Dennett, Daniel C. (1992) The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity. In: F. Kessel, P. Cole and D. Johnson (eds.) Self and Consciousness: Multiple Perspectives. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Danish translation, "Selvet som fortællingens tyngdepunkt," Philosophia 15 275-88, 1986.
“[we…] cannot undo those parts of our pasts that are determinate, but our selves are constantly being made more determinate as we go along in response to the way the world impinges on us. Of course it is also possible for a person to engage in auto-hermeneutics, interpretation of one's self, and in particular to go back and think about one's past, and one's memories, and to rethink them and rewrite them. This process does change the "fictional" character, the character that you are”.
“Nothing is easier than contradiction when you're dealing with fiction; a fictional character can have contradictory properties because it's just a fictional character. We find such contradictions intolerable, however, when we are trying to interpret something or someone, even a fictional character, so we typically bifurcate the character to resolve the conflict.”
“…turns out to be theoretically perspicuous to organize the interpretation around a central abstraction: each person has a self (in addition to a center of gravity). In fact we have to posit selves for ourselves as well. The theoretical problem of self-interpretation is at least as difficult and important as the problem of other-interpretation.
“We are all…confabulators, telling and retelling ourselves the story of our own lives, with scant attention to the question of truth. Why, though, do we behave this way? Why are we all such inveterate and inventive autobiographical novelists? As Umberto Maturana has (uncontroversially) observed: "Everything said is said by a speaker to another speaker that may be himself." But why should one talk to oneself? Why isn't that an utterly idle activity, as systematically futile as trying to pick oneself up by one's own bootstraps?”
“Who wasn’t squatting in one of the handful of prefabricated subject positions proffered by capital or whatever you wanted to call it, lying every time she said 'I'” – page 101 of Leaving the Atocha Station
“One isn't creating or discovering a little bit of ghost stuff in [positing a second self in order to understand psychological disorders etc.]. One is simply creating another abstraction. It is an abstraction one uses as part of a theoretical apparatus to understand, and predict, and make sense of, the behaviour of some very complicated things. The fact that these abstract selves seem so robust and real is not surprising. They are much more complicated theoretical entities than a center of gravity. And remember that even a center of gravity has a fairly robust presence, once we start playing around with it. But no one has ever seen or ever will see a center of gravity. As David Hume noted, no one has ever seen a self, either.”
“I never can catch myself at any time without a percepton, and never can observe anything but the perception….”
Kuleshov Effect / Effete Kuleshov
Roses are red; violets are blue. But if we called a violet red, what color would it be? This is not a rhetorical question. How we label things can affect how we perceive them. Naming can impose meaning. And though science and anthropology have provided significant support for the proposition that color perception is basically identical across societies, recent studies have found evidence that we also see our rainbows through cultural lenses.
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