"Telepathy would not be a good thing to have. It might seem nice because you'd be on the cover of a dozen magazines per year, but you'd also have to fly over the Atlantic 30 times per year to keep up with the demand for your talent. It would be a very exhausting life."

And that presumes that we see the world objectively enough to share our processed sensory data without experiencing it as an unrelenting horrorshow.

Author of sci-fi tall-tales R.A. Lafferty wrote a classic tale Through Other Eyes which posits that the subjectivity of our views would render "sharing" into a nightmare.

From http://emc2andallthat.wordpress.com/2013/11/30/through-other-eyes/ ;

"Now I know that the student concerned had seen the website previously. He had even complimented me on it. But he obviously hadn’t seen it properly. And, strangely enough, it started me thinking about how we do not always see the world as others see it.

To my mind, one the finest descriptions and “thought experiments” on this topic comes from a short story by the incomparable R. A. Lafferty:

“It may be that I am the only one who sees the sky black at night and the stars white,” he said to himself, “and everyone else sees the sky white and the stars shining black. And I say the sky is black, and they say the sky is black; but when they say black they mean white.”
– R. A. Lafferty, Through Other Eyes, “Nine Hundred Grandmothers and other stories”

..........

"Charles makes the mistake of using the Scanner to look out through the eyes of his girlfriend, Valery. He is horrified:

“she hears sounds that I thought nobody could ever hear. Do you know what worms sound like inside the earth? They’re devilish, and she would writhe and eat dirt with them.”

Lafferty didn't write "hard SF." He wrote more like a spinner of fables or barroom exaggerations. But the work was good and often pointed.

He was also an "author's author," never gaining much popularity, but never without a story in any given "year's best" anthology.

Dante







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