Unicycle #15 - Simulation of Reality
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Hello dear friends :-)
I read the first part of Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation last week. This book was the inspiration for The Matrix, one of my favorite movies, and has a lot to say about postmodernism, media, capitalism, and politics. I’m not sure everything Baudrillard talks about is true, but looking at the world through his lens is fascinating.
The core idea is that there’s reality, and then there’s our ideas about reality (he calls them signs and symbols). For most of human history, reality was primary. Our symbols were faithful reflections of the physical world. With the wide adoption of media technologies like the printing press and TV and the internet, the symbols slowly replaced the physical. Now we live in a world primarily made of symbols — a simulation of reality. The underlying reality is sometimes misrepresented by these symbols, has disappeared completely, or maybe wasn’t even there to begin with (in the case where symbols just refer to other symbols).
Some examples:
Search for images of “save icon”, and you’ll see pictures of floppy disks. But saving a file today has nothing to do with a floppy disk. There’s no “disk” (round thing that spins) involved at all, as most modern drives are solid-state. The “save” symbol points at a reality that does not exist. In fact, a “file” is not a file — not in the sense of a paper in a cabinet, nor even in the sense of data on your hard drive. Today it’s probably an entry in a database in the cloud.
Humans used to raise individual chickens and eat them. Now we buy generic chicken (or even chik’n) in a supermarket. The connection between the animal and the product is tenuous. How would you tell if there were no connection at all? In 2016, Castle Cheese was caught replacing parmesan cheese with wood pulp.
E-sports simulates real sports. Twitter simulates conversation. Politics simulates community.
Even words drift from the concepts they represent:
The DSM in psychology is an official book of the presently-dominant school of psychology’s jargon. The words in the DSM have little ability, on their own, to pick out important aspects of reality. The DSM jargon is given meaning when learned in a psychological community (a hospital or practice or university, say) while observing people, classifying them one way and another, until the initiates can aesthetically “see” the different constructs for themselves, just like their teachers. Each observing-teaching community unavoidably develops its own distinct meanings for the DSM words. But within psychology, as within many domains, there is a clear belief that these special jargon words have global meaning: that they apply to humans generally, and that their meanings are clear and shared. This faith, evidenced most in psychology’s tools and experimental methods, is both touching and troubling.
~ Words Fail
The book is slow going. I think it’s worth at least a skim, but if you don’t want to dig in, this post does a better job explaining the core idea than the book itself, and ties it together with the simulacra levels I wrote about before.
Soup of the Week
This week, Soup Club is making Moroccan Stew with butternut squash, chickpeas, and couscous. If you cook your soups in an instant pot (as I do), you can adapt this pretty easily. Do the sauteing (steps 1 and 2) as instructed, then combine steps 3 and 4 and cook at all at once on high for 15 minutes. Make sure you don’t overfill the instant pot, or it won’t cook right. Put the broth in last, and only enough to fill the pot 2/3rds of the way full. If it comes out too thick, stir in more broth at the end.
Dub Mood
I’m listening to this Thievery Corporation mix right now. Dub is a chill blend of reggae and trip-hop, with a bit of jazz. I like the slow pace and relative lack of lyrics while writing. Otherwise I end up thinking too much about the music and getting distracted. Enjoy!
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