Jean Baudrillard: The Image and Simulation

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Introduction

Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) was a French poststructuralist/postmodernist known for his critical analyses of contemporary society and culture, particularly regarding consumerism and technology. Like other philosophers associated with the postmodern movement (Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Lacan, etc.), Baudrillard’s thought begins with semiotics and argues that meaning and significance are derived from the way signs, or images, interrelate. He also argued that the attempt to formulate a systematic and comprehensive knowledge of the world ends in illusion, an idea which, while certainly not foreign to other postmodernists, he emphasised and carried to its logical conclusion in a way they perhaps didn’t. Fully articulated in the essay “The Precession of Simulacra”, this idea was that the real no longer has any relevance in the modern world, having been replaced by simulacra: representations that don’t represent anything real. In this article, I want to explore Baudrillard’s notion of simulation and simulacra in more depth, then look at a couple of examples that illustrate the progressive deterioration of the image, before briefly discussing a key consequence that follows. I will then submit Baudrillard’s account of the image and simulation to a critical analysis (which, be warned, is going to get a little critical), before concluding with a brief look at how the image has been understood in the aesthetic domain by four other (non-postmodern) philosophers.

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Reasons and Beliefs

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Introduction

Think for a moment about some of the beliefs you currently hold. Do you believe in God or are you an atheist (the belief that God doesn’t exist[1])? Do you believe that one form of government is better than others or that a particular position on the political spectrum is the best? Do you believe that abortion is wrong or that violent offenders should be given the death penalty? Do you believe that a certain genre of music is objectively better than others? From the transcendent and metaphysical to the commonplace and ordinary, our entire lives are structured by the myriad of beliefs we hold. But why have you assented to the particular set of beliefs you have come to possess? This is the question I want to explore in this article.

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Schrodinger’s Cat: Challenging Copenhagen

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Introduction

These days, anyone with even a passing interest in contemporary physics has heard of early 20th century physicist Erwin Schrodinger’s thought experiment involving a cat that is paradoxically both alive and dead. In this article, I will briefly outline the basics of Schrodinger’s notion before looking at an alternative thought experiment proposed by Albert Einstein that I think can be adapted to make Schrodinger’s point even more poignantly. Finally, I will argue that, although Einstein and Schrodinger’s thought experiments are sound, they both fail in their ultimate objective, which was to show that the Copenhagen interpretation is flawed.

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Berkeley and Quantum Mechanics: To Be is to Be Decohered

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Introduction

I won’t hold it against you if you are wondering what George Berkeley, an 18th century Anglican bishop and idealist philosopher, and quantum mechanics, a modern scientific theory unparalleled in the accuracy of its predictions, are doing side by side in the title of an article. I still won’t hold it against you if the second half of the title doesn’t shed much light on the first half. Hopefully, by the time you finish this article, all of those disparate pieces will slide into place and make perfect sense. With that said, I have two aims in writing this article. First, I want to highlight a couple of curious and surprising connections that I have noticed between those most unlikely of bedfellows: Bishop George Berkeley and quantum mechanics. My second aim here is to work through some of the ideas I have been mulling over for a few months now concerning quantum mechanics; specifically, regarding the observer/measurement effect, superposition, decoherence, and entanglement, all of which I believe to be intimately connected.

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Facts and the Truth

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Good faith discussions, as rare as they might be in the real world, you would think would be places where facts matter and where the truth about an issue is both attainable and something that can be agreed upon by two reasonable interlocutors. After all, facts are, by definition, indisputable, and the truth is, by definition, singular. However, we’ve all seen political debates (which admittedly no one would mistake for good faith discussions) where each side seemingly has access to an entire realm of facts alien to the other side, so that rather than a genuine attempt to understand the situation and actually resolve any problems, the two sides end up talking past each other. They might be talking about the same topic, but to listen to them, you might think they are discussing completely different countries. The truth is that party A has either been strong on immigration or they’ve been weak, right? And the facts should confirm one of these conclusions, shouldn’t they? But what’s really perplexing is that even good faith discussions (although you would have to turn off your TV, unplug from social media, have a reasonable friend who nevertheless doesn’t share your beliefs/viewpoint, and actually meet them in real life to stand even a chance of experiencing one of these) don’t fare any better. How can good faith discussions fail in the face of the indisputability of facts and the singularity of the truth?

Note that in this article, I am only interested in the best-case scenario of a good faith discussion between reasonable interlocutors. In other words, I am setting aside discussions in which either party traffics in deliberate falsehoods, ignorant assertions, or wilfully disregards facts that don’t support their viewpoint. You might object that such discussions are a fiction and no matter how much good faith a person brings to a discussion (particularly when the topic is something in which one or both parties are heavily invested), they are always biased to some degree and their arguments will reflect this. This is true, and if this article had a more practical aim, such as improving the quality of our actual discussions/debates, the objection would be on point. However, what I’m interested in here is the more philosophical question of what facts and the truth are and how our failure to understand these concepts derails our discussions before they even begin.

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Reflections on Time – Infinity

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The word ‘infinity’ is used to refer to something endless or without boundaries. If you believe that the universe has no outer boundary, so that you could travel outwards forever and never reach the end or return to where you started, this would make the universe infinite in space or size. If you subscribe to the multiverse theory, on the other hand, it might be the number of universes that you would take to be infinite. Another thing that is commonly taken to be infinite is time, in the sense that time extends endlessly forwards into the future and endlessly backwards into the past.[1] It is this sense of infinity – the temporal kind – that we will be concerned with in this article.

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My First Book – The Philosophy of Reality

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Some of you may have noticed that I have been a little quiet on here recently. A part of the reason for this is that I have been working hard on getting my first book ready for (self-)publication. I’m happy to report that the battle is finally over, and The Philosophy of Reality is up and looking good on Amazon (link here). It is basically the sum total of my thinking over the past decade, during which time I have been making long-form, in-depth, explanatory video series on key philosophical texts while writing articles containing more original ideas, some of which have gone into certain parts of my book. To give you a little idea of what The Philosophy of Reality is about, in this article I will reproduce the blurb I’ve written for it along with three excerpts, one from each of the main sections that make up the book.

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Evolution from a Metaphysical Perspective

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Let me begin this article by clarifying that I will NOT be doubting evolution as the theory that life forms change over time and different species share common ancestors. No scientific theory (I also won’t be wasting any time refuting the silly objection that evolution is just a theory that has yet to be proven) has as much supporting evidence for it, from the fossil record to carbon dating to homologies (including anatomical, vestigial, and molecular features) to developmental biology to genomics, and on and on. With that said, evolutionary theory is not perfect, although what it lacks, strictly speaking, doesn’t fall within the mandate of what the theory (or science, in general) studies.

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Time and Its Three Tenses

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Like my last article, this one takes its cue from an article I read in the magazine, Philosophy Now. The article in question was written by Letizia Nonnis, a philosophy undergraduate at the University of Roehampton, and was entitled “Kant on Time.” My aim here is to take up some of the key points Nonnis extracts from Kant regarding time and discuss them in more detail, leading, hopefully, to a deeper understanding of this horribly misunderstood aspect of reality.

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Exploring Moral Relativism

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This article explores moral relativism through an article in the online philosophy magazine Philosophy Now written by Paul Stearns, a philosophy professor at Blinn College, Texas, entitled ‘Right and Wrong about Right and Wrong.’[1] Note that the moral relativism which Stearns is arguing against here is not the claim that there are no universal standards from which we can judge the behaviour of people in different times or cultures from our own, therefore all behaviours, norms, and practices are acceptable, or at least not open to criticism from people outside those times/cultures. Rather, he is responding to the diachronic relativist assertion that basic moral values change over time. In the first part, I will outline Stearns’ arguments against this moral relativist claim before evaluating them in the second part.

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