Are we all living in a simulation? If you were to ask the French philosopher Jean
Baudrillard this question, his answer would be a definitive yes, although what he
means by simulation and what you mean by simulation might be two very different
things. Which is funny, considering the most influential example of a simulation was
directly inspired by Baudrillard's 1981 work
Simulation and Simulacra. This is the book that we see Neo hide in the computer disks
he sells in The first Matrix, and it's the one book the Wachowski siblings made
required reading for everyone on the crew of The Matrix movies.
But despite this famous example of the mainstream idea of the simulation being
directly inspired by Baudrillard's work, what the French postmodern philosopher
means by the term simulation is something much more insidious and much scarier
than what we find in The Matrix movies.
In this episode, we're going to be exploring what Baudrillard means by this term
simulation and why Baudrillard thinks that we are already walled inside a simulation
permanently cut off from reality. This Baudrillardian idea of simulation is, to my
mind, one of the most hauntingly prescient philosophical ideas you'll ever come
across.
More relevant and scary than either 1984 or Brave New World, Simulation and
Simulacra is the dystopia of our present - a dystopia that is so all-encompassing and
yet impossibly hard to grasp that we have walked blindly into it. It is the most accurate
diagnosis of the slope
we find ourselves free-falling down with our culture's departure from modernity into
the unreal simulation that is the postmodern condition.
After rewatching The Matrix movies a couple of months ago, I thought it might be a
nice idea to have a dive into Jean Baudrillard iconic work Simulation and Simulacra.
It's a small book, but dear Lord, it is
not an easy book. It reminds me of reading Camus' Myth of Sisyphus or Nietzsche's
Beyond Good and Evil for the first time. I had that same sense that 90% of the book
was going over my head, but the 10% that was seeping in was really blowing
my mind was filling me with excitement and was changing the way that I look at the
world. What Baudrillard is saying ties in my obsession in the past year with people
like Jamie Wheal, Tristan Harris and, above all,
Daniel Schmachtenberger.
I fully believe that if Simulation and Simulacra had been written as a novel it would be
spoken about with 1984 and Brave New World -I suppose in a bastardised form, it
still is with The Matrix movies. But yeah, it's not really. And it probably wouldn't
have been able to, because the thing is like, this
book is really hard to pin down
and I found it really difficult to kind of get into the juice of it and to figure out
what's going on. When I sat down to make the video,
I thought I'd start with three key terms in the book Simulation and Simulacra and hyperreality.
So I started with the term simulation and tried to define what the word meant, and I
immediately found myself in the weeds. This is the first major difference between
Baudrillard's book and The Matrix movie. The idea of the simulation is really easy to
define in The Matrix movies.
The simulation is a technological virtual reality world that we are all plugged into.
It's Descartes epistemological demon. In the language
of Baudrillard, The Matrix is dealing with the problem of illusion, not
the problem of simulation, because The Matrix is really a question of illusion.
You have the virtual reality that is the Matrix, which seems real, and then you have the
actual reality of Zion. The Matrix is an illusion. The red pill takes you out of the
illusion and into reality. It's a nice, heroic arc, but that's not what Baudrillard is talking
about.
That's Descartes idea of the dream and how do I know that I'm sitting beside a fire
when I could be in my bed dreaming that I am? It's a question of illusion. Baudrillard's
simulation is much more insidious and terrifying because in Baudrillard's simulation
there is no Zion. That's the whole point. There's no way out of the simulation. It's
a straitjacket. It's a prison that we are locked
into, and that's why it's so terrifying. Baudrillard tells us that the binary opposition
between illusion and reality implodes with the entry into the post-modern age.
There's no longer any distinction between illusion and reality. The reality is no longer
reachable, and thus neither reality nor illusion have any meaning anymore. We are, to
use Baudrillard's semiotic terminology stranded in a world without referents.
We live in a sea of signs that are disconnected from any real thing. The real is
decaying, falling to pieces in our world of simulation. It has become what Baudrillard
calls the "desert of the real". Now, on the face of it, this may sound like everything
the commentators warn about with postmodernism.
It's everything that's scary about the relativism and scepticism of knowledge and truth
and everything we hold sacred in the West. But it's a complete mistake to look at it
that way. What this caricature of postmodernism
misses - and Baudrillard is one of the classical postmodernists - is that the postmodern
philosophers aren't the puppet masters of this new postmodern reality, they're
the Cassandras. They're quite often the only ones willing to stare into the face of what
was coming. The Analytic philosophers were busy trying to catch up with science and
with the humble quest of making their discipline rigorous. A lot of these French
philosophers, however, were more concerned with the present day and with the
activity of philosophy and
the course of history. There were the philosophers of the day. That's part of the reason
a lot of them became celebrities because what they had to say was relevant to the
world that they lived in at that time.
So with Baudrillard, I hope we gain insight into the other lens of looking at the
postmodern, not as spectres and shadows of everything that is wrong with the world as
many see them, but as diagnosticians who are diagnosing the great shift that was
occurring in culture.
Now, obviously, they weren't all objective, unbiased individuals sitting on the sidelines.
Foucault certainly was someone who threw his weight to one side of the movement
and acted as a catalyst to bring about the change he believed should come.
But to say that Foucault or Derrida or the other postmodernists created the world, is
to get caught up in the fallacy of mistaking
the reflections of the stars in the pond for the
night sky or in the language of Baudrillard
it's to attribute to individuals what is properly a function of the simulation. The big
question, then, is what exactly does Baudrillard mean by simulation? As it turns out, it
isn't such an easy question to answer. At first, I thought it was just my inexperience
with Baudrillard that kept me from understanding.
But after scouring four or five different books on Baudrillard and reading through a
lot of articles online, it seems that the struggle
to understand the idea of simulation is not just a personal quirk, but a ubiquitous struggle.
None of the books I went through came up with a satisfactory definition of the term.
They left the term float around without pinning it down. The closest I came to a
definition was Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy's page on Baudrillard, where
Douglas Kellner defines Baudrillard's simulation as "the cultural modes of
representation that simulate reality as in television
, computer or cyberspace and virtual reality." This seems quite apt as a definition,
except for the fact that it really doesn't work when you think about it. This is just
a slightly expanded definition of the Matrix's
version of simulation.
It's the virtual reality of The Matrix and its antecedents, TV and computers that absorb
our life force. This is an important aspect of simulation, and one will be digging into
deeper in future episodes. But it doesn't explain how Baudrillard can justify saying
that the entire world is a simulation that we are all living in is a simulation.
It just doesn't make sense. But despite Keller's attempt being wide of the mark, I do
appreciate the attempt at nailing the term down and thought I would try and add to the
quest -although realistically, this video will probably just muddy the waters a bit
more.
One of the books I studied was by a scholar called Rex Butler, who talks about the
inherent difficulties in talking about the term
simulation So
if everything in this episode seems muddy and unclear to you, this is only partly to
due to my inadequacy. It also explains why Simulation and Simulacra will never be so
easy to summarise that it can stand beside 1984 and Brave New World.
Its watered down version in The Matrix is about the best we are going to get at a
mainstream level. All of this being said, the rest of the episode will be an attempt
to demystify this idea of simulation, at least
to some degree.
After reading Butler, it seems that like the first rule of Fight Club,
Baudrillard says
He's using reference here in the semiotic sense as being the referent, i.e. the thing
in reality that the sign refers to. This is the
first key aspect of Baudrillard's simulation. It
is, first and foremost, a hypothesis. As Butler points out, the simulation
So I hope you're beginning to get an idea as to why this topic has been wrecking my
head and also why I find
it so fascinating. It's both incredibly dense and difficult to understand, but at the same
time, it's one of the most fascinating ideas I've come across in years. So having
established that anything we say about the topic is going to be inadequate and
blundering past Wittgenstein's injunction that "what we cannot speak of, we must pass
over
in silence" let's try to say a little more about simulation. Another important clue in
attempting to understand simulation is the idea that
So that all sounds very interesting. But what does it actually mean? one example the
Baudrillard uses in the book is the idea of the hypermarket, and this rather mundane
example is a good way of understanding this point.
So hypermarket is a common term in France for supermarkets.
So your Tesco, your Walmart, or for those of you in Ireland, your Dunnes Stores. And
what is a supermarket? It's an attempt to perfect the idea of a market. Originally,
a market was a place where you went and you'll
get your meat off this person.
you get your bread off that person, you get your candles off the person over there. As
Baudrillard puts it, the traditional market was the place where "the city and the
country came to rub elbows". But along comes the supermarket and attempts to
perfectly realise this idea of a market brings all these things together under one roof.
The vegetables are here and the meat is there and the candlesticks are over there. But
as Butler puts it, at a certain point in its progress, it draws too close to the original.
And instead of bringing the system closer to the
original, it only drives it further away.
This makes perfect sense in the supermarket example, because supermarkets while
theoretically closer to the perfection of the market couldn't be further from the reality.
There is something soul-destroying about a supermarket. You go in and under these
fluorescent lights, you pick out your groceries, and now you don't even have to talk to
anyone.
You just go up to the machine. You touch your phone and your out. But it's not even
that, it's the system itself. It's the machine-likeness of it all. You go in - another dot in
the crowd and you pick out some items from the perfectly organised ranks. In your
wake.
the ranks are replenished, so the machine is in a constant state of homogenising itself.
You, the customer, proceed in an orderly, linear fashion around a supermarket. You
come to the till and you proceed out in your car and home. It's not just the
supermarket, either.
Baudrillard writes that Compare.
all this with going to the market where there's a wholesome buzz, there's people
interacting with the people at the stalls, there's someone busking over there in the
corner, there's limited stock and humans you have to overcome to get access to that
stock.
I find there's something nourishing about going to the market. I feel good after it.
I would never go to a supermarket for a walk
around but the market? Absolutely. There's something wholesome about the market
that is completely missing in the supermarket.
It's lost its soul in its attempt to perfect the idea of the market. This reaching for
the perfection of the market, for the ultimate
form creates a homogenised market experience across the country and across the
world.
The market becomes something hyperreal in this approach to perfection. And
somewhere along the lines, it loses its soul. There's more than enough lessons there to
consider as far as human perfection goes as well. Perhaps we are better off being
thwarted by the haphazard chaos of our instincts.
Maybe a Stoic world would become a soulless as a hypermarket.
Obviously, this is a mundane example, but to try and bridge between this example of
the hypermarkets and the globalised, all encompassing, truth destroying idea of the
simulation
let's look at Baudrillard example from ethnology. So in 1971, the Philippine
government decided to return a few dozen Tasaday people to the depths of the forest
they had recently been discovered in. The Tasaday had lived there for eight centuries
with no contact with the outside world.
But upon contact with this world they were, as Baudrillard puts it
And so, at the recommendation of the anthropologists, the government decided to
return the tribespeople people to virgin forest beyond the reach of colonisers, tourists
and ethnologists.
Baudrillard's analysis of this event is brilliant. As with everything else, it's difficult to
grasp what that something incredibly powerful is. He says that in order for ethnology
to live, its object must die. In the process of studying the tribes,
the ethnologist were causing them to decay. But this returning of the Tasaday people
to the virgin forest is precisely what is so peculiar. The science sacrifices these
tribespeople in order to preserve its reality principle. The Tasaday are frozen in their
natural element.
They've become These tribespeople become the model of simulation
- of all the possible tribespeople from the times before ethnology. What Baudrillard
is getting at here captures the difficult to grasp essence of simulation.
Earlier, he writes about how, with simulation, the real is no longer what it was. We see
the implosion of the real - the collapse of the difference between illusion and reality.
Now there is no illusion or reality. There is only simulation.
Looking at the case of the Tasaday tribespeople in this light, we see the attempts to get
back to reality, to restore the Tasaday to their "true" form
in a virgin forest. It's this idea of what is natural, this reality principle. But in
trying to grasp for that real, we are only simulating
this. When you hear people arguing about what our ancestors ate, how our ancestors
lived and why you should live that way now, it's not getting back to the way our
Palaeolithic ancestors lived,
it's just another simulation like the Tasaday. Another example that came to my mind is the
idea of a wilderness reserve. If you think about it, it's a complete paradox in terms.
Wilderness used to be an unsafe space that existed beyond the city walls.
It was the dangerous wildlands where anything could happen. It was the dark path, the
thick forest, the untamed wilderness in which wolves and mountain lions hung about.
It was a place of danger and uncertainty, but not just that, the wilderness was the
world.
Civilisation was nothing but a series of islands in this untamed world of wilderness.
That's what made it wilderness. It was the untamed and all-encompassing other. But
now you have wilderness reserves. Instead of the wilderness being the thing that walls
in civilisation,
you now have this area we've walled off and called wilderness. We've tried to preserve
this idea of wilderness. But in doing so, we've created a simulated wilderness. It's
this simulation of wilderness that, in its attempts
to perfect the idea of wilderness, has lost all touch with it.
These are relatively mundane examples of Baudrillard's simulation, but you could
begin to see what he means by saying that everything has become a simulation, that
the simulation has become all encompassing. This isn't just a question of the internet
or of the media, it's everything.
When we talk about internet and technology and how they've warped our lives, the
simulation is easy to understand. The Matrix is an easy thing to understand because
we look at our non virtual lives and see something that is less warped.
But Baudrillard's point - that I have no doubt butchered - is that the simulation is
much more insidious and has penetrated far deeper into our lives.
We now live in an entirely simulated world. What exactly this means I'm still wrestling
with, and I'm fully confident that anyone who's studied Baudrillard deeply would
probably cringe at my indelicate attempt to capture what he's talking about. But in
future episodes I want to circle, this work of Baudrillard more because I genuinely feel
that there's something important in it
and something that might be imperative to understanding the mess that we find
ourselves in in the third decade of the twenty-first century. In future episodes, we're
going to look at Baudrillard's criticisms of The Matrix movies. We're going to do a
more detailed breakdown of Simulation and Simulacra, and we're also going to talk
about his idea of hyperreality
and look at the prescience of Baudrillard's work for our world today. For now, that's
everything for today's episode of the living philosophy. If you've enjoyed this, you
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