Hyperreality: A Way of Life

[whynaut]

This idea occurred to me the other day:

Hyperreality, as Baudrillard describes it, is the combination of both simulation and reality. For example, there is a bar made to look like an exact replica of the bar from the show Cheers. In reality there are bars, the show Cheers is simulation of the experience found in bars, the "Cheers Bar" is a real bar based on the simulation of bar: it is both real and a simulation. But this is just an obvious example, as Baudrillard expressed that every aspect of our lives has become a hyperreality. Every experience we have ever felt is a real manifestation of something we have only experienced through simulation i.e. emulating fictional characters, idealizing love that we only see in movies, building inventions that were imagined in books, etc. Even experiences that were based on "real" events might have in turn been based on simulated events which dilutes the reality of the current event. But the point that Baudrillard was trying to make was not that these experiences were fake, or even real, but both: a hyperreality.

Sadly, Baudrillard saw this a sad thing, comparing the loss of reality as a sort of entropic death. But it was from this idea that I considered, "what if reality is both objective and subjective, or rather objective from the point of view from a subjective person?"

When I first came to this group I was under the flawed assumption that reality was not real, and that perception was purely subjective. My logic followed thusly:
MC - Reality is not real
P1- Reality is perceived by the senses
P2- The senses can be deluded
P3- True Reality cannot be based on an deluded system

While this logic sort of works, it ignores that if our senses are deluded it is a delusion of what? The Objective person would say that if something is being deluded it would be the delusion of True Reality, and even if our senses are unreliable that True Reality exists beneath our flawed senses. But that never satiated me either because different people's perception of reality have been so divergent that I simply could not believe that it all came from a uniform (objective) source.

However, what if reality is subjective from person to person, but for that person it is absolutely objectively real and not a delusion? For instance, if I see a chair, or God, or goodness then that is exactly what I see with no possibility of wrongness. Even if someone comes along and tells me he sees none of those things, then in his perception he is correct and in my perception I am correct. My theory goes to follow: If reality is based on the senses, then what the senses contrive IS reality.
To use a metaphor, do you say that a painting is just a delusion of the canvass or is the painting the real thing?  

[Niniva]

I will dissagree in that reality itself must be purely objective. For example, it wouldn't do very well for me to percieve gravity different from you and thus have my theory be that ever 250th person on earth floats would it?

There seems to me to be some semblance of ballance to the every day things we percieve, certainly this is no proof for what is actually real, for we could never truely know if we were all trapped in the matrix and imagining all of this as some sort of induced computer program. However, here's one objective thing that you cannot doubt, and I will call back to decartes once again.

There is something out there, very objectively....doing the percieving. In order to turn something into subjectivity, it first must be percieved and then it becomes subjective under whatever false rationalizations we give to it. Whatever mistakes and foolish things we allow get in the way of percieving it objectively, there is a point here.....there is and it[/it] that we are pecieving.

Much like the idea that there can be no arguement that there is an agent doing the doubting when you doubt, there also must be some essential thing out there to be fooled into percieving in the first place, and there must also be something essential out there by which we base our apparations and foolheardy perceptions. In other words, you cannot creatively piece together apparations of things you have never before experienced.

Try as you may you could never imagine something who's individual parts you have never percieved. For example, if I told you to imagine a unicorn but you had never seen a horse before, would you then imagine a horse with one horn? No, because you don't know what a horse looks like.

The same goes for your subjective reality. If it "becomes" real suddenly because you percieved it as such....it is....in a sense "real" to you, but that does not make it "essentially" real. It does not make it Truth (note the capital T).

All you have done by claiming such is redefined what we would call "objective". Just because in my head I believe green gremlins make my car engine go....does not then suddenly make it real. It might be real "to me" but that does not then bring it into metaphysical existance that is objective. Objectivity applies to certain principles such as math, and logic. If x+y = C here to me in my reality, then x+y=C in your reality. You may give a different symbol but the essential numbers are the same.

For example, your senses cannot be fooled into thinking that when you add the degree of the angles of a triangle they always come out to the same ammount. Whether you mistakenly assign it a different numerical symbol or not you will find that no matter how many times you try to add the numbers together they always come out the same....this is true for everyone and always will be.

Other concepts are just simply logical Truths based on definition. If a man is a Bachelor, can he then be married? Of course he can't. And we would say that OBJECTIVELY speaking a persons senses cannot be fooled about such things. It just is. I might mistake a married man FOR a bachelor because he is unfaithful or wears no ring, but that is nothing more than a mistake, that does not then change that he TRUTHFULLY....is still married and therefore not a bachelor.  

[Raticiel]

Objectivity, you say. I think there is no need to mix up Baudillard philosophy of culture with epistemological problems such as objectivity or subjectivity... I'd rather say you should compare Baudillard with Anderson or McLuhan, that kind of stuff...
Btw, if we really want to mix it up, then it's necessary to admit that we who are interested in philosophy are living in a very hyper reality wink the ones who keep on telling others "You guys are fooled!" are fooled every time they think they touch that Truth neutral
pessimistic?