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When you wrote one dimensional, I'm finding that I like the concept. Everything stripped away to the core. No pretense. No identity that was put on you by something outside yourself. Yes, the cost of waking up. And, the reward. Hey! We are discussing Simulacra and Simulation after all!"The simulacra that Baudrillard refers to are the significations and symbolism of culture and media that construct perceived reality, the acquired understanding by which our lives and shared existence is and are rendered legible; Baudrillard believed that society has become so saturated with these simulacra and our lives so saturated with the constructs of society that all meaning was being rendered meaningless by being infinitely mutable.[/b]"Um... exactly!See! I told you! HEADACHE. Indeed. Where did you ever come by Jean Baudrillard and his ideas? This video helped me get a grasp on it. It's an interesting way of framing things. Do you find there is a utility to looking at things in such a light?Oh! I didn't come across Simulacra and Simulation. Neo showed it to me. It's his fault!On the geekysnippets web page it says, "The superimposed digital reality is greatly influenced by the idea of hyper reality contoured in the book. A reality where object and people are unaware that they are not original, that they are copies of copies, that is the exact building block of the Matrix reality."The video you found is very helpful! As for utility, the theory makes for a more critical eye, when it comes to taking in information. I'm already pretty skeptical when it comes to news media (I think you and I have talked about this somewhere. ), but looking at the idea of getting further and further away from reality in our society, it helps me to see why I'm so skeptical. News and political sound bites have become meaningless to me, white noise. To those who buy into all of it, I want to say,"Wake up... the Matrix has you."Did you find the ideas of the book useful to you?It feels normal enough to shift in and out of thinking of things in a derivative sense... for instance, you can look at a telephone as a telephone or you look at it as it's components. Mostly it's various bits of plastic. And many plastics are derived from an ethylene/butene mix, and ethylene is derived from ethane, which is derived from natural gas, which is derived from what? Old burried organic matter? I don't really know, I'm just googling this stuff as I go. The whole simulacra way of looking at things though isn't as derivative, but as, what? Representative? A lot more difficult to reverse engineer. But like you say, good practice for certain types of evaluation.Nice job seeing that in the movie. I never noticed that or thought to look! It helps inform Neo's character. I'd be interested to see what else is on his bookshelf. haha! I thought you knew those telephone components off the top of your head! I like your term, "representative." And yes, very hard to reverse engineer. I was trying to do that last night with one of my own realities and the best I could come up with is this: I've been cleaning out my filing cabinets and am amazed at all that I have kept. Why keep all of this? Everything was filed away because I thought it had value at the time and I had gotten in the habit of it pre-Google/Wiki days. But, it was more than that. Why did I need to have good information at my retrieval, even though the likelihood for needing it was very small? Who taught me to do this? My mom. She's a librarian. She did it for a living and copied her routine into her life and I copied it into mine. I'm not a librarian! I will no longer have a copy of a copy of reality. All of those papers go! (That's the best I could do with simulacra reverse engineering. )That's better than any example I can come up with. Honestly the philosophy is so nebulous I can't wrap my head around it. There appear to be rules, but I can't make them work for anything I throw at it. It's just too weird for me. I like how the guy in the video you found, basically said, "Don't get hung up on it." Yes, nebulous and it turns in on itself, until it too loses meaning.I didn't see the book initially, but had heard the term when looking up The Matrix a while ago. When I googled the term after the movie, there the book was!It's surprising the machines allowed it to persist in their simulation of reality. I hadn't thought of that! Maybe Trinity had it made and planted it somewhere for him to find. Inception! Good thinking.