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"I've got this beautiful panoramic three-dimensional painting of Mars based on Martian photos. It's 30 feet wide. You can pick out every pebble on the Martian landscape. And who'd have dreamed you could do that?"
- Arthur C. Clarke
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| XV | ||
| Allows anyone to directly experience another person's conscious awareness. |
This is another variant on the idea of stimsim, a way of being able to actually have the same experience of another person.
| When XV was introduced in 2006, it was denounced roundly for being even more attention-absorbing than television. It was also praised highly because it allowed anyone to have the experience instantly of knowing how to do a thing, and of doing it…You could take a psychopath with no empathy and give him the experience of being a victim. This was the experiment that revealed the flaw. |
| Technovelgy from Mother of Storms,
by John Barnes. Published by Tor in 1994 Additional resources -
|
If it existed, this device would solve one of the twentieth century's most vexing philosophical problems - the private language argument proposed by Ludwig Wittgenstein in his book Philosophical Investigations. The argument is stated with characteristic succinctness in the following quote:
If you had XV, you could know.
The words of this language are to refer to what can be known only to the speaker; to his immediate, private, sensations. So another cannot understand the language.
Even when I use words that we all hold in common, how can you be sure that when I use a word like "upset" that I mean the same thing, the same internal experience, as you mean when you use the word?
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'He had travelled the space-lanes of the solar system for the greater part of his life...'
'The dinner was excellent. It was completely vegetarian — grown in specially prepared gardens in this Moon base...'
'Telepaths had their sensitiveness enlarged to an immense range by the pin-sets, which were telepathic amplifiers adapted to the mammal mind.'
'It was a relief to enter one of the comfortable autos, whisper a direction down the tube, and just know that you would be taken to your destination in the quickest, safest, and cheapest manner.'
'But he didn't get very far with it before another noise in his ear radio scattered his thoughts. George winced...'
'The vast spinning sphere of Factory in the Sky loomed above and ahead of us, gleaming white against the unfathomable jet depths of surrounding space.'
'And if it doesn’t work,' inquired Lazarus, 'what does that make us? Sunspots?'
'The Dillard people had performed a miracle and put all the works in a girl-modeled case.'
'Our study of your race has convinced us that you are not fitted to leave your planet in the present state of your civilization.'
