- From person as extra to person as director.
It is a useful metaphor to consider this subjective map as a mind movie, in which the person is director, producer, script-writer, stage manager, and principal star. This movie studio of the mind doubles as a movie theatre. However, there is only one seat. Each of us has to learn to talk, to write, to make movies, and so on in order to invite other people in to see our home movies. In extending the metaphor to include the movie theatre, we are in danger of falling into the fallacy of the Cartesian theatre, which requires a little person in our heads observing our consciousness, and leads to an infinite regress of nested little people [Dennett, 1991]. However, we learn about our self as we learn about other people - through observing our behaviour not our experience. There are certain quantitative differences - the self is in every scene, and there are certain qualitative differences - our experience of our own actions is based on fedback rather than input information. Self-consciousness is based on those differences.
The person is co-evolving with his/her tools. The current debate as to whether our new electronic tools are means of liberation or of oppression can be illuminated by considering participant effects. If a person uses those tools they become extensions and thus a potential means of liberation; if a person does not use those tools, their use by other people becomes part of his/her environment and thus a potential means of oppression. Communication tools are valuable aids in making the mind movie. Now that we have the computer as the corpus callosum, integrating the text of the left hemisphere and the images of the right hemisphere, we can simulate the function of the entire nervous system. We finally have a three-dimensional medium mediating between our three-dimensional brains and our three-dimensional environments. Hypermedia, consisting of a system of interlinked nodes, is isomorphic with our cognitive system of interrelated concepts. It is a powerful positive prosthetic which fits.
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