So, a lot of this is working off of Douglas Harding; he played with the argument that he had no head. (http://www.headless.org) I want to instead play with the argument that we have no face. I am sure this does not make any sense to you. Read on.

Everything about the experience of a single organism is changing constantly, and interactions with the world are inconsistent. For instance, if you (yes, you) grab an object at the distal end, then it is much heavier than when grasped in the middle (balanced). There are two different types of experience: the phenomenological and the transcendental. In the phenomenological experience, the experience as an organism of oneself and one’s access to the world is inconsistent, “unreliable”, ever-changing, and based upon the movement of the organism relative to the interaction space. In the transcendental experience, there is a craving for universality and therefore properties are assigned to the interaction space shared by several individuals and these properties constitute the world rather than the individual constituting the world. No one type of experience is any more real than the other.

In the experience of being a self, there is never any face for oneself. A shadow has no face. We identify features that resemble a face (the face we see on others) in mirrors and photographs, but we never have any direct access to this thing that is called a face. There are sensory receptors and several orifices, but there is no reason to assume that what is felt and sensed is the same kind of face that we see on others. Instead, it seems like one giant eye is taking up at least half of the space where a “face” should be.

So, my computer battery is about to die and it is late, but here are some ideas that I want to play around with more — “exchanging faces” and the idea that we become what is witnessed.