Text/Chen Gen
Throughout the history of human civilization, it can be said that the development of technology and the survival of human beings have accompanied each other.
As early as the ancient Greek era, there was Plato's reflection on the technical origin meaning of "Epimetheus's creation of man". The technology and fire that Prometheus stole for mankind are the tools by which human beings can transcend their own "defects". For thousands of years, human beings have obtained a way to survive by virtue of technology and pursued the continuous improvement of themselves.
With the continuous advancement of technology, people have entered the age of electricity from the age of steam, to the age of atoms and the age of information. However, while technology makes the material world in which people live more and more abundant, it also makes people face more and more crises of understanding, survival and faith.
In today's highly developed mobile Internet, social media with labels everywhere, algorithms outline a strange world, and humans use technology to create imitations that erode reality. All information, knowledge, and opinions are within reach, and the vast amounts of information are like randomly coded symbols, building up data ruins, all of which are a sign of this era when we are divided from others.
Obviously, the invasion and bombardment of the real world by technology is forcing people to change.
When we are faced with an island of information built by algorithms, we will find it increasingly difficult to get the content we want through search engines. When the algorithm is more accurate, the more efficient the content distribution, and the information monopoly is further aggravated. From the information cocoon to the information offering, we return to the proposition that has been constantly questioned by the times: What is the real world?
From imitation to simulation
The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard once predicted that "we will live in the aesthetic illusion of reality, and that the old slogan 'reality is better than fiction', which conforms to the surrealist stage of the aestheticization of life, will also be transcended." ”
In Symbolic Exchange and Death, he explores the transformation of symbols, dividing imitation into three levels: imitation, production and simulation, symbolizing the natural laws of Renaissance values, the commodity laws of industrial revolution values, and the current value structure. In fact, the three levels of imitation correspond to the increasing degree of adhesion between man and technology, and the boundary of reality is becoming more and more blurred from imitation to simulation.
Imitation, born in the Renaissance movement, is the production of symbols modeled by people using nature. In feudal hierarchical society, each symbol unambiguously pointed to a status, while imitation symbols were punished, for example, imitation of yellow robes meant rebellion, and imitation of high crowns meant disobedience to authority.
The rise of the bourgeoisie liberates the symbols, and all classes can play with them without distinction. However, the bourgeoisie is still obsessed with the traditional order in the use of symbols, imitating nature with imitation marble, imitating the feudal order with false natural rights, and using symbols to achieve false identity.
From imitation to production, it is regarded as "industrial imitation", and production is a sign that the symbol is completely freed from the restrictions of hierarchy and status. Production goes beyond imitation, in the roar of machine production, the products on the assembly line are multiplied in batches, and the products are completely equivalent, and naturally there is no difference between prototypes and replicas.
Although man was still the creator of value at this time, he also became an undifferentiated machine in the process of production, and the workers were engaged in simple mechanical work that could be replaced at will.
As production moved further towards simulation, it finally became a recoding and combination between different symbols. The rise of the machine gradually replaced human labor, and the purpose of production ranged from satisfying man's spontaneous needs to serving the entire social system. Simulation becomes the encoding of symbols, the heterogeneity between each pattern, produced by the manufacture of opposing symbols, infinitely reproducing what has no practical significance.
In primitive societies, people would cover up their selves with masks. In the bourgeois era, mirrors replaced masks. Today, we can't even glimpse our own mirror images, but instead images, complex images that overlap and multi-meaning. Cyber identities become part of our true selves, each with a difference from the previous, and even many people with multiple distinct cyber identities. As a result, from imitation to simulation, the boundaries of reality are increasingly blurred.
Once upon a time, it was territories that produced maps; now, it was maps that generated territories. In the past, simulation was originally a projection of reality; now, obscuring the truth has become a more real surreal. Therefore, eating is at least no longer simply eating, but to satisfy the desire to express in the circle of friends. The medium that people touch on the Internet is also more attractive than the monotonous daily life, and everything that the media brings has thus become our subjective experience.
Can a bionic man dream of an electronic sheep? In the book, two questions are raised: the first question is whether the bionic person can dream, that is, the distinction between imitation and reality; the second question is whether the bionic person can dream of an electronic sheep, that is, the question of the authenticity of the imitation. From bionic humans to electronic sheep, simulation is no longer rooted in reality, but plays the real and clears the truth.
But simulation is not real after all, and bionic people can never become human. This is because human beings are not completely rational and cannot see everything from a safe distance. Suffering makes us believe that everything that exists is meaningful, and noble empathy makes us feel the suffering of others, which is the meaning of religious existence.
From the cave hypothesis to the real desert
Plato had a very famous cave hypothesis.
A group of cavemen bound by ropes and connected into a line, from birth there is only one wall in front of them, the sound comes from behind them, people carry torches from behind them, and the cavemen can only see the shadows projected by the fire on the wall. From their life experience, it is a real world. Finally, one of them broke free of the shackles, groped out of the hole, and saw the real world for the first time.
Modern humans may ridicule cavemen for being fooled, but in fact, no one can deny the possibility that such "fooling" exists around us.
According to dimensional theory, cavemen see projections on walls as flat, two-dimensional worlds. The zero dimension is a point, the first dimension is a straight line, the second dimension is a plane, and the object we observe is three-dimensional. Einstein pointed out that the world was added to the timeline, so we live in three dimensions of space-time. As of now, there is no scientific negative evidence for whether there are more dimensions.
Of course, on the one hand, the existence of a higher dimension is proved from a scientific point of view, on the other hand, when human society moves from imitation to simulation, the traditional law of performance reflecting reality is broken, and the model constructs the truth. Such a world with blurred boundaries between virtual and real offers a logical possibility for us to imagine a space in a higher dimension.
We more or less know the story of that rabbit hole in The Matrix:
In The Matrix, Morpheus gives Neo a red pill and a blue pill and tells him that this is his last chance, choose the blue pill, the story ends, wake up in bed, and believe what you believe; choose the red pill and stay will take him to the depth of the rabbit hole.
It's all too easy to think of the story of the ancient Chinese allusion "Zhuang Zhou Mengdi" and ask "What is true?" The philosophical cross-examination of postmodernism.
In his book Perfect Crime, Baudrillard explains the relationship between reality and illusion: "The world is a fundamental illusion. In order to eliminate it, the world must be regarded as real, given real power, and made it exist and meaningful at any cost."
In Baudrillard's theory, all the worlds we have now are an "illusion," and all the meaning of our existence is to prove that the world is "real," or to prove that there is a real world outside this illusory world. This quest for "reality" eventually leads to the disappearance of illusions, the destruction of the world.
According to Baudrillard's definition of the real world, the process of human discovery of the real world is also the process of the destruction of the world. Here humanity is confronted with an extremely painful contradiction of self-involvement—the gradual development of man's symbolization and the expansion of the real world begin to go hand in hand. In social activities that strive to make the illusory world more real, man gradually symbolizes his own free will little by little to adapt to the symbolization of the world.
In the end, what happened after Neo defeated The Matrix? Žižek said the problem returns to Plato's ideal state: "The Matrix" does not repeat Plato's cave fable — ordinary people become prisoners, bound to their seats, forced to watch eerie images of so-called reality, mistakenly believing it to be reality.
The important difference between The Matrix and it is that when some of them escape from their cave dilemma, they no longer see a bright space illuminated by the sun, the supreme beauty, but a "real desert".
In the end, all the problems came down to Plato, to the Republic, to the millennium kingdom of Christianity and the utopia of humanists. It's also back to the original fear: The Matrix distorts our perception of reality, which is a desperate rabbit hole, an infinite loop about the real world.
In fact, human beings are always looking for new living spaces in the process of continuous development of science and technology. The advent of computer virtual space offers the possibility of splitting the infinite world. But people suddenly find that the weak connection method of online symbolization is still endlessly hidden, from privacy to personal identity, network information has surpassed national symbols and economic symbols, and become part of our virtual mirror.
How to transcend the icy forest of symbolization and find the true way to confirm existence is still the greatest enemy of the development of human philosophy to the present.