GirlChat #606107
Re: Nothing to do with the content of your post
Posted by Dante on 2014-November-21 19:27:03 EST, Friday
In reply to Nothing to do with the content of your post but posted by Neutrino on 2014-November-21 10:23:06 EST, Friday
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 hadnt 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? Theyre 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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