I like Ursula K. Le Guin a lot as a science fiction author - she is an imaginative inventer of societies and a first-rate investigator into the nature of communication. In this work, reviewed by Maria Popova, she offers an alternative to the traditional mechanical information-theoretic model of communication. This model, a transmission model, involves separate entities sending information to each other through a pipe. Her model is more involved, and evokes the picture of two amoeba getting jiggy. Then amoeba communicate, they actually merge with each other, and share a common space. Well, that's great for the amoeba, but my own feeling is that this model, which has its roots in phenomenalism (see, eg., Husserl), is wrong. No, we don't send signals through a channel into each others' minds. But neither do we physically enter them. We are far more distant from each other than either suggests. It's not nearly so romantic a vision as LeGuin's, but then, sometimes the world isn't as romantic as we would like (or perhaps romanticism depends on our way of viewing the world).
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