Trans-cyclopean vision

Cyclopean vision is the illusion of seeing the world through a single virtual eye located in the centre of your forehead. It is only a subjective illusion. The two eyes give slightly different pictures, and viewed objectively, there is no consistency in what you actually see. Numerous optical illusions are evidence for that.

For a quick demonstration, notice that your field of vision is bracketed by a pair of noses. Your nose, viewed through each eye. Now try fixating on just one of those noses. The other disappears.

So if the sensation of selfhood can smash together the differing images from two eyes, then why not two pairs of two eyes, in two different heads? Is it just a matter of achieving fast enough visual data transmission?

Why not several pairs of eyes? In the end Xi Jinping could experience himself looking out of all 1 .3 billion pairs of Chinese eyes. 

Though it was the Japanese, in the Showa era, who seemed to make the most progress in that department, as Okinawa and kamikaze planes testify. Plus Hiroshima, although there the process seemed to work in reverse. Perhaps it was the sudden shock of so many people dying at once?

In the days when I used to dabble in transpersonal psychology, which is a polite way of saying: playing with my mind plus somebody else’s, without being quite sure whose was whose, I used to stare into my eyes in a dark mirror, trying to swap my perspective around so I could look out from my virtual eyes into my real eyes. This convinced me that “trans-cyclopean vision” (to coin a term) is indeed a subjective illusion – and a fragile one. A compelling one, but only if you’ve never tried to break it before.

You can also do it with a friend, but make sure you pick someone you can trust. An identical twin should be easy, but there… can you trust even your identical twin? Might they not secretly be your evil twin?

It’s a dangerous thing to do. You might get stuck in your new perspective and have to live out the rest of their life as that other person. On the surface they may look perfectly happy, but inwardly have plenty of reason to be utterly miserable. It happens far more than you might imagine.

I also suspect there are people who lack this fixed-perspective. Maybe they were born without one? Or maybe, as a consequence of childhood abuse, say, they were invited to abandon it?

As to the possibility of such a thing happening, consider this. Our sense of self perishes within us all when we go to sleep. It reappears when we dream, but in a crippled twisted form, with proclivities and powers that are “simply not us” – like being able to levitate. Certain drugs can suppress it, or drastically modify it. It also disappears when we are engaged in some all-absorbing task (we say it “takes us out of ourselves”). Modern neuroscience considers it an epiphenomenon of the DMN (default mode network), and can watch it being suppressed by psilocybin, say.

There’s a correspondence here with mythical beings that notoriously don’t have souls, such as elves, dwarfs and mermaids. Likewise witches and vampires – the conceit being that their souls are in hell and their bodies taken over by demons. From this ugly perspective, burning a witch at the stake (plus other hideous cruelties) actually does her a favour, since it liberates her animated corpse from infernal possession.

Suppose we run the risk of being abducted by the secret police and tortured, but we are confident we have a burner body, like having a burner phone – the “Mystical Body of Christ”. Nobody can control us now. It was part of the appeal of early Christianity: while your corruptible body was being munched by lions in the arena, you could join the audience in the stands – and perhaps even enjoy the show.

Why then did fixed-perspective vision (aka a sense of selfhood) evolve, if it makes the individual so vulnerable to coercion? For the same reason as fear itself – to invite one to take more care of oneself and not get into the habit of casually throwing oneself away. Darwinian evolution doesn’t care how a thing is done. Just that it gets done well enough to make having grandchildren more likely.

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