The Little Weird: Self and Consciousness in Contemporary, Small-press, Speculative Fiction Page: 41
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respond to what it perceives.6 This is how, for example, two different selves negotiated by two
different self-culture discourses might look differently upon (and react differently to) something
as extreme as, say, cannibalism. One of these selves, a Western one, for example, might see a
horrific ritual-it is there, in the outside world, being perceived. However, the other self, one
from a culture that practices cannibalism, would not see the same thing. No horrific ritual exists
in its world. It sees, perhaps, religious transcendence, cultural solidity, or any number of other
phenomena-it may not even see the eating of flesh at all but a metaphysical Eucharist instead.
Which is correct? Both, of course. Each self has been built from a life-long immersion in cultural
discourse, and each is guided by specific memes that delimit evaluation and response. What is
more, one of these selves may have already begun "creating" cannibalism in its cognitive model
of the world. If this self merely observes what it considers associated aspects of "possibly-
cannibalism" (i.e. primitive huts, aggressive tribal dancing, drawings of heads on leathern
windows), these aspects can create "cannibalism in the immediate world" before it has even been
perceived. In his study of the processes of perception and how a mimetically driven narrative of
self creates them, Daniel C. Dennett explains the "analysis-by-synthesis" model of perception,
which states that
perceptions are built up in a process that weaves back and forth between centrally
generated expectations, on the one hand, and confirmations (and disconfirmations)
arising from the periphery on the other hand (e.g., Neisser, 1967). The general idea of
these theories is that after a certain amount of "preprocessing" has occurred in the early
or peripheral layers of the perceptual system, the tasks of perception are completed
objects are identified, recognized, categorized-by generate-and-test cycles. In such a
cycle, one's current expectations and interests shape hypotheses for one's perceptual
systems to confirm or disconfirm, and a rapid sequence of such hypothesis generations
and confirmations produces the ultimate product, the ongoing, updated 'model' of the
world of the perceiver. Such accounts of perception are motivated by a variety of
considerations, both biological and epistemological..."
A self cannot remove itself from the motivated processing of what it perceives. The functions of41
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Bradley, Darin Colbert. The Little Weird: Self and Consciousness in Contemporary, Small-press, Speculative Fiction, dissertation, May 2007; Denton, Texas. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc3703/m1/45/: accessed July 17, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .