Most of us have a sense that there is something about us that is peculiarly private, known only to us, and that the contents of what we call our "mind" are almost (?) definitionally this peculiarly private stuff. This is why "mind reading" is such a popular magic trick. To have someone pull a rabbit out of a hat is one thing, and all good fun. But to pull out my thoughts from my head? "Think of any number between one and ten ... you are thinking of four!" -- THAT sort of trick is slightly threatening, though in the context of a stage show the threat is of course contained so the audience doesn't flee in horror. In history-of-philosophy terms Descartes certainly helped codify our sense of ourselves as a tight fortress with a private theatre inside, it is the "I" which "thinks" and which holds itself as its first certitude. As a consequence and one might say as a mitigation of this sense of privacy, we talk of putting ourselv...
