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You wake in the morning and the first thing you see is the harsh light slamming you from your bedroom window. You squeeze your eyes shut and pull the blanket over your head -- your eyes are burning and you need more sleep. But it's Monday. You have to get up or you'll miss your chemistry class. Or you'll be late for work. Whatever! So anyway you get up and go into the bathroom for your morning ritual and wash the sour taste from your mouth. Then it's time for some chow. Or at least a cup of coffee or something.

The next thing you know you're on the freeway, driving your 12 year old bucket with wheels, thinking the traffic is worse today than it was the last time you were here. But eventually you arrive at work, or school, or at the supermarket. Wherever!

And so it goes for the rest of the day, being in one place or another, doing one thing or another, meeting somebody or other, ... generally seeing your way through performing hundreds of skills. And that sure enough is everyday, plain-vanilla ordinary experience. It may not be all that much, but it's all you've got and you're happy you've got it. Read is definitely good.

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Wait a minute, though! All that reading is making be dizzy. Something funny is going on. Things get smaller as they move farther away! Why is that? And why didn't I notice it before? More to the point, how can it be? Not only that, but if the house gets bigger as I move closer to it, it must get smaller for Steven, who's walking away from it. Can that be? Is it for real? Can a house get bigger and smaller at the same time? There it is, but is it possible? Is that the way the world works? Or is it a logical impossibility, merely a figment of my imagination?

In psychology they call such funny business "perspective." If you notice in your experience you're always in a big globe and always at the center of it. And all the objects around you shrink as they move toward the perimeter and get bigger as they get closer. Normally it's no concern. You simply take it for granted that the objects don't really change in size as they move nearer or farther. This is to say that you distinguish between what things are really like and how things look to you. And if you think about that little morsel a bit more, you probably realize that you experience two worlds in one, so to say. One, the things you experience don't really change in size -- that's the objective world. And two, the things in your experience do change in size -- that's the subjective world. Two worlds in one. The invariant world and the perspective world. What's more, whenever you perceive (read), whatever you observe, whatever you look at or study, you are always confronted with your perception of that something or other. So the subjective world of perspective is forever present in your experience.

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You can take advantage of the subjective-objective duality of personal experience to build simulations of skills environments (or contexts). Indeed, you can draw a parallel between the math model for the simulation with the objective world, on the one hand, and the simulation itself with the subjective world, on the other. What is out front in perspective, as it were, is the visual representation of the simulated environment. And what is behind the scenes is the math model. The former represents the space-time view of an individual in the context, and what lies behind, as part of the dual composite, is the unavoidable objective presence. The best and most accurate picture of the real-world counterpart is a scientific representation.

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Simulation is a bit like the world of perception. On the one hand it's a representation of real events, and on the other it reflects what you see. In fact, you personalize the simulation when you embed your personal characteristics in it and depict what you yourself experience. The more of yourself you inject into the simulation, the more personalized the depiction will be. 

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