How Do I Look?

Edit the principal researcher in Edward’s thesis, will offer for discussion, facilitated by Edward, a brief reflection on a few cues and cautions regarding multi-species relations that have arisen as a white-tailed deer working on a PhD dissertation focused on unreadability with partial origin in narrative fiction. Beginning with an immersive exploration of perception, Edit will guide an interactive exercise in viewing the world, complemented by work focused on how human
genders view the world differently (Chaney and Tovar). This will segue to concerns Edit has experienced regarding for instance their understanding of William, the horse who narrates _Sweet William: A Memoir of Old Horse_, coupled with invitation from the audience to discuss. Edit’s sense of caution is then brought into focus via Karin Daniellson’s work on unreadability and the alterity of non-human minds. Lastly, Edit presents considerations regarding cautions of multispecies relations from the work of Donald Hoffman et al into the program of research generally referred to as conscious agent theory which integrates considerations of the fitness beats truth theorem in (human) perception and interface theory of perception.

Considering the cautions raised for Edit by this body of creative and critical work, Edit then invites the audience to discuss whether an effective cue, or point of focus, in doubt of certain objective access to the external, particularly minds of others, and especially the minds of other species, might be to simply sit together and perhaps observe how we each observe the world rather than jump to presumptions of interpretation or comprehension.

Works Cited
Chaney, Robert A. Alyssa Baer, and L. Ida Tovar. “Gender-Based Heat Map Images of Campus
Walking Settings: A Reflection of Lived Experience.” _Violence and Gender_. ahead of
print http://doi.org/10.1089/vio.2023.0027

Danielsson, Karin M. “Unreadable Nonhumans, Ambiguity and Alterity in Eric Linklater’s Short
Fiction,” _Green Letters_, 25:3, 313-325, 2021. DOI: 10.1080/14688417.2021.2023032

Hawkes, J. _Sweet William: A Memoir of Old Horse_. Simon & Schuster, 1993.