  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.
