No. That was not what the cites were about.
The point that I was trying to make in my original post - perhaps ineptly, but in any case the point got lost in the subsequent noise - is that your original scenario is misconceived, because there is no clearly defined instant (clearly defined at scales relevant to light-speed events) at which the experience of your face occurs or begins. You certainly do not begin to experience your face at the instant that the first photons reflected from it (and re-reflected from the mirror) strike your retina. There is nothing particularly experientially significant about that moment. Indeed, if, a few nanoseconds, or even microseconds after that first wave of photons arrived, they somehow stopped coming, you would not have any such experience at all.
Visual experience is not something that happens at a nanosecond-scale instant. It takes time to constitute itself, and the process has no very clearly marked beginning or end point. Neural and cognitive processes that were constitutive of the experience of seeing your face in the mirror began well before those first photons arrived at your eyes (indeed, well before they first reflected off your face) - this is why I mentioned the predictive aspects of perception - and they need to continue long afterwards in order for you to have the relevant experience. We are talking about timescales on the order of 10ths of a second here, not the nanosecond timescales at which (I take your word for it) the light gets from face to eye. Furthermore, different aspects of the experience get processed at different rates: for instance, visual shape information and color information are processed in different parts of the brain, so that, given the relatively slow speed of nervous conduction, they are bound to deliver their first results at different times, yet we do not subjectively experience a face’s shape and layout before we experience its color (or vice-versa). At the timescale appropriate to understanding brain processes (itself very much slower than that appropriate to local optical processes) a subjectively instantaneous visual experience is, in fact, very smeared out in time.
Actually it is worse than that, because recognizing a face, even recognizing a very familiar one, such as your own, is usually going to require you to move your gaze around the mirror image in front of you, to bring the spotlight of foveal attention successively on to its different features. That of course, all takes time. For each eye movement, the brain has to compute where the eye probably needs to be pointed to gather the next needed diagnostic information; it has to send out the signal to move to the eye muscles, along the relevant motor nerves; the muscles have to execute the movement; and then, the information from the new pattern of stimulation falling on the retina has to be sent back to the brain, and processed in the several relevant cortical and thalamic areas. Luckily, we can pack a few such eye movements (and associated neural computations) into a second or so, and those few will probably be enough for you to recognize the face, to see it as a face, and even as your face, with a reasonable degree of confidence; although it is well to be aware that there is no well defined end to the recognition process, and in most circumstances your eyes will continue to move over the mirror image, checking the features further, for some time more.
So, seeing your face in the mirror probably, in normal circumstances, takes a minimum of roughly one second. And the roughness here is not just a matter of our ignorance; is inherent in the nature of the relevant processes. Certainly a few nanoseconds here or there are of absolutely no consequence.
Thus this (from the OP):
is, to all intents and purposes, nonsense. You are committing a form of the fallacy of false precision. The paradoxical (and thus, for some, kinda thrilling) notion that our experience is always experience of the past arises only when we apply inappropriate time-scales to our thinking about cognition and subjective experience, and when we baselessly privilege certain events (such as the first arrival of certain photons at the retina) over others that are in fact, far more significant to the formation and timing of our experiences.
Sure, you can ask what biochemical processes have had time to occur in the time that light took to go from your face to your mirror and on to your eye, but the answer is of no scientific, philosophical or phenomenological significance. You do not, in fact, experience yourself as you were 23.6 (or whatever) nanoseconds ago. On a timescale appropriate to the description of experiences (or even on the somewhat finer timescale appropriate to the description of neural events) you experience your face in the mirror just as it is at the time of the experience.
The stuff that kanicbird (and others) say about “time lags,” compensatory mechanisms, and reterospective changes to our experience are also symptoms of having fallen prey to this error.
