What is a Simulacrum? (Postmodern Philosophy)

An explanation of the concepts in postmodern philosophy of simulacra and hyperreality as espoused by Jean Baudrillard, and its implications for postmodernism.

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Information for this video gathered from The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The Collier-MacMillan Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the Dictionary of Continental Philosophy, and more! (#Postmodernism #Simulacra)

[aunttifa]

Hyperreal spectacles 👓 to see a hyperreal spectacle

[wanazriq]

A simulacra can become an independent reality/object without being dependent on its original source. A video game maybe a simulation, but it’s its own alternative world.

[edmontoraptor]

I wrote a grad paper on video game audio and hyperreality and I actually came across what I think is a great example of hypereality. On January 20, 2009, Barack Obama was sworn in as president. At his inauguration Yo-yo Ma and other professional musicians played an original composition written by John Williams for the occasion. Viewers heard the beautiful tones of the ensemble, but unbeknownst to them, the musicians were actually miming their parts. They had recorded themselves two days prior and were silently playing to that recording at the inauguration. This was because it was below freezing on the 20th, and wooden instruments are very susceptible to the cold. They were worried that strings might snap, or instruments might crack if they were played. Yo-yo Ma rubbed soap on his bow so it would make no sound on the strings. If they had actually played their instruments it would have been a horrible and out of tune mess, not becoming of a presidential inauguration. This is an example of the image (of the flawless performance) eclipsing the reality of the situation. I would say this is an example of a simulacrum.

[simulacrum]

I think it's time to really consider the possibility that we may indeed be living in a simulated reality, where our understanding of an objective reality is just another illusion.

[Dayglodaydreams]

Television, commercials show us what we want to see, not what is.

[lepotato]

Girl I gagged. I've been trying to understand what this means for SO long and you just threw it out there like a professional. My brain has finally eaten something today. Thank you so much!!

[ャンティオカ]

To answer your question - it is not even the question. The entire world we percieve as "real" is just a simulacrum our brains created for us, because it is way easier to navigate then overalaping quantum fields.

[jiggler]

Mobile phones, television, radio and many other technological devices are all a simulacrum of our natural psychic capabilities.

[sarah.]

LOVE FROM THE ARCHAIX FAMILY 💚138...PHOENIX 🕊🇬🇧2106CAPSTONE...

[flawedpeacock]

Theres a moment in the opening scene of Suspiria 2018 where a psycologist witnesses what he believes is a patient experiencing a delusion. He thinks his patient is fabricating a mythology, but it turns out that whats shes going through is actually happening. So her experience of reality is a sumulacrum of reality, and his intepretation of her experience is a simulacrum of a simulacrum. Holy crap, thanks for this video!

[sinecurve]

Baudrillard's book Simulacras and Simulation makes an appearance in the film The Matrix. I find that film quite prescient of the current social media culture and data collection policies of massive corporations.

[Phi]

Gilles Deleuze works a lot with 'Immanence'. I don't think that Immanence is a concept. But could you do a video on it regardless? :)
I'm enjoying ur current series a lot!

[JamesObertino]

The narrator’s shrill, nasal voice doesn’t help. Try breathing from the stomach. And the “u” in simulacrum is not pronounced “you.”

[pinecone]

Why was Philosophy Overdose, the YouTube channel, taken down?

[aaronsalem]

For anyone that wants to look into this subject more joscha Bach did a podcast with lex Friedman and they discuss simulacrums in depth. Joscha is a cognitive neuroscientist and truly is a brilliant individual. Id highly recommend you give it a watch.
(There are two different podcasts, the second one is better but you need to watch the first one for context)

[addammadd]

This is a fairly hamfisted misreading of the concept. Art representing art has no relevance to hyperreality. Baudrillard wasn’t clear about much but he was crystal clear about the nature of the hyperreal. Chief among its characteristics is the inability for anyone to distinguish between the real and the symbolic. There would be no capacity for “art to represent art, ” for example, as representation is not at all what is done by simulacra. Baudrillard’s simulacra have entirely sublated their originals. There is no representation whatsoever. That’s the whole point.

In fact that’s the aspect that the Wachowskis themselves completely missed with The Matrix and precisely why Baudrillard called it “exactly the kind of movie The Matrix would have made” as he shunned any connection between it and his theories.

I highly recommend you actually read his works and audit your understanding of this concept. I strongly implore you to delete this video but I expect you won’t.

[josenberg]

Great video! This takes me back to my college years, learning so many concept from Baudrillard, Foucault, Habermas etc.

[hjge]

A lot of the ideas brought up here strongly beg the question about what reality actually is and whether we can know reality.

Our senses give us sensory inputs and our brain interprets our sense. So our brain gives us a representation of a representation. So everything we know through sensory input is some sort of hyperreality. And since we can't know reality's true form, our reality would probably even be considered a simulacrum under this way of thinking.

If we were to assume we can know reality -- and everything that comes with that -- we would be accepting a metanarrative. Moreover, if we were to accept we can know reality, then why can't we know reality through the hyperrealities in our daily lives?

I don't know... the more I learn about this, the less sense it makes. It all doesn't seem very cohesive and a lot of aspects seem very self-defeating. Whomever mopped all these ideas together under the moniker of "postmodernism", hasn't done a very good job as far as I can see.
The only way I see this ending, is in nihilism.

[JiandiP]

From mass print, to radio, to film, to the internet- and a whole bunch of other inventions- there's obviously been a steady increase of "images". But I don't think *Direct Experience* is necessarily gone. I think all things outside that should be held with a certain lever of discretion, maybe even skepticism in some cases.

[cliffordhodge]

Absent a rigorous theory of representation itself, I don't know what to make of this notion. Representation would seem to depend on resemblance among other things, but that leads to such difficulties as to render the idea of simulacrum somewhat pointless. And what does the theory have to say about type vs. token uses of a word? Take a word like 'simulacrum', e.g. Is it, when I use it, merely itself a simulacrum? In fact, how does a word used in naming anything, like a new species, for example, get to be considered a representation, except by dint of the christener's proclaiming it to be the word for the new species? How do we test this representation claim? How does any word get to be a representation of an abstract object; and how do we know if a two-dimensional photo is actually a bona fide representation - rather than a mere simulacrum - of the four-dimensional President Biden? It makes sense that a myth used as the basis for a political campaign would inspire us to cry foul, to claim illegitimate representations are being put forth, but it seems like we already have ways of saying things like that. Further, it seems questions of resemblance, representation, naming and reference, etc. have been, and are being, considered and debated, but found to be very thorny issues not easily resolved and not advanced by pointing out that my writing of the word 'seven' is extremely far removed (as being the umpteenth token use) from its first use.