@misc{cogprints6418,
           month = {April},
           title = {First Person Singular},
          author = {Stevan Harnad},
            year = {2009},
            note = {Review of: Brian Rotman: Becoming Beside Ourselves: Alphabet, ghosts, distributed human beings},
        keywords = {language, evolution, consciousness, writing, mind, multimedia},
             url = {http://cogprints.org/6418/},
        abstract = {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.}
}

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