title: First Person Singular
creator: Harnad, Stevan
subject: Cognitive Psychology
description: 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.
date: 2009-04-12
type: Preprint
type: NonPeerReviewed
format: text/html
identifier: http://cogprints.org/6418/1/tls-rotman-post4.htm
format: application/pdf
identifier: http://cogprints.org/6418/2/tls-rotman-post4.pdf
format: other
identifier: http://cogprints.org/6418/3/tls-rotman-post4.rtf
identifier:   Harnad, Stevan  (2009) First Person Singular.  [Preprint]     
relation: http://cogprints.org/6418/