Simulation Theory: Reality Has Become Science Fiction [Paperback]

Simulacra and Simulation (French: Simulacres et Simulation) is a 1981 philosophical treatise by Jean Baudrillard, in which the author seeks to examine the relationships between reality, symbols, and society, in particular the significations and symbolism of culture and media involved in constructing an understanding of shared existence.
Simulacra are copies that depict things that either had no original, or that no longer have an original. Simulation is the imitation of the operation of a real-world process or system over time. Definition[edit]...The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.— The quote is credited to Ecclesiastes, but the words do not occur there. It can be seen as an addition, a paraphrase and an endorsement of Ecclesiastes' condemnation of the pursuit of wisdom as folly and a 'chasing after wind'—see for example Ecclesiastes 1.17.Simulacra and Simulation is most known for its discussion of symbols, signs, and how they relate to contemporaneity (simultaneous existences). Baudrillard claims that our current society has replaced all reality and meaning with symbols and signs, and that human experience is a simulation of reality. Moreover, these simulacra are not merely mediations of reality, nor even deceptive mediations of reality; they are not based in a reality nor do they hide a reality, they simply hide that nothing like reality is relevant to our current understanding of our lives. The simulacra that Baudrillard refers to are the significations and symbolism of culture and media that construct perceived reality, the acquired understanding by which our lives and shared existence is and are rendered legible. (Baudrillard may have taken all of these ideas from the first pages of Guy Debord's 1967 La société du spectacle (The Society of the Spectacle). Baudrillard believed that society has become so saturated with these simulacra and our lives so saturated with the constructs of society that all meaning was being rendered meaningless by being infinitely mutable; he called this phenomenon the "precession of simulacra