The Theater Metaphor
The easiest way to think about GWT is in terms of a "theater metaphor." In the "theater of consciousness" a "spotlight of selective attention" shines a bright spot on stage. The bright spot reveals the contents of consciousness, actors moving in and out, making speeches or interacting with each other. The audience is not lit up --- it is in the dark (i.e., unconscious) watching the play. Behind the scenes, also in the dark, are the director (executive processes), stage hands, script writers, scene designers and the like. They shape the visible activities in the bright spot, but are themselves invisible. Baars argues that this is distinct from the concept of the Cartesian theater, since it is not based on the implicit dualistic assumption of "someone" viewing the theater, and is not located in a single place in the mind (in Blackmore, 2005).
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Famous quotes containing the words theater and/or metaphor:
“It is not enough to demand insight and informative images of reality from the theater. Our theater must stimulate a desire for understanding, a delight in changing reality. Our audience must experience not only the ways to free Prometheus, but be schooled in the very desire to free him. Theater must teach all the pleasures and joys of discovery, all the feelings of triumph associated with liberation.”
—Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956)
“If we are a metaphor of the universe, the human couple is the metaphor par excellence, the point of intersection of all forces and the seed of all forms. The couple is time recaptured, the return to the time before time.”
—Octavio Paz (b. 1914)