Do We Live in a Simulation? | Jean Baudrillard
The meaning of simulation from Baudrillard’s Simulation and Simulacra
Are we all living in a simulation? If you were to ask the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard this question, his answer would be a resounding yes. Although what he means by simulation and what you mean by simulation might be two very different things (which is funny considering the most influential example of a simulation — The Matrix — was directly inspired by Baudrillard’s 1981 work Simulation and Simulacra.)
This is the book that Morpheus quotes from, that we see Neo hiding the computer disks he sells inside in the first Matrix and it’s the one book that the Wachowski siblings made required reading for everyone on the crew of the Matrix movies.
But despite this famous example of the mainstream idea of the simulation being directly inspired by Baudrillard’s work, what the French postmodern philosopher means by the term simulation is something much more insidious and much scarier than what we find in the Matrix movies.
In this instalment we are going to be exploring what Baudrillard means by this term simulation and at why Baudrillard thinks that we are already walled inside a simulation — permanently cut off from reality.
