First Person Singular: Review of Brian Rotman's "Becoming Beside Ourselves: Alphabet, ghosts, distributed human beings"

Harnad, Stevan (2008). « First Person Singular: Review of Brian Rotman's "Becoming Beside Ourselves: Alphabet, ghosts, distributed human beings" ». Times Literary Supplement.

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Résumé

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.

Type:	Article de revue culturelle
Mots-clés ou Sujets:	langage, conscience, ecriture, esprit, test de Turing
Unité d'appartenance:	Faculté des sciences humaines > Département de psychologie Instituts > Institut des sciences cognitives (ISC)
Déposé par:	Stevan Harnad
Date de dépôt:	27 août 2008
Dernière modification:	20 avr. 2009 14:33
Adresse URL :	http://archipel.uqam.ca/id/eprint/920

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