The desert of the real

The video above is a pretty cool introduction to Jean Baudrillard and his epic work, Simulacra and Simulation.

If you've seen The Matrix, you've already been introduced to the line of thinking that's presented in his 1981 writings about what he calls hyper realism.

Essentially everything evolves, or devolves into a copy of a copy.

The whole human experience with possibly the exception of birth and death, has become an image of an image. A projection of a projection.

For example:

You're 16. You fall in love for the first time. You've seen it happen countless times on television and in the movies. Your expectations has already been set by actors, who aren't in love, and were paid a lot of money to create a scene the way a director thinks it should be, depending on the storyline and genre of the entertainment. Without having an authentic experience , music has already shaped your view on certain emotions and in which circumstances they be reenacted.

In schools children are molded to be another brick in the wall.

This can be a fascinating subject, in theory.

In practice, we are all more like Cypher in the Matrix.

We like aircon. We like video games. We buy tickets to go laugh at witty comedians that tell us society as a whole, is screwed.

We are no longer living, but observing simulations of life as entertainment.

Digital media, politics, religion, all these things and more have successfully staked their claim within this simulated environment.

And that's a brief overview but it's best you watch the video as the content is explained much more succinctly therein.

The religion of the 'Great Reset' is in my opinion all about hyper realism.

The final nail in the coffin of an authentic human experience.

I'm very new to his work, but I don't think Baudrillard came up with an alternative to how it plays out.

One thing that seems certain to me though is that the more technology progresses, the more entrenched we will become in a simulation of a simulation.

Not so sure about birth and death being exceptions. I think that nobody can be sure what is beyond that, but we have our guesses.
My guess is that there are endless layers of reality and "real life" is just one layer of the chain.
I think that it's normal that new layers will evolve and we just forget the older layers when we get too used to the new ones.
To describe my guess the best is like being hooked to "virtual reality", so the autonomous systems will take care all of your bodily functions. During time the "virtual reality" will become the new "real life" as we have just forgotten that there is anything beyond that. The trippy thought is that if this reality is just one layer, then it means that in this reality we will start to evolve from the smallest and simplest biological lifeforms and with every death, we evolve into something more complex. And this evolution progresses until we are complex enough to create a new form of reality to move to, and where to forget, that there is an older form of reality that this new reality is built on.

I have no idea what actually happens beyond birth and death, but this makes most sense for me when trying to imagine the infinity of the universe.

The digital world is a constructed "reality" or perceived as such by those engaged (like me typing this). To grow up in that environment is to experience everything second hand in a way my generation (50 +) didn't. We got to enter adulthood without the digital matrix sucking us in. Life is meant to be lived not simulated and observed. Secondhand existence, maybe 3rd, 4th to a billionth hand depending on how you want to measure it. Copies of copies as he says. Nothing is original, we are growing stale by repetition and rotting from the inside out.

a reply to: eitea

I meant to say as an experience, that is as original a moment for us as it can get.

Birth because of a clean feedback loop and death perhaps because fear causes an authentic emotional response.

a reply to: 19Bones79

It's funny that you posted this today. I have shower thoughts, like most of you, and I was thinking about how there aren't any new ideas in the world. It's all previous idea's just regurgitated to fit the problem at hand.

During my shower, I realized, if you have an actual new thought you'd be rich in life. Not money rich but breaking out of the paradigm of conformity.

So who is to define what is reality ? This is fascinating subject. I like the matrix movies .

a reply to: 19Bones79

Strong experiences for sure. But... the "virtual experiences" we are getting right now are becoming stronger and stronger.
So, yeah, no "truth" to be argued over, but just our different guesses.

a reply to: Kenzo

This is reality, but we are born as one of the pieces on a boardgame of Monopoly.

I think because of the motivators in this life a lot of development possibilities lie dormant for us as a species.

If you weren't living from paycheck to paycheck as most do, if the basics was taken care of and as a result you only had to do in life what you really felt like doing then your motivations would be pure and your life experience might have a completely different route, one which you chose and were not forced into due to the nature of money and profit. An untainted experience if you will.

No more ads, no more brainwashing into buying something, no politicians to tell you who is evil and needs to be attacked (for profit of a few).

How would life be if you know that when you see someone doing something it's because they genuinely wanted to do it?

a reply to: 19Bones79


This is strange place, and yes the basic daily stuff act like distraction , from other more important things


Riddle me this

If we all live as in controlled hallucination state ,It’s just that when we all agree about our hallucinations, that’s what we call reality.


When we all agree , was it hallusination or not, it`s more tricky to see the baseline.....because ,to what you can compare?

a reply to: Kenzo

I'm not speaking to hallucinations but rather illusions.

Things that dominate our lives so completely and yet my gut feeling tells me they are not only unnecessary but also deliberately harmful.

Nothing is by accident. Everything is by design.

The question(s) for me becomes who, what, how and why.

And when do we stop believing that everything will fall to pieces if we focused on humanity instead of economics?

a reply to: 19Bones79


And how you can tell which are hallucinations and what are illusions as "sensory inputs"


These are few videos about reality and so on....i dont say it`s all clear to me, i find the concepts and ideas quite interesting .








Our brains exist in a state of “controlled hallucination”

a reply to: Kenzo

I understand that and I do find it fascinating within my limited knowledge on the subject however I am talking about ivory towers like banking institutions and the debt trap, and religious institutions and how they leech off the very people that come to them for spiritual enlightenment.

We have no way of developing naturally while under the illusion of these institutions that they are necessary.

a reply to: 19Bones79


Yeeh agree, so much things that are keeping people coming more as spiritually And psyop is flying everywhere...Twilight zone .

a reply to: 19Bones79

I'm very new to his work, but I don't think Baudrillard came up with an alternative to how it plays out.

He did. The best exposition of what he found was by Guilles Deleuze. You'll find it in his book A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

In short: your species don't make it past the Great Filter, It does not succeed, and finally dies out. Whatever it tries.

a reply to: Direne

Thanks for the book info

your species don't make it past the Great Filter,

And yours?

a reply to: 19Bones79

Mine will go back to the design board, again, engineering a new species, seeding a planet, taking care of all initial and boundary conditions, monitoring the emergence of a techno-civilization, and repeating the experiment once more till we finally success.

And once we do, we will proceed with the slow contact process. Till we both together can make it to the next step in through the Great Filter. Till one day we all together could look into the eyes of the Great Designer and escape from this Universe. The simulation will then be over.

a reply to: Direne

This is great.

So I'm talking to an alien named Direne.

How are ya?

Have you posted a thread about this I might read up on?

a reply to: 19Bones79

There is no longer a front, no demarcation line, the enemy sits in the heart of the culture that fights it. That is, if you like, the fourth world war: no longer between peoples, states, systems and ideologies, but, rather, of the human species against itself (Baudrillard, 2004).

I'm sure you will love Baudrillard. About the Great Filter theory you'll find some information in books devoted to the Fermi Paradox.

a reply to: Direne

Ah ok.

That probability threshold is definitely whether or not we can put our warlike tendencies to rest as our technology grows even more dangerous.

The journalist seemed confused on that issue in the article I just read,not sure if we already passed it.

And yes, at the current trajectory we are definitely fooked in the class war.

Tell me about your species or if you've already done so send me a link please.