TY  - GEN
N1  - Review of: Brian Rotman: Becoming Beside Ourselves: Alphabet, ghosts, distributed human beings
ID  - cogprints6418
UR  - http://cogprints.org/6418/
A1  - Harnad, Stevan
TI  - First Person Singular
Y1  - 2009/04/12/
N2  - Brian Rotman argues that (one) 'mind' and (one) 'god' are only conceivable, literally, because of (alphabetic) literacy, which allowed us to designate each of these ghosts as an incorporeal, speaker-independent 'I' (or, in the case of infinity, a notional agent that goes on counting forever). I argue that to have a mind is to have the capacity to feel. No one can be sure which organisms feel, hence have minds, but it seems likely that one-celled organisms and plants do not, whereas animals do. So minds originated before humans and before language --hence, a fortiori, before writing, whether alphabetic or ideographic.
AV  - public
KW  - language
KW  -  evolution
KW  -  consciousness
KW  -  writing
KW  -  mind
KW  -  multimedia
ER  -

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