How can you know what is real?

Last night, I made a comment on @tarazkp's post about manipulating the world to make photographs better. It made me remember the work of Jean Baudrillard, a French philosopher, and his 1981 work; Simulacra and Simulation.

_{Image Sourced from Pixabay, credit to "Pexels"}

This work, while not only serving as one of the main inspirations for the film The Matrix, has been heavily referenced in other science fiction and cyberpunk literature. It has taken on new meanings in my own mind since I last examined it; not only in the context of block chain, but also through virtual reality.

If you know a thing or two about how digital art, and in particular, 3D digital art, you'll know that it isn't the goal to "create" something to make a realistic image, but instead, to "simulate" the physical properties of objects, light, texture, and other things that make up our visual reality.

Baudrillard's work on this topic describes four different paradigms of things that are simulated, or copied.

The first is just a copy. We could say a photocopy, or photograph / print of a painting is the "reflection of a profound reality." We can usually identify at a glance a photocopy versus an original, or know that a print of a painting isn't actually the painting. It's a dead ringer when brush-strokes are missing for instance.

The next stage is where it starts to get interesting - copies, and other representations of other things start to be lies, or rather untruths. The reproduction changes the colour of the flower to pink, from yellow, or the woman's hair from blonde to brunette.

It goes deeper down the rabbit hole, as Morpheus offers in the Matrix. We have copies with no original. This is a simulation in essence, or a copy of the physical world-object, to which the existing item is iterated from. It could be a man with the vascular system of a horse - but as it's a simulation, and the simulation says it works, sure!

Finally, the "pure simulacrum" is entirely artificial, unreal, and has no link to the physical world. My easy way to compare the "pure simulacrum" to a well known phenomenon is this: think of a pure simulacrum as a safe space dwelling hands in the ears, lalalalalala archetype who won't accept any opinion but their own.

Fake news would also fall into this category.

The interesting thing about Baudrillard's work in the context of block chain is that his notion of a "copy with no original" is not possible in a block chain environment. A copy, a base, a signature, exists. You can trace back through a ledger (or hyper-ledger) what was, what was before, and so on. The real kicker here is that it redefines our notion of history from something which is a narrative of perspective, to something that is objectively captured.

News is just recent history. If we capture news as an objective sequence of events, we can put it on a blockchain, or on a ledger. The world falls back to Newton's laws of action and reaction. Nothing more. Simple, powerful laws that hold true in the physical world.

_{Image credit: gr8effect / pixabay}

Baudrillard, in his later work, would state that "the end of history" would come about due to simulacrum pervading our physical realities. We'd have no way to know what was real, and what was not. Block chain technology isn't just something that lets you move value, or goods around the planet quickly. It can also be used to document the very thing that explains the present moment - what came before.

He's a dense read, if you're interested, but it is a truly enlightening piece of philosophy to brush up on, especially if you're into futurism, post-humanism, or love to read something that really makes you think.

If you're interested, check out the Standford Encylopedia of Philosophy, and its entry on Baudrillard. I find it quite fascinating.