what makes the characters conscious?

what makes the characters conscious

There are no real answers/agreement when looking at what makes us human/conscious. People have been picking at it for years;  we're not really here, we're vessels for sensation, others say god put it there, their opponents spend hours proving we're in charge. Some people say there's this space outside the brain where consciousness lives, separate to the body. Some explanations are combinations of the above.

It has only been during the last hundred years have we been seriously speculating that maybe the brain causes it all.

All philosophers, whether academic or bar room, really believe whatever truth they believe in, and find the evidence they are specifically looking for. It's a difficult thing to nail down. One person's interpretation is as valid as the next and some interpretations allow for other interpretations and philosophies to exist together.

Suppose our head/body/mind is controlled by lots of little people working together and sometimes against each other.

You might notice them sometimes by maybe having to suppress a thought that you thought was too bad, or when they go crazy to get what they want, or maybe when you've been drunk.

Like the numbskulls in the Beezer comic, they make the decision whether you are happy or sad without your consent. There are lots of these little fellows and they can control many different systems inside you through negotiation and dictatorship.

In relation to quantum physics, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle states that when observing an electron you can't look at both its speed and position at once. It appears as a wave when we observe its speed and as a particle when we observe its position. When observed as a wave we are looking at the the available positions the electron could be, but when we go to look for the electrons position, a quantum wave collapse occurs, the waves (speed) disappear and it becomes a fixed point,

Quantum wave collapse is the condensation of physical possibilities into a single occurrence, as seen by an observer. 

This is the thing Schrodinger explained with his cat .

Imagine your consciousness as a quantum cloud of decisions. You have a certain percentage being in a happy state, and a certain percentage being sad. This is a process controlled unconsciously by your happy/sad bot; one of the little people in your head,

Like the description of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, your behaviour is a cloud of possibilities until you observe it. The act of observation causes a quantum wave collapse, and causes you behaviour to become a fixed state. You observe wether you are happy or sad, and the control bot (the one that does the communicating) states what position the emotion is in, and likely reasons why it is in that spot. We justify our actions after they have already been decided and have happened.

We cant turn these off, just like we can't turn off our sense of touch. It's how we operate, even making the decision to see if you are happy or sad has already be activated by one of your psycho-bots.

Not to say we can't change it through feedback, or techniques like cognitive therapy (good NHS bots give it over the internet). Neuro- linguistic programers know how to speak directly to these little men, but generally the probabilities change gradually over time, just like morals.

Free will dissolves away when observed like this, together with consciousness (we observe the world through the decisions of psycho-bots), together with intelligence (made up from non-conscious activity), together with the organisation of matter (these bots just need to feed back from sensation, even feedback from themselves seems ok, look at dreams) we really could really all be dreaming.

It seems that consciousness, intelligence, acceptance of reality is ours to give. It's what the bots decide it to be. A lot of it depends one whether we endow a thing with it. A hard core animal rights activist might endow a rabbit with consciousness, someone who's car doesn't start might might make it conscious (please work old girl), a nazi may remove consciousness from the mentally ill. If you need further proof, get a bag of potatoes put a hat on one, then see which potato is used last.

That's not to say it's all doom and gloom, even though you might be shouting "we're just algorithms performing a probability table!".  People don't like being told, (or it be inferred) that they're not in charge. They also seem to think they're the most important thing, without acknowledging that humans might not be the mind frontier.

A quantum model of consciousness also works as a model of culture, like the saying, "as-above-as below". On a social level, we use feedback from other autonomous units (humans), to create a community quantum cloud. The community quantum cloud is how society reacts to a given range of possibilities, in other words morals.

Although it's not always the goodness inside us we expand on, anything or anyone can provide a meme, you just need someone to copy you or to copy something and put a bit of a skew on it, (maybe make it better/make it worse) and the system becomes emergent. Like Conway's game of life, it starts to grow. It can feed back from itself in the manner of a koch curve. No need for outside stimulation.

"We all seem to be team players, no man is an island, when we get together we can push the boundaries". When something goes wrong with the boundaries being pushed we are all to blame. There's an emergent metastructure in society created by our actions and how they are fed back upon. Something that we all help to create, mainly unconsciously.

Maybe this is something to do with our worth/point - if worth/point is the right phrase. We are building meta-structures out of information we're collecting, mapping all information systems, decoding signals and sensations. Maps are knowledge and power, like the power felt by renaissance man with his maps of the sky, land and oceans. Maybe ignoring questions of consciousness is the best way to get this structure built, bury it deep, get on with the mapping.

the numskulls

great article on them here

heres an example

Best site ever in the world!

sherman tank just entered this competion

BT Digital Music Awards

just click the button to win!

.....seems a bit complicated for tank.....he's not sure what to do...

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Fear Fighter

reprinted from fox news

Psychology Software Takes Over From British Therapists

Friday, October 05, 2007

LONDON  —  For nearly her entire life, Mary had a crippling fear of cramped spaces that meant she couldn't travel on airplanes, subways, or cars.

Seeing a psychologist didn't help. So she tried something else.

The 61-year-old bookkeeper, who only gave her first name to protect her privacy, sat down in front of a computer and spilled out her problems to a kind of psychiatric computer game called "Fearfighter."

Last year, Fearfighter was one of two programs endorsed by Britain's health advisory watchdog for people with panic attacks, mild depression, or phobias.

People uncomfortable with getting advice from a computer can still choose to see therapists, but the option of logging on for help is now available — and will be paid for by the government-run National Health Service.

In Britain, patients registered with the NHS routinely wait up to six months to see a psychiatrist; nearly 90 percent of people with mild depression never actually see a therapist.

The computer programs now mean that for some patients, getting psychiatric counseling is as easy as getting a password from their general practitioner to access the programonline.

"Six months for some patients might be too long," said Dr. Paul Grime, an occupational medicine expert at London's Royal Free Hospital.

Since the endorsement was made last February, many British psychiatric patients have skipped the weekly sessions at their doctor's office.

Instead, they now log on at home, or go to libraries to use computers designated to run the programs, where there is a health professional ready to help if necessary.

The computers are not authorized to prescribe medicine. A qualified human is required for that.

The computerized treatment is possible because people with phobias, from fear of spiders to fear of heights, tend to get the same basic therapy.

repetitive parts of the therapy are done by a computer, which can then make decisions based on these answers," said Dr. Isaac Marks, a professor emeritus at King's College Institute of Psychiatry in London, and co-developer of "Fearfighter."

Treating short-term problems like phobias or mild depression often simply means teaching patients new ways to think or react — something a computer can be programmed to do, Marks said.

In Britain, a few thousand people are estimated to have already been treated with the programs.

Judy Leibowitz, a clinical psychologist who runs mental health programs in London, said the anonymity of computer therapy was a selling point for certain patients.

"There are lots of people who are not that keen on pouring out their heart to a therapist," she said.

Still, psychiatrists shouldn't worry that they might become obsolete.

"We still need therapists to be creative and do all the things a computer can't, like express empathy and respond to the idiosyncrasies of a person's life situation and their history," said Dr. Jesse Wright, a psychiatrist at the University of Louisville, who has studied the use of computer therapy.

Serious psychiatric problems like bipolar disorder, suicidal tendencies or schizophrenia are too complex to be cured by computer programs.

Britain decided to roll out the anti-panic and depression computer programs nationwide after a group of experts sifted through evidence and concluded that the programs work just as well as face-to-face psychiatric care.

"We wanted to be confident that this wasn't just a second-best option," said Dr. Steven Pillings, of University College London, who led the British committee that made the recommendations.

Many experiments in Britain, the United States and elsewhere showed that patients counseled by computers made just as much progress as those counseled by real, live therapists.

Using computers to treat patients was also much cheaper and could help cash-strapped health systems expand care.

One study estimated that therapists using computer programs could double the number of their patients.

In "Fearfighter," patients are taught to recognize the signs that trigger their panic attacks in the hopes of preventing one. But if that doesn't work, they're also instructed on how to cope with their fears.

The program asks patients to identify the personal triggers that set off their panic attacks. They're told to be more observant of these red flags, and to keep a diary of things they avoid because it makes them nervous.

Then, the computer gives them homework: They must seek out uncomfortable situations to practice their new skills.

In the anti-depression program, patients watch staged vignettes in the lives of depressed people, using professional actors.

For example, in a scene where a character has an argument with a spouse, patients are shown how the person thinks through different ways of responding.

It is then up to the patients to decide how the character will react, in a process that psychiatrists say helps them develop new thinking patterns.

The computer programs take roughly 10 weeks of hourly sessions, including scheduled telephonecalls from a health worker to check on progress.

For Mary, computer therapy seems to have worked. Before using Fearfighter, she had been too afraid to fly or ride the subway.

But after eight weeks, Mary told program developers that she had ridden the subway without even a twinge of anxiety. The computer treatment, she said, was far more effective than talking to a psychologist.

"I am very puzzled how this could have happened so quickly," she said.

The Island Of Stone Money

THE ISLAND OF STONE MONEY
Milton Friedman
Senior Research Fellow
Hoover Institution

Abstract
Large stones quarried and shaped on a distant island were used as money on the Island of
Yap. After Germany acquired the island at the turn of the century, its officials had dificulty
inducing the residents to repair the footpaths until they resorted to the desperate expedient
of taking possession of many of the stones by marking them with a cross in black paint, to he
removed when the paths were repaired. The apparently meaningless measure had real results.
That was equally true of an eerily similar event that occurred in 1932 when the New York
Federal Reserve Bank transferred gold to the Bank of France by earmarking gold in its vaults.



From 1899 to 1919 the Caroline Islands, in Micronesia, were a German
colony. The most westerly of the group is the Island of Uap or Yap, which
at the time had a population of five to six thousand.
In 1903, an American anthropologist by the name of William Henry
Furness III spent several months on the island and wrote a fascinating book
about the habits and customs of its inhabitants. He was particularly im»
pressed by the islanders’ monetary system, and accordingly gave his book the
title I have given this chapter: Qhe Island of stone honey (1910).
"[A]s their island yields no metal, they have had recourse to stone;
stone, on which labour in fetching and fashioning has been expended, is
as truly a representation of labour as the mined and minted coins of
civilisation.
"Their medium of exchange they call tei, and it consists of large,
solid, thick, stone wheels, ranging in diameter from a foot to twelve
feet, having in the centre a hole varying in size with the diameter of
the stone, wherein a pole may be inserted sufficiently large and strong
to bear the weight and facilitate transportation. These stone 'coins'
[were mde from limestone found on an island some 400 miles distant.
They] were originally quarried and shaped [on that island and the
product] brought to Uap {gig} by some venturesome native navigators, in
canoes and on rafts ...noteworthy feature of this stone currency ... is that it is not
necessary for its owner to reduce it to possession. After concluding a
bargain which involves the price of a fei too large to be conveniently
moved, its new owner is quite content to accept the bare acknowledgment
of ownership and without so much as a mark to indicate the exchange, the
coin remains undisturbed on the former owner's premises.
"My faithful old friend, Fatuak, assured me that there was in the
village near—by a family whose wealth was unquestioned, —— acknowledged
by every one —- and yet no one, not even the family itself, had ever laid
eye or hand on this wealth; it consisted of an enormous fei, whereof the
size is known only by tradition; for the past two or three generations it
had been, and at that very time it was lying at the bottom of the sea:
Many years ago an ancestor of this family, on an expedition after fei,
secured this remarkably large and exceedingly valuable stone, which was
placed on a raft to be towed homeward. A violent storm arose, and the
party, to save their lives, were obliged to cut the raft adrift, and the
stone sank out of sight. When they reached home, they all testified that
the fei was of magnificent proportions and of extraordinary quality, and
that it was lost through no fault of the owner. Thereupon it was
universally conceded in their simple faith that the mere accident of its
loss overboard was too trifling to mention, and that a few hundred feet
of water off shore ought not to affect its marketable value, since it was
all chipped out in proper form. The purchasing power of that stone
remains, therefore, as valid as if it were leaning visibly against the
side of the owner's house....
"There are no wheeled vehicles on Uap and, consequently, no cart
roads; but there have always been clearly defined paths communicating
with the different settlements. When the German Government assumed the
ownership of The Caroline Islands, after the purchase of them from Spain
in 1898, many of these paths or highways were in bad condition, and the
chiefs of the several districts were told that they must have them re~
paired and put in good order. The roughly dressed blocks of coral were,
however, quite goo enough for the bare feet of the natives; and many
were the repetitions of the command, which still remained unheeded. At
last it was decided to impose a fine for disobedience on the chiefs of
the districts. In what shape was the fine to be levied?... At last, by
a happy thought, the fine was exacted by sending a man to every railu and
papa} throughout the disobedient districts, where he simply marked a
certain number of the most valuable §ei with a cross in black paint to
show that the stones were claimed by the government. This instantly
worked like a charm; the people, thus dolefiully impoverished, turned to
and repaired the highways to such good effect from one end of the island
to the other, that they are now like park drives. Then the government
dispatched its agents and erased the crosses. Presto! the fine was paid,
the happy railus resumed possession of their capital stock, and rolled in
wealth"
Unless you are very unusual, your immediate reaction, like my own,
will be: "How silly. How can people be so illogical?" However, before
criticizing too severely the innocent people on Yap, it is worth contemplat-
ing an episode in the U.S. to which they might well have your reaction, In
1932-33, the Bank of France feared that the U.S. would not stick to the gold
standard at the traditional price of $20.67 an ounce of gold. Accordingly,
it asked the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to convert dollar assets that
it had in the U.5. into gold. To avoid the necessity of shipping the gold
across the ocean, it requested the Federal Reserve Bank simply to store the
gold on the Bank of France’s account. In response, officials of the Federal
Reserve Bank went to their gold vault, put in separate drawers the correct
amount of gold ingots, and put a label or mark on those drawers indicating
that they were the property of the French - for all it matters they could
have done so by marking them."with a cross in black paint" just as the
Germans did to the stones.
The result was headlines in the financial newspapers about "the loss
of gold," the threat to the American financial system, and the like. U.S.
gold reserves were down, French gold reserves up. The markets regarded the
U.S. dollar as weaker, the French franc as stronger. The so~called "drain"
of gold by France from the United States was one of the factors that ulti~
mately led to the banking panic of 1933.
Is there really a difference between the Federal Reserve Bank's be-
lieving that it was in a weaker monetary position because of some marks on
drawers in its basement and the Yap Islanders’ belief that they were poorer
because of some marks on their stone money? Or between the Bank of France's
belief that it was in a stronger monetary position because of some marks on
drawers in a basement more than 3,000 miles away and the Yap Islander's
conviction that he was rich because of a stone under the water some 100 or
so miles away? Or, for that matter, how many of us have literal personal
direct assurance of the existence of most of the items we regard as consti~
tuting our wealth? Entries in a bank account, property certified by pieces
of paper called shares of stocks, and so on and on.
The Yap Islanders regarded stones quarried and shaped on a distant
island and brought to their own as the concrete manifestation of wealth.
For a century and more, the "civilized" world regarded as a concrete mani-
festation of its wealth metal dug from deep in the ground, refined at great
labor, and transported great distances to be buried again in elaborate
vaults deep in the ground. Is the one praetice really more rational than
the other?
What both examples -— and numrous additional ones that could be
listed -— illustrate is how important "myth," unquestioned belief, is in
monetary matters. Our own money, the money we have grown up with, the
system under which it is controlled, these appear "real" and "rational" to
us. The money of other countries often seems to us like paper or worthless
metal, even when the purchasing power of individual units is high.

Road Pilgrim

A broken down Sat Nav endowed with a sense of the hyper-unreal.
The road pilgrim goes from a to b . then from b to c . then f to e . then c to a . The road pilgrim is only interested in the journey not the destination. To kill time  the road pilgrim likes to chatter about what road he is on, what the distance is and pontificates on where he is going, wether he's got nowhere or is now here. Pilgrim gets confused, jumbles his lines, forgets to mention directions or distances.  The road pilgrim hates dead air and will fill it up with the contents of his mind. Mostly its innane psychobanter designed to cover the fact that he has the direction of where he is headed but has no idea of where he is going or where he is. What we're getting is a map of his mind when we are hearing about his maps.
Road pilgrim creates real/imaginary landscapes of his own and lives there.

The road pilgrim is realy into maps , more than the real landscape, Like bouldrillard predicted the road pilgrim is equipped with a map so real he finds it difficult to tell it from the real thing. In fact road pilgrim is unsure what a map is. The map is everything to him, he cannot compare it to the "real world" as he cant  think out of the box, he can't get out of his box. The map maps out his life.

 Maps  are tools for those wishing to exploit reality, they also are the last word in consensus,we all agree on the measurements and heights, they are physical realities that cannot be disputed. The road pilgrim is sure of his map, the fact he has it means it can't be disputed.

that confimed feeling works as a security blanket," i know stuff, i am saved . every aspect of this object has been mapped. nothing is left to chance."
 We are in love with the measurments, rather than the physical object because we can agree on them. we might say the mountian belongs to us or them, the measurements cannot be disputed. We fall in love with the image. Its more convient we can carry it about in our head(where it could be argued it only exsists). Mapping items works on anything we can measure, this could include physical objects,biological objects (through dna mapping) but more "Imaginary objects" such societies, trends and ideas..... the more we measure the more these become imaginary, and manipulatable.

The road pilgrim follows routes having a Swindon area postcode. 

Swindon, home of railways , car manufactureres and the roundabout. It's the most "average city" in the U.k, that is it demographic relfects the complete population demographic of the u.k . Credit cards (non-real money) we road tested here. It was home to britians first cable t.v station . Oasis named themselves after a sports centre there. Very boudrillardrian twist Swindon is twined with Walt disney world.
Road  pilgrim listens to the radio when driving.constant noise to stop the feelings of helplessness.

The map is not the territory. this is not a pipe. Random quote from wiki

René Magritte illustrated the concept of "perception always intercedes between reality and ourselves"


Esoteric concepts are concepts which cannot be fully conveyed except by direct experience. For example, a person who has never tasted an apple will never fully understand through language what the taste of an apple is. Only through direct experience (eating an apple) can that experience be fully understood.


Lewis Carroll, in Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893), made the point humorously with his description of a fictional map that had "the scale of a mile to the mile." A character notes some practical difficulties with such a map and states that "we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.

The development of electronic media blurs the line between map and territory by allowing for the simulation of ideas as encoded in electronic signals, as Baudrillard argues in Simulacra & Simulation:

Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: A hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory - precession of simulacra - that engenders the territory. (Baudrillard, 1994, p. 1)

A more extreme literary example, the fictional diary of Tristram Shandy is so detailed that it takes the author one year to set down the events of a single day – because the map (diary) is more detailed than the territory (life), yet must fit into the territory (diary written in the course of his life), it can never be finished. Such tasks are referred to as supertasks.

One describes a tale best by telling the tale. You see? The way one describes a story, to oneself or the world, is by telling the story. It is a balancing act and it is a dream. The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory. The most accurate map possible would be the territory, and thus would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless. The tale is the map that is the territory.

A specific analogy that Baudrillard uses is a fable derived from On Exactitude in Science by Jorge Luis Borges. In it, a great Empire created a map that was so detailed it was as large as the Empire itself. The actual map grew and decayed as the Empire itself conquered or lost territory. When the Empire crumbled, all that was left was the map. In Baudrillard's rendition, it is the map that people live in, the simulation of reality, and it is reality that is crumbling away from disuse.

Some have wondered whether there is any relationship between Korzybski's ideas and Gödel's incompleteness theorems. Since one consequence of Gödel's theorems is that representational systems cannot be used to prove themselves, and since human perception is a representational system, human perception cannot be used to prove its own accuracy.

"Simulacra and Simulation" breaks the sign-order into 4 stages:

1. The first stage is a faithful image/copy, where we believe, and it may even be correct that, a sign is a "reflection of a profound reality" (pg 6), this is a good appearance, in what Baudrillard called "the sacramental order".
2. The second stage is perversion of reality, this is where we believe the sign to be an unfaithful copy, which "masks and denatures" reality as an "evil appearance-it is of the order of maleficence". Here, signs and images do not faithfully show us reality, but can hint at the existence of something real which the sign itself is incapable of encapsulating.
3. The third stage masks the absence of a profound reality, where the simulacrum pretends to be a faithful copy, but it is a copy with no original. Signs and images claim to represent something real, but no representation is taking place and arbitrary images are merely suggested as things which they have no relationship to. Baudrillard calls this the "order of sorcery".
4. The fourth stage is pure simulation, in which the simulacrum has no relationship to any reality whatsoever. Here, signs merely reflect other signs and any claim to reality on the part of images or signs is only of the order of other such claims.

boudrillard

-Baudrillard developed theories in which the excessive, fruitless search for total knowledge lead almost inevitably to a kind of delusion. In Baudrillard's view, the (human) subject may try to understand the (non-human) object, but because the object can only be understood according to what it signifies (and because the process of signification immediately involves a web of other signs from which it is distinguished) this never produces the desired results. The subject, rather, becomes seduced (in the original Latin sense, seducere, to lead away) by the object. He therefore argued that, in the last analysis, a complete understanding of the minutiae of human life is impossible, and when people are seduced into thinking otherwise they become drawn toward a "simulated" version of reality, or, to use one of his neologisms, a state of "hyperreality."


In this postmodern world, individuals flee from the “desert of the real” for the ecstasies of hyperreality and the new realm of computer, media, and technological experience. In this universe, subjectivities are fragmented and lost, and a new terrain of experience appears that for Baudrillard renders previous social theories and politics obsolete and irrelevant.

reprinted from wiki

Life

Baudrillard was born in Reims, northeastern France, on July 27, 1929. He told interviewers that his grandparents were peasants and his parents were civil servants. During his high school studies at the Reims Lycée, he came into contact with pataphysics (via the philosophy professor Emmanuel Peillet), which is supposed to be crucial for understanding Baudrillard's later thought.^[3] He became the first of his family to attend university when he moved to Paris to attend Sorbonne University.^[4] There he studiedGerman language and literature, which led to him to begin teaching the subject at several different lycées, both Parisian and provincial, from 1960 until 1966.^[5] While teaching, Baudrillard began to publish reviews of literature and translated the works of such authors as Peter Weiss, Bertolt Brecht, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Wilhelm Mühlmann.^[6]

During his time as a teacher of German language and literature, Baudrillard began to transfer to sociology, eventually completing his doctoral thesis Le Système des objets(The System of Objects) under the dissertation committee of Henri Lefebvre, Roland Barthes, and Pierre Bourdieu. Subsequently, he began teaching sociology at theUniversité de Paris-X Nanterre, a university campus just outside of Paris which would become heavily involved in the events of May 1968.^[7] At Nanterre he took up a position as Maître Assistant (Assistant Professor), then Maître de Conférences (Associate Professor), eventually becoming a professor after completing his accreditation,L'Autre par lui-même (The Other by Himself).

In 1970, Baudrillard made the first of his many trips to the USA (Aspen), and in 1973, the first of several trips to Japan (Kyoto). He was given his first camera in 1981 in Japan, which led to his becoming a photographer.^[8]

In 1986 he moved to IRIS (Institut de Recherche et d'Information Socio-Économique) at the Université de Paris-IX Dauphine, where he spent the latter part of his teaching career. During this time he had begun to move away from sociology as a discipline (particularly in its "classical" form), and, after ceasing to teach full time, he rarely identified himself with any particular discipline, although he remained linked to the academic world. During the 1980s and 1990s his books had gained a wide audience, and in his last years he became, to an extent, an intellectual celebrity,^[9] being published often in the French- and English-speaking popular press. He nonetheless continued supporting the Institut de Recherche sur l'Innovation Sociale at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and was Satrap at the Collège de Pataphysique. Baudrillard taught at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee^[10] and collaborated at the Canadian theory, culture and technology review Ctheory, where he was abundantly cited. In 1999-2000, his photographs were exhibited at the Maison européenne de la photographie in Paris.^[11] In 2004, Baudrillard attended the major conference on his work, "Baudrillard and the Arts," at the Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe in Karlsruhe, Germany.^[12]

[edit]Core ideas

Postmodernism

preceded by Modernism

Postmodernity Post-anarchism Postmodernist anthropology Postmodern architecture Postmodern art Postmodern Christianity Postmodern dance Postmodern feminism Postmodernist film Posthumanism Postmodern literature Post-Marxism Post-materialism Postmodern music Postmodern picture book Postmodern philosophy Postmodernism in political science Postpositivism Post-postmodernism Postmodernist school Postmodern social construction of nature Postmodern theatre Post-structuralism

v • d • e

Baudrillard was a social theorist and critic best known for his analyses of the modes of mediation and technological communication. His writing, though mostly concerned with the way technological progress affects social change, covers diverse subjects  — including consumerism, gender relations, the social understanding of history, journalistic commentaries about AIDS, cloning, the Rushdie affair, the first Gulf War and the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City.

His published work emerged as part of a generation of French thinkers including Gilles Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan who all shared an interest in semiotics, and he is often seen as a part of the poststructuralist philosophical school.^[13] In common with many poststructuralists, his arguments consistently draw upon the notion that signification and meaning are both only understandable in terms of how particular words or "signs" interrelate. Baudrillard thought, as many post-structuralists did, that meaning is brought about through systems of signs working together. Following on from the structuralist linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, Baudrillard argued that meaning is based upon an absence (so "dog" means "dog" not because of what the word says, as such, but because of what it excludes: "cat", "goat", "tree" etc.). In fact, he viewed meaning as near enough self-referential: objects, images of objects, words and signs are situated in a web of meaning; one object's meaning is only understandable through its relation to the meaning of other objects, in other words, one thing's prestige relates to another's mundanity.

From this starting point Baudrillard constructed broad theories of human society based upon this kind of self-referentiality. His pictures of society portray societies always searching for a sense of meaning  — or a "total" understanding of the world  — that remains consistently elusive. In contrast to poststructuralists such as Foucault, for whom the formations of knowledge emerge only as the result of relations of power, Baudrillard developed theories in which the excessive, fruitless search for total knowledge lead almost inevitably to a kind of delusion. In Baudrillard's view, the (human) subject may try to understand the (non-human) object, but because the object can only be understood according to what it signifies (and because the process of signification immediately involves a web of other signs from which it is distinguished) this never produces the desired results. The subject, rather, becomes seduced (in the original Latin sense, seducere, to lead away) by the object. He therefore argued that, in the last analysis, a complete understanding of the minutiae of human life is impossible, and when people are seduced into thinking otherwise they become drawn toward a "simulated" version of reality, or, to use one of his neologisms, a state of "hyperreality." This is not to say that the world becomes unreal, but rather that the faster and more comprehensively societies begin to bring reality together into one supposedly coherent picture, the more insecure and unstable it looks and the more fearful societies become.^[14] Reality, in this sense, "dies out."^[15]

Accordingly, Baudrillard argued that the excess of signs and of meaning in late 20th century "global" society had caused (quite paradoxically) an effacement of reality. In this world neither liberal nor Marxist utopias are any longer believed in. We live, he argued, not in a "global village," to use Marshall McLuhan's phrase, but rather in a world that is ever more easily petrified by even the smallest event. Because the "global" world operates at the level of the exchange of signs and commodities, it becomes ever more blind to symbolic acts such as, for example, terrorism. In Baudrillard's work the symbolic realm (which he develops a perspective on through the anthropological work of Marcel Mauss and Georges Bataille) is seen as quite distinct from that of signs and signification. Signs can be exchanged like commodities; symbols, on the other hand, operate quite differently: they are exchanged, like gifts, sometimes violently as a form of potlatch. Baudrillard, particularly in his later work, saw the "global" society as without this "symbolic" element, and therefore symbolically (if not militarily) defenceless against acts such as the Rushdie Fatwa^[16] or, indeed, the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks against the United States and its military establishment (see below).

In 2004, the International Journal of Baudrillard Studies was launched.

[edit]The object value system

In his early books, such as The System of Objects, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, and The Consumer Society, Baudrillard's main focus is upon consumerism, and how different objects are consumed in different ways. At this time Baudrillard's political outlook was loosely associated with Marxism (and situationism), but in these books he differed from Marx in one significant way. For Baudrillard, it wasconsumption, rather than production, which was the main drive in capitalist society.

Baudrillard came to this conclusion by criticising Marx's concept of "use-value." Baudrillard thought that both Marx's and Adam Smith's economic thought accepted the idea of genuine needs relating to genuine uses too easily and too simply. He argued, drawing from Georges Bataille, that needs are constructed, rather than innate. Whereas Marx believed in objects of necessary use-value distinct to those of pure "commodity fetishism", Baudrillard thought that all purchases, because they always signify something socially, have their fetishistic side. Objects always, drawing from Roland Barthes, "say something" about their users. And this was, for him, why consumption was and remains more important than production: because the "ideological genesis of needs"^[17] precedes the production of goods to meet those needs.

He wrote that there are four ways of an object obtaining value. The four value-making processes are as follows:^[18]

1. The first is the functional value of an object; its instrumental purpose. A pen, for instance, writes; and a refrigerator cools. Marx's "use-value" is very similar to this first type of value.
2. The second is the exchange value of an object; its economic value. One pen may be worth three pencils; and one refrigerator may be worth the salary earned by three months of work.
3. The third is the symbolic value of an object; a value that a subject assigns to an object in relation to another subject. A pen might symbolize a student's school graduation gift or a commencement speaker's gift; or a diamond may be a symbol of publicly declared marital love.
4. The last is the sign value of an object; its value within a system of objects. A particular pen may, whilst having no added functional benefit, signify prestige relative to another pen; a diamond ring may have no function at all, but may suggest particular social values, such as taste or class.

Baudrillard's earlier books were attempts to argue that the first two of these values are not simply associated, but are disrupted by the third and, particularly, the fourth. Later, Baudrillard rejected Marxism totally (The Mirror of Production and Symbolic Exchange and Death). But the focus on the difference between sign value (which relates to commodity exchange) and symbolic value (which relates to Maussian gift exchange) remained in his work up until his death. Indeed it came to play a more and more important role, particularly in his writings on world events.

[edit]Simulacra and Simulation

Main article: Simulacra and Simulation

As he developed his work throughout the 1980s, he moved from economically-based theory to the consideration of mediation and mass communications. Although retaining his interest in Saussurean semiotics and the logic of symbolic exchange (as influenced by anthropologist Marcel Mauss) Baudrillard turned his attention to Marshall McLuhan, developing ideas about how the nature of social relations is determined by the forms of communication that a society employs. In so doing, Baudrillard progressed beyond both Saussure's and Roland Barthes' formal semiology to consider the implications of a historically-understood (and thus formless) version of structural semiology. The concept of Simulacra ^[19][20] also involves a negation of the concept of reality as we usually understand it. Baudrillard argues that today there is no such thing as reality.

Simulation, Baudrillard claims, is the current stage of the simulacrum: All is composed of references with no referents, a hyperreality. Progressing historically from the Renaissance, in which the dominant simulacrum was in the form of the counterfeit—mostly people or objects appearing to stand for a real referent (for instance, royalty, nobility, holiness, etc.) that does not exist, in other words, in the spirit of pretense, in dissimulating others that a person or a thing does not really "have it" -- to the industrial revolution, in which the dominant simulacrum is the product, the series, which can be propagated on an endless production line; and finally to current times, in which the dominant simulacrum is the model, which by its nature already stands for endless reproducibility, and is itself already reproduced.

Some examples Baudrillard brings up of the simulacrum of the model are: 1) the development of nuclear weapons as deterrents—useful only in the hyperreal sense, a reference with no real referent, since they are always meant to be reproducible but are never intended to be used—2) the (former) Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, which replaced a New York of constantly competing, distinct heights with a singular model of the ultimate New York building: already doubled, already reproduced, itself a reproduction, a singular model for all conceivable development, and 3) a menage-a-trois with identical twins (attractive ones, Baudrillard seems to assume), where the fantasy comprises having perfection reproduced in front of your eyes, though the reality behind this reproduction is nil and impossible to comprehend otherwise, since the twins are still just people. The very act of perceiving these, Baudrillard insists, is in the tactile sense, since we already assume the reproducibility of everything, since it is not the reality of these simulations that we imagine (in fact, we no longer "imagine" in the same sense as before; both the imagined and the real are equally hyperreal, equally both reproducible and already reproductions themselves), but the reproducibility thereof. We do not imagine them reproduced for us, since the original image is itself a reproduction—rather, we perceive the model, the simulation.

[edit]The end of history and meaning

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, one of Baudrillard's most common themes was historicity, or, more specifically, how present day societies utilise the notions of progress and modernity in their political choices. He argued, much like the political theorist Francis Fukuyama, that history had ended or "vanished" with the spread of globalization; but, unlike Fukuyama, Baudrillard averred that this end should not be understood as the culmination of history's progress, but as the collapse of the very idea of historical progress. For Baudrillard, the end of the Cold War was not caused by one ideology's victory over the other, but the disappearance of the utopian visions that both the political Right and Left shared. Giving further evidence of his opposition toward Marxist visions of global communism and liberal visions of global civil society, Baudrillard contended that the ends they hoped for had always been illusions; indeed, as his book The Illusion of the End argued, he thought the idea of an end itself was nothing more than a misguided dream:

The end of history is, alas, also the end of the dustbins of history. There are no longer any dustbins for disposing of old ideologies, old regimes, old values. Where are we going to throw Marxism, which actually invented the dustbins of history? (Yet there is some justice here since the very people who invented them have fallen in.) Conclusion: if there are no more dustbins of history, this is because History itself has become a dustbin. It has become its own dustbin, just as the planet itself is becoming its own dustbin.^[21]

Within a society subject to and ruled by fast-paced electronic communication and global information networks the collapse of this façade was always going to be, he thought, inevitable. Employing a quasi-scientific vocabulary that attracted the ire of the physicist Alan Sokal, Baudrillard wrote that the speed society moved at had destabilized the linearity of history: "we have the particle accelerator that has smashed the referential orbit of things once and for all."^[22]

In making this argument Baudrillard found some affinity with the postmodern philosophy of Jean-François Lyotard, who famously argued that in the late Twentieth Century there was no longer any room for "metanarratives." (The triumph of a coming communism being one such metanarrative.) But, in addition to simply lamenting this collapse of history, Baudrillard also went beyond Lyotard and attempted to analyse how the idea of forward progress was being employed in spite of the notion's declining validity. Baudrillard argued that although genuine belief in a universal endpoint of history, wherein all conflicts would find their resolution, had been deemed redundant, universality was still a notion utilised in world politics as an excuse for actions. Universal values which, according to him, no one any longer believed universal were and are still rhetorically employed to justify otherwise unjustifiable choices. The means, he wrote, are there even though the ends are no longer believed in, and are employed in order to hide the present's harsh realities (or, as he would have put it, unrealities). "In the Enlightenment, universalization was viewed as unlimited growth and forward progress. Today, by contrast, universalization is expressed as a forward escape."^[23]

[edit]Political commentary

[edit]On the Gulf War

Part of Baudrillard's public profile, as both an academic and a political commentator, comes from his 1991 book, titled for its provocative main thesis, "The Gulf War Did Not Take Place". His argument described the first Gulf War as the inverse of the Clausewitzian formula: it was not "the continuation of politics by other means", but "the continuation of the absence of politics by other means". Accordingly, Saddam Hussein was not fighting the Allied Forces, but using the lives of his soldiers as a form of sacrifice to preserve his power (p. 72, 2004 edition). The Allied Forces fighting the Iraqi military forces were merely dropping 10,000 tonnes of bombs daily, as if proving to themselves that there was an enemy to fight (p. 61). So, too, were the Western media complicit, presenting the war in real time, by recycling images of war to propagate the notion that the two enemies, the US (and allies) were actually fighting the Iraqi Army, but, such was not the case: Saddam Hussein did not use his military capacity (the Iraqi Air Force), his politico-military power was not weakened (he suppressed the Kurdish insurgency against Iraq at war's end), so, concluding that politically little had changed in Iraq: the enemy went undefeated, the victors were not victorious, therefore, there was no war: the Gulf War did not occur.

Much of the repute that Baudrillard found as a result of the book  — originally a series of articles in the British newspaper The Guardian and the French newspaper Libération in three parts: During the American military and rhetorical buildup as "The Gulf War Will not take Place"; during military action as "The Gulf War is not Taking Place", and after action was over, "The Gulf War Did Not Take Place"  — was based on his critique that the Gulf War was not ineffectual, as Baudrillard portrayed it: People died, the political map was altered, and Saddam Hussein's regime was harmed. Some critics accuse Baudrillard of instant revisionism; a denial of the physical action of the conflict (part of his denial of reality, in general). Consequently, Baudrillard was accused of lazy amoralism, encompassing cynical scepticism, and Berkelian idealism. Sympathetic commentators (such as William Merrin, in his book Baudrillard and the Media) have argued that Baudrillard was more concerned with the West's technological and political dominance and the globalization of its commercial interests, and what it means for the present possibility of war. Merrin has asserted that Baudrillard did not deny that something happened, but merely questioned that that something was a war; rather it was "an atrocity masquerading as a war". Merrin's book viewed the accusations of amorality as redundant and based upon misreading; Baudrillard's own position was more nuanced. In Baudrillard's own words (p. 71-72):

Saddam liquidates the communists, Moscow flirts even more with him; he gases the Kurds, it is not held against him; he eliminates the religious cadres, the whole of Islam makes peace with him ... Even ... the 100,000 dead will only have been the final decoy that Saddam will have sacrificed, the blood money paid in forfeit according to a calculated equivalence, in order to conserve his power. What is worse is that these dead still serve as an alibi for those who do not want to have been excited for nothing: at least these dead will prove this war was indeed a war and not a shameful and pointless hoax ...

[edit]On September 11

In contrast to the "non-event" of the Gulf War, in the essay The Spirit of Terrorism^[24] he characterised the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City as the "absolute event." Seeking to understand them as an (ab)reaction^{[clarification needed]} to the technological and political expansion of capitalist globalization, rather than as a war of religiously-based or civilization-based warfare, he termed the absolute event and its consequences as follows (p. 11 in the 2002 version):

This is not a clash of civilisations or religions, and it reaches far beyond Islam and America, on which efforts are being made to focus the conflict in order to create the delusion of a visible confrontation and a solution based upon force. There is indeed a fundamental antagonism here, but one that points past the spectre of America (which is perhaps the epicentre, but in no sense the sole embodiment, of globalisation) and the spectre of Islam (which is not the embodiment of terrorism either) to triumphant globalisation battling against itself.

Baudrillard thus placed the attacks  — as accords with his theory of society  — in context as a symbolic reaction to the continued expansion of a world based solely upon commodity exchange. This stance was criticised on two counts. Richard Wolin (in The Seduction of Unreason) forcefully accused Baudrillard and Slavoj Žižek of all but celebrating the terrorist attacks, essentially claiming that the United States of America received what it deserved. Žižek, however, countered that accusation to Wolin's analysis as a form of intellectual barbarism in the journal Critical Inquiry, saying that Wolin fails to see the difference between fantasising about an event and stating that one is deserving of that event. Merrin (in Baudrillard and the Media) argued that Baudrillard's position affords the terrorists a type of moral superiority. In the journal Economy and Society, Merrin further noted that Baudrillard gives the symbolic facets of society unfair privilege above semiotic concerns. Second, authors questioned whether the attacks were unavoidable. Bruno Latour, in Critical Inquiry argued that Baudrillard believed that their destruction was forced by the society that created them, alluding the Towers were "brought down by their own weight". In Latour's view, this was because Baudrillard conceived only of society in terms of a symbolic and semiotic dualism.

[edit]Reception

Critics have found fault with some of Baudrillard's writing, ideas or his uncompromising positions.

For example Denis Dutton, founder of Philosophy & Literature's "Bad Writing Contest" — which listed examples of the kind of willfully obscurantist prose for which Baudrillard was frequently criticised — had the following to say:

Some writers in their manner and stance intentionally provoke challenge and criticism from their readers. Others just invite you to think. Baudrillard's hyperprose demands only that you grunt wide-eyed or bewildered assent. He yearns to have intellectual influence, but must fend off any serious analysis of his own writing, remaining free to leap from one bombastic assertion to the next, no matter how brazen. Your place is simply to buy his books, adopt his jargon, and drop his name wherever possible.^[25]

However only one of the two major confrontational books on Baudrillard's thought — Christopher Norris's Uncritical Theory: Postmodernism, Intellectuals and the Gulf War (ISBN 0-87023-817-5) — seeks to reject his media theory and position on "the real" out of hand. The other — Douglas Kellner's Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond (ISBN 0-8047-1757-5) — seeks rather to analyse Baudrillard's relation to postmodernism (a concept with which Baudrillard has had a continued, if uneasy and rarely explicit, relationship) and to present a Marxist counter. Regarding the former, William Merrin (as discussed above) has published more than one denunciation of Norris's position. The latter Baudrillard himself characterised as reductive (in Nicholas Zurbrugg's Jean Baudrillard: Art and Artefact).

Willam Merrin's work has presented a more sympathetic account, which attempts to "place Baudrillard in opposition to himself." Thereby Merrin has argued that Baudrillard's position on semiotic analysis of meaning denies himself his own position on symbolic exchange. Merrin thus alludes to the common criticism of Structuralist and Post-structuralist work (a criticism not dissimilar in either Baudrillard, Foucault or Deleuze) that emphasising interrelation as the basis for subjectivity denies the human agency from which social structures necessarily arise. (Alain Badiou and Michel de Certeau have made this point generally, and Barry Sandywell has argued as much in Baudrillard's specific case).

Finally, Mark Poster, Baudrillard's editor and one of a number of present day academics who argue for his contemporary relevance, has remarked (p. 8 of Poster's 2nd ed. of Selected Writings):

Baudrillard's writing up to the mid-1980s is open to several criticisms. He fails to define key terms, such as the code; his writing style is hyperbolic and declarative, often lacking sustained, systematic analysis when it is appropriate; he totalizes his insights, refusing to qualify or delimit his claims. He writes about particular experiences, television images, as if nothing else in society mattered, extrapolating a bleak view of the world from that limited base. He ignores contradictory evidence such as the many benefits afforded by the new media ...

Nonetheless Poster is keen to refute the most extreme of Baudrillard's critics, the likes of Alan Sokal and Norris who see him as a purveyor of a form of reality-denying irrationalism (ibid p. 7):

Baudrillard is not disputing the trivial issue that reason remains operative in some actions, that if I want to arrive at the next block, for example, I can assume a Newtonian universe (common sense), plan a course of action (to walk straight for X meters, carry out the action, and finally fulfil my goal by arriving at the point in question). What is in doubt is that this sort of thinking enables a historically informed grasp of the present in general. According to Baudrillard, it does not. The concurrent spread of the hyperreal through the media and the collapse of liberal and Marxist politics as the master narratives, deprives the rational subject of its privileged access to truth. In an important sense individuals are no longer citizens, eager to maximise their civil rights, nor proletarians, anticipating the onset of communism. They are rather consumers, and hence the prey of objects as defined by the code.