creators_name: Harnad, Stevan
creators_id: harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk
type: preprint
datestamp: 2009-04-12 22:41:22
lastmod: 2011-03-11 08:57:21
metadata_visibility: show
title: First Person Singular
subjects: cog-psy
full_text_status: public
keywords: language, evolution, consciousness, writing, mind, multimedia
note: Review of: Brian Rotman: Becoming Beside Ourselves: Alphabet, ghosts, distributed human beings
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.
date: 2009-04-12
date_type: completed
refereed: FALSE
referencetext: Rotman, Brian (2008) Becoming Beside Ourselves: Alphabet, ghosts, distributed human beings. Duke University Press
citation:   Harnad, Stevan  (2009) First Person Singular.  [Preprint]     
document_url: http://cogprints.org/6418/1/tls-rotman-post4.htm
document_url: http://cogprints.org/6418/2/tls-rotman-post4.pdf
document_url: http://cogprints.org/6418/3/tls-rotman-post4.rtf