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"The world is really so surreal these days that it's necessary for us to blunt it somehow in order to stay sane. The artist functions to short-circuit the buffering mechanism, so that people can occasionally perceive the weirdness of things as they are."
- William Gibson
 |
| 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. |
| 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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