Through the eyes of another

Mari’s comment in response to one of my recent posts has gotten me thinking about the nature of subjective experience. Mari wonders what the experience might be like, once technology allows one person to see through the eyes of another.

I think she is actually raising a rather deep point, because “seeing” is not really a passive experience — it’s a highly active one. To engage in the simple act of looking around is to engage our entire self — our body, our sense of smell, touch, proprioception. There is a vast difference between, say, watching a movie, in which someone else is calling the shots, and experiencing reality first-hand, through one’s own eyes, head and body.

What would it mean to see through the eyes of another? Which participant — the local or the remote observer — would be in control? To see through another’s eyes, would we need to remotely control the motion of the other person’s head, their body, the reflexive saccadic movements of their pupils when something moves within their line of sight?

And would we need to feel what they feel for it all to truly make sense? If they tilt their head or turn around quickly, would we need to experience a disturbance in our own inner ear? Would our proprioceptive sense need to be attuned to the position of their hand when they reach beyond their line of vision to pick up an object? Should our own fingers feel their touch upon that object?

I’m not saying these things merely to ridicule them. With sufficient time and technological advancement, any of these possibilities may come to fruition. I’m simply wondering, as with each passing year we embrace ever more advanced forms of socially networked interconnection, and the time-space boundaries between us start to fall away, whether our very notions of self and identity will also begin to blur and change in some fundamental way.

What will it mean, exactly, when we can see through the eyes of another?