First Person Singular: A review of Brian Rotman's "Becoming Beside Ourselves: Alphabet, ghosts, distributed human beings"
First Person Singular: A review of Brian Rotman's "Becoming Beside Ourselves: Alphabet, ghosts, distributed human beings"
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.
language, writing, computations, web, Turing Test, mind
Harnad, Stevan
442ee520-71a1-4283-8e01-106693487d8b
2008
Harnad, Stevan
442ee520-71a1-4283-8e01-106693487d8b
Harnad, Stevan
(2008)
First Person Singular: A review of Brian Rotman's "Becoming Beside Ourselves: Alphabet, ghosts, distributed human beings"
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Monograph
(Project Report)
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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tls-rotman4X-pub.pdf
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Available under License Other.
Text
tls-rotman-post4.pdf
- Other
Available under License Other.
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Published date: 2008
Keywords:
language, writing, computations, web, Turing Test, mind
Organisations:
Web & Internet Science
Identifiers
Local EPrints ID: 266603
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/266603
PURE UUID: c0e42c9d-11cc-4661-a054-1a5d84c67f0f
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Date deposited: 27 Aug 2008 00:08
Last modified: 15 Mar 2024 02:48
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Author:
Stevan Harnad
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