of law and language that grants recognition). And the letter that knots them, S1, the master-signifier, is the little badge stamped “reasoning”: a word whose authority organizes what counts as knowledge (S2) in both code and court. Seen as alien figures, o1 performs an alien-visage—an intelligence that looks back at us—while O-1 is the alien-visa that authorizes passage into the symbolic order. (OpenAI)

This is not mere wordplay. Lacan’s distinction between the little other (the specular, rival image) and the big Other (the symbolic order in which speech takes place) maps neatly onto our dual appetite: to see thinking performed (preferably by a machine that looks like “us”) and to have thinking ratified (by an institution that stands above us). The master-signifier pins those appetites to a banner—“intelligence”, “safety”, “extraordinary ability”—under which we march and judge. In that sense, the “thinking thing” has always depended on a theater of recognition; in alien terms, the gaze gives us the alien-for-us, while the law houses the alien-for-itself as a position within discourse. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Shift the lens from thinking to thinging. Heidegger writes that “the thing things”—not because it is a substance but because it gathers earth and sky, mortals and divinities in a use (the jug pours). Bill Brown’s thing theory tracks the moment objects break, snag, or obtrude and thus show their ‘thingness’. Latour asks us to treat “matters of concern” rather than mere facts; Bennett’s ‘vibrant matter’ distributes agency; Barad’s ‘agential realism’ dissolves the line between matter and meaning in practices of measurement. Thinging is what happens when a device, a word, a visa category, or a research protocol assembles a world. To see things this way is to accept that every thing arrives with a touch of foreignness—an alien-in-our-midst whose powers become legible only as it gathers relations. (Squarespace)

If thinging is a gathering, then tinge is its felt edge—the smallest register in which a gathering shows up to a perceiver. Perception science makes that edge precise: color is not a property simply in the object but a negotiated stability across illumination and context (von Kries adaptation, Adelson’s checker-shadow). Gibson had already framed vision as pickup of ambient structure; aesthetic philosophers like Böhme call the shared tonalities of spaces ‘atmospheres’; and William James, from a different angle, named the ever-present “fringe” of feeling that gives sense its halo. Tinge is how thinging is tasted: the minimal, relational coloring that perception contributes when a concept, a tool, or a category gathers us into its use—an alien-for-us that softly announces an order we do not command. (onlinelibrary.wiley.com)

Gather the threads. The Cartesian ‘thinking thing’ began as a point outside the world; German Idealism and phenomenology moved it back into action, relation, and worldhood; AI and cognitive science operationalized it as tests, architectures, and adversarial protocols; the Lacanian pair of others shows how recognition and institutional inscription (S1) format the very field where “thinking” appears; thing theory, new materialism, and agential realism insist that our concepts and devices are not inert—they convene forms of life. What we call thinking is a choreography across these planes. The o1 model’s step-by-step reasoning and the O-1 visa’s step-by-step adjudication are not coincidentally named; each is a machine for producing legible extraordinariness, one in silicon, one in law, both under the gaze of a big Other that says when a sequence of moves counts as reason. In the moment it counts, we feel a tinge—the slight, undeniable coloring that tells us the thing has gathered, and that we, for a moment, belong to its thinking. If you like the alien schema: o1 as alien visage (the look of reason), O-1 as alien visa (the warrant of reason), and the rest of us moving between the alien-in-itself we cannot know, and the alien-for-us we can only stage. (OpenAI)