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"What television does is rent us friends and relatives who are quite satisfactory. This is quite something, to rent artificial friends and relatives right inside the house."
- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
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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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'If you're one of those rarities who haven't attended a rocket-polo "carnage", let me tell you it's a colorful affair.'
'They filed clumsily into the battleroom, like children in a swimming pool for the first time, clinging to the handholds along the side.'
'a walking balloon proceeded with long strides of its aluminum legs...'
'There was nowhere on the planet where science and technology could not provide one with a comfortable home...'
'Most men updated their PIP on New Year's Day...'
'...a misshapen, many-tentacled thing about twice the size of a man.'
