The Little Weird: Self and Consciousness in Contemporary, Small-press, Speculative Fiction Page: 56
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3 David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (London: Routledge Classics, 2002),
4. It should be noted that Bohm's thesis is specifically not about dividing the self from the world
as I am using his work to illustrate. Indeed, he takes as his focus of study a doing-away-with
ideas about division (fragmentation) between physical objects. However, in the sense that I have
quoted him here, recognizing that what seems to be beyond the self must be processed by the
mind and is therefore subject to Dennett's "semantic readiness," discriminatory states, and the
other cohesive habits of the narrative of self does not contradict Bohm's argument. The outside
world and the internal self may indeed be part of one order, as Bohm argues, but that does not
mean that the mind has any pure, unaffected, objective access to what is occurring in its (the
mind's) parcel of the whole and unbroken order.
4 "Perception, however, is a psychological process, strongly dependent on the position of
the perceiving body; a small child sees things in a totally different way from an adult, if only as
far as measurements are concerned. The degree to which one is familiar with what one sees also
influences perception. When the Central American Indians first saw horsemen, they did not see
the same things we do when we see people riding. They saw gigantic monsters, with human
heads and four legs. These had to be gods. Perception depends on so many factors that striving
for objectivity is pointless." Todorov, The Fantastic, 100.
5 Further, the phenomena that do occur within the range of a perceiver, the very
phenomena that many hold as first neutrally and objectively perceived then, distorted by the
processes of cognition, may be neither neutral nor objective even in a physical sense. David
Bohm points out in Wholeness and the Implicate Order, referring to Heisenberg's Indeterminacy
Principle, that "even if one supposes that the physically significant variables actually existed56
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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/m1/60/: accessed July 17, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .