What we actually see is only one face of an object, determined by the axis of our embodied orientation as it is directed towards the object. When we label the object found at the end of our gaze, we do so with an assumption of what would be given from all other views and angles that could be taken toward and around the object. Therefore, what we fill in about an object in our furious attempt to grasp the world and fit it into what we can conceptually circumscribe is essentially ungrounded in the sense that it is completely disconnected from our actual view of the world, the world as it is given to our “limited” first-person perspective. I must inquire here as to what view of the world we are trying to manifest and maintain. We are working to validate an absolute world where objects have permanence in their characteristics and where we are able to grasp the world from beyond our outside of our embodied view. Once the world is discovered to be a social realm, the knowledge of the Others’ presence and sentience alters our perspective such that we put ourselves in his place, hypothesize the world from his view, and adopt his view when conceiving of the a priori world given within our embodied position. This last theory may be a bit of a stretch, but I truly do not think that we can talk about how we came to experience the world as we do in this dissociative way without accounting for our drive for assimilation and communion with the Other.
Thoughts from Mearlu-Ponty’s “Experience and Objective Thought”, pp. 67-9 in Phenomenology of Perception
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.