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 -