The issue of “being” is not something which one has to “know about” or even have a certain amount of “intellect” in order to understand. Instead, it is something quite perfectly obvious and all the same very mysterious because we desire to stretch outwards and turn our face back towards it to examine it “fully”. However, this is it. The fundamental nature of our own being is lived, embodied, and enacted daily, but ignored constantly. There is a “universal” quality of being, in the “human” way, from an essential source and being in a world. Heidegger called this Dasein, a way to describe the type of “Self” which we all share..as an orientation towards the world, as beings in the world and beings viewed by the Other. There is something that it is like to be a Self, a faceless perspective of unlimited capacity. The entire world that we know is part of the perspective of that world, and we could almost say that its scope is unlimited if we were not aware of the gap between the Self (“myself”) and the Other. Knowing that the Other perceives a world and that the world perceived by the Other is not the world that we perceive and that it, in fact, cannot be (we cannot stand in the exact same space at the same time to perceive the same events unfolding), serves as a proof that our access to the world is incomplete.
Self/Other
Lynda Joy is a American PhD student living in Denmark, researching sensorimotor training with multi-modal Augmented Reality technologies by using methodologies from Cognitive Neuropsychology. During her MA, she worked very closely with the Center for Subjectivity Research and studied Phenomenology and its plausible implementations in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science ("naturalized" phenomenology). Between her MA and PhD, she worked with labs in Berlin (Germany), Adelaide (Australia), Tallinn (Estonia), Zurich (Switzerland), and Paris (France). She was a keynote speaker at IEEE VR in 2016, and presented at the Augmented Reality World Expo in 2017. In her spare time, she is currently writing a novel about a virtual simulation of bardo (the stage between life and death to reincarnation in Tibetan Buddhism). Her goal is to create experiences with new technologies that help people access more of the embodied subjectivity of another person/persons. Lynda wants her work to revere compassion to help allow the world to realize what a gift it is to both give and receive. Lynda is a strong believer in a better world that we collectively make by sharing a common vision, and that this vision comes through sharing our stories and our truths. That's what this blog is all about.
What is Experience? 