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Semiotics and Simulacra

May 23, 2003

All of this talk about The Matrix has gotten me interested in the philosophical side of simulations and reality, and I'd like to share some of my findings.

Our first stop is the book "Simulacra and Simulation", by French social theorist Jean Baudrillard (In the first movie, Neo has a stash of computer disks hidden inside a hollowed-out copy of this book). I haven't read the book yet, but in it, Baudrillard "argues that our 'postmodern' culture is a world of signs that have made a fundamental break from referring to 'reality'" (from this page). What? Well, you know that Magritte painting of a pipe, that says "Ceci n'est pas une pipe"? Indeed, what is in the painting is not a pipe - it is a representation of a pipe. In fact, I did not link to a painting of a pipe. I linked to a webpage containing a digitized image of the painting of a pipe. "Simulacra and Simulation" is available at Amazon.com.

Next stop: Semiotics. I have not found a good definition of semiotics, but it seems to be a discipline of psychology that considers signs and icons in our social lives, as well as syntax and linguistics (these are connected by the fact that labels, like "freedom fighter", could have multiple alternatives, like "rebel", "warrior", or "lunatic"). How does the context of the situation change one's understanding of a situation? Here's another link, Cognition and Semiotics.

A few schools offer majors in semiotics. I've often thought that a computer science study gives one a different understanding of the world than, say, a civil engineer would have. I would image that a semiotics major would have an even more bizarre relationship with reality.

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