%A Stevan Harnad %O Review of: Brian Rotman: Becoming Beside Ourselves: Alphabet, ghosts, distributed human beings %T First Person Singular %X 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. %D 2009 %K language, evolution, consciousness, writing, mind, multimedia %L cogprints6418