Before I can really dive into simulacra and social media, I need to take a moment to discuss something I brought up in my last post. The challenge to determine what is “real.” While I may want to believe this should be obvious, as the last post suggested, this is not the case.
I will begin by lumping some other ideas in with this idea of the “real.” There is the idea of what is “true.” There is also this idea of what is “I,” the pronoun used to describe what I consider to be myself. These ideas all have something very much in common: while I feel confident I have a solid grasp on them, so that I use them constantly in my day-to-day life, it turns out when pushed, I cannot for the life of me explain what exactly they are.
In the case of “I,” it seems like what makes up me is what is not outside me. That is, if I assume the existence of the world, then I am not the world. If I suggest the universe is made up of me and the world, then I might suggest that I am the part of the universe that is not the world, and vice versa. However, this quickly devolves if I considered how my body sheds cells and molecules constantly. I consume parts of the world, taking them into myself and using those pieces to generated more of myself. Later, I will shed parts of myself and those pieces will again become part of the world. I am my own personal Ship of Theseus, bringing with it the same challenges to identity.
This line of reasoning holds until I raise the question of the unmeasurable. That is, if all that I am is these molecules, the billions upon billions of them that constitute my cells and body parts, then the Ship of Theseus thought experiment seems to hold true. However, what if there is something more? What if there is a part of me that is not merely these molecules, something unmeasurable? Then what is me may not be as simple.
The intention of this post is not to focus on identity issues, so I won’t dive any deeper into this topic for now. But I hope my point is clear. To explain myself in a way that is clear, to describe myself in a way that delineates me and only me, and not anything else, is quickly becoming a rather challenging endeavor.
The idea of what is “true” is similarly challenging. For my discussion, trying to explain what is true has a strong linkage to what is “real” as well. In fact, part of what I believe most people would want to say about truth has to do with what is real. The explanation I chose to go with in my previous post was to suggest that truth is in some way matching up with how reality is, and reality is what matches up with what we all, collectively, agree to.
That last statement probable raised some hairs, so I will elaborate more. When I utter something, you will likely want to say that what I’ve uttered is true or false, but how do you decide? If possible, you are likely to look to your world and verify my claim, comparing it to your experience of the world. If I suggest that the sky is blue, you will look to the sky and see for yourself if the sky really is blue. If it is, you will say that I uttered a truth. If I instead said the sky was green, you are likely to suggest I uttered a falsehood, as the sky is not green.
Immediately there is a problem with all of this. For a truth assessment to be made, there needs to be something to assess the statement against. Something like facts and evidence. However, there are many, many things I might utter that you will be unable to verify in any way. For example, if I utter “what I see when I look up at the sky appears green to me,” you will have no recourse. You cannot say whether that statement is true because you have no access to my experiences. You could look at the sky and compare your experience to mine, but that would not tell you if my statement were true or not. It would only provide you a possible correlation to my experience.
This is where the idea of “my truth” comes from. The idea is that my perspective on the world, and my experience of the world, is mine and mine alone. No one else can experience the world as I do, and so what is true for me is indisputable. It is my truth that the sky appears green to me, and no one can verify my claim either way. And there are a great many better examples I can give than simply my experience of the sky.
This brings us to the idea of the “real.” For me, what counts as real is a personal experience. I assess when reality is real, and when it is not. This is not to say I cannot be deceived or make errors in my assessment; only that it is ultimately up to me what makes up what is real. What is more, if I do make an error, I have to come to the conclusion that I came to an error on my own; no one can tell me I made an error. To be more accurate, others can tell me I made an error, but I will not necessarily believe them; I have to believe I’ve made an error myself before I will see beyond my assessment of the real.
It is a messy business determining for one’s self what is real, what is true, or who one is. It requires a great deal of effort. It can even be painful. This is why I believe so many people defer these sorts of judgments to others. It is much easier to simply allow others to dictate the answers to these questions than to work tirelessly one’s self to determine the answers. This problem is further compounded when groups of people decide to collaborate their efforts together, often with an aim to convince those around them to their side. From what I’ve seen, this appears to be the job of main stream religions, as well as modern commercialism.
I hope that it is apparent to you at this point that I have spoken very little about science and the universe. Not that these things are unimportant, especially in a discussion about what is true or real. What I want to emphasize here is that what science tells us about what is true or real is unfortunately quite biased. And this is what also brings us to Jean Baudrillard‘s simulacra.
I will go into much more detail regarding simulacra in my next post. For now, I will simply say that a simulacra is something like an imperfect copy. Initially, the copy is of something real, but over time the copy no longer refers back to the thing copied. Where there may have originally been a linkage between the copy and the real, no linkage exists any longer. Like if you photocopied a piece of paper over and over repeatedly; eventually what came out of the photocopier would not look at all like the original.
The significance of the simulacra with science is the very same. Science is a process. It was first used long ago by the likes of Aristotle, nearly 2500 years ago, though he never used the term “science” back then. Science is about taking something, like a procedure, and repeating that procedure endlessly. To run an experiment, and to see what the result is. If I run that same experiment repeatedly, do I get the same result each time? How about if others run the same experiment I did, do they get the same result? It is about agreement and consistency. And it is about reality.
However, if you and I and many other people all run this same experiment and we all observe the same results, does that mean we have found a truth? Does it actually tell us something about reality? It was believed that all swans were white for a very long time, until one day a black swan was discovered. It was believed that the Earth was flat for a very long time, even when there were people out there fighting to suggest it was round. It is interesting to me that even today, there are still people who argue that the Earth is flat.
If one follows pure logic, and deductive reasoning, one can feel very, very confident in the results of such experiments. If I assume that Socrates is a man, and that all men are mortal, then I can be very, very confident that Socrates is mortal. However, note that I made 2 important assumptions at the outset: that Socrates is a man, and that all men are mortal. Were either of these assumptions shown to be untrue, my conclusion suddenly looses its veracity.
Science, like so many things, begins with assumptions. So long as we can agree that those assumptions are good assumptions, then what follows can be trusted. But we cannot prove an assumption. Circular reasoning cannot be used. To say that God exists because it is stated so in the holy scripture that He Himself wrote is circular reasoning; the evidence neither proves nor disproves his existence. It simply provides no meaningful information.
What is real is an assumption. It is clearly a critically important assumption that we all must make. Even if we do not do so consciously, our actions and choices will be a reflection of that assumption. When I walk across the floor of my kitchen, I have assumed that the floor is a real thing, trusting it to support my weight and allow me to get to the door I wish to go through. I’ve made the assumption, even if it isn’t obvious.
This is the key to everything, in my mind. Not to suggest our assumptions are necessarily bad assumptions; but to recognize that we are making assumptions. When we fail to recognize the assumptions we make, we mistake confidence for certainty. We take something that we are 99% certain about and make it into something we are 100% certain about. In general, this may not seem like a dangerous choice to make, but if we continue to make this assumption repeatedly, over and over, taking the results of one experiment as the assumptions of the next, we will end up with something that does not match up at all with the original. We will end up with a simulacra of reality.