| Recent innovations in imaging techniques promise some access to your experience [CBC, 1992]. However, my major access to your experience is through analogy with my experience. Empathy is essential. Thus, I must have a humanistic concept of the person, in which relationships are intimate. That is, I recognise you as a member of the same species with essentially the same equipment in essentially the same predicament. Being aware of my own complexity, I should not explain you in simplistic terms based on my limited information about you. The most blatant example is explaining you in terms of superficial attributes like skin colour and sex. However, in the psychological literature, there are many examples of less blatant explaining away of subjects.
For example, much of perception research is based on fixing the body of the subject with respect to the environment, the head with respect to the body, and the eyes with respect to the head. Such "controls" permit the presentation of an impoverished stimulus and the measurement of a limited response. It is encouraging to see explorers in cyberspace turning now to J. J. Gibson, who argues that it is precisely by means of those movements of the body with respect to the environment, the head with respect to the body, and the eyes with respect to the head that enables the person to construct the visual world [Gibson, 1979]. Paradoxically, it is cybernauts, sitting passively at their computers and roaming around cyberspace without their bodies, who are emphasising this theory based on the active interaction of the body with the environment!
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