Baudrillard is quite cheeky, he knows as well as I do the original is not "artificial" or fake, but he is trying to say that at the level of publicity or propaganda the one is substituted too glibly for the other.

With my "clunky" mind I would always infer, in situations like that, that a smaller number of skilled and qualified scientists go nearer to protect it from mass exhalations, litter etc. and that if you are one of those what you see is "very much like" this replica only obviously better, and can be analysed (but perhaps more difficult to see). Presumably there is some sense, for some people, in visiting to see the ambient locality (more than just to buy "Lascaux wallpainting" mugs and pendants, etc).

Been to Lascaux, done the "wallpaintings" / replica / "whatever".

Likewise he often says war is effectively largely reduced to the same status as anything else on the television screen. A sort of "meme" that is just "there" and most people aren't even "supposed" to ponder what it "is".

As a critic he is telling us (not straight, he wants us to make the jump, he is telling it to us "startlingly") we have got to use curiosity about background knowledge, we have got to use valuation, and we have got to use inference: the three themes on my mind these days continuously.

Increasingly enforced absence of these three things is the "christmas cake" and not the "fairy cake" ("vodka" and not "cup of tea") recipe, the express and not all-stops itinerary, for total human disaster.

Indeed from the passage quoted if one remembers from one minute to the next that one peeped at the real and walked through the whole replica, it should be a matter of adding two and two together. He is saying don't forget to do that much! And how many people have forgotten that ("encouraged" by power larger than themselves).

At least when I was sightseeing with my family of origin I never wanted to sleepwalk.

How does a copy of the original cave make them both fake? If there’s a reference to the “real” thing what makes the real cave fake? What makes the recreated cave more real, or just as real as the original? There is no feasible way that the recreated cave was an absolute stone cold carbon copy, and even if it was, if the original exists, why would someone substitute the recreation for the original? — Ignance

Haven't come around to actually read Baudrillard yet, despite him being one of the most interesting modern philosophers I know. Reason being that while people use Descartes or Plato's cave whenever they make the metaphysical thinking about "reality being a simulation", it's such an overused argument that it misses the more interesting ideas that Baudrillard brings to the table.

Even though I haven't read Simulacra and Simulation yet, the things I've read about his philosophies tell me that it's the psychology of the experience and memory of the cave that is key. Think about it this way, many appreciate 1900- house architecture, the more down-to-earth, lived-in feeling instead of modern factory-produced houses without any "soul". So a company starts building 1900-era houses, replicating everything and it becomes a huge trend, much so that a hundred years in the future, most people have forgotten that the architecture originally started 200 years ago. For them, this is architecture from the start of the millennium, they've forgotten the original and cannot see the difference between originally built houses and newer houses that essentially just copied the old architecture.

You can see his ideas all the time in society. When someone tastes wine that they think is expensive, but it's just a cheap copy. It tastes the same, it is the same to the one experiencing it.

But it goes much further. And the most interesting idea is how his philosophy applies to the world we live in now. How Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook have created a simulation of our world, but how people started blurring the lines between the real and the fake online persona to the extent that it's basically a simulacrum, a hyperreal society. How do you know that your friend is, in your mind, is not just a blurred sum of your real experience with him/her and the added fake reality of his/her online persona? Where does the online persona begin and end, and where does the real physical self exist in this regard?

Essentially, we already live inside this fake cave. Our experience of the world is so influenced by the simulation of fiction blended with the simulacra of news, commercials, and propaganda, that we cannot really see where the fake sense of reality ends and reality begins. Just look at how media and social media produce people who seem to be so detached from everything that we are stunned by their alien words and behaviors. Qanon is a perfect example of this, an extreme and totally bonkers conspiracy ideology that is based on its peoples' hyperreal experience. They are unable to distinguish between the real and the simulation. They accept crazy bloggers' depiction of reality as the real world to the extent that they don't understand the difference anymore. The attack on the Capitolium was a prime example of how far into this hyperreal they actually are. And the sentences many of them get now are a shock to them; a sort of awakening where they don't understand what is happening, much like Neo waking up in the tank in The Matrix. Not really seeing the real world, but seeing the border more clearly and how traumatic that is.

Now, Baudrillard criticized The Matrix for not really understanding his ideas, but I think that was a bit premature since the rest of that film trilogy did in fact use a lot of his ideas to the fullest. They were filled with the ideas of symbols and archetypes as simulacra and they took the concept of hyperreal and used it on top of the story structure of the movie itself. People with surface-level philosophy knowledge were speculating if the "real world" in the movies were just another simulation, but they didn't realize that even though the real world wasn't a simulation, it was a hyperreal event. Everything that the second two movies were about was the manufactured simulacra of fighting against the machines. It's like if the future wars of the Terminator movies were instead carefully manufactured by the machines to keep humans thinking they were free but inside a prison of their own mental concept of resistance. This type of hyperreal situation let us believe that Neo, Morpheus, Trinity and the rest were actually fighting for freedom when it's just a rehash of a thing that has been happening over and over again. This is what Neo is then breaking by literally being blinded, but seeing the line drawn. He is then able to navigate towards a solution that breaks the hyperreal fake war. And maybe here the criticism by Baudrillard makes more sense, since his point is that we are unable to see the border clearly, however, for the Wachowski's to pinpoint the philosophy, they had to show it clearly.

This type of hyper-real war is also closer to reality than many think. Much of the wars going on today is merely proxy-wars where the soldiers think they fight for survival or something noble or God or whatever, but in reality, it's just superpowers playing them against each other to acquire geographical resources and strategical positions.

Wherever we turn today, we have hyperreal things all around us. Even knowing things are hyperreal, it's very hard to break through the boundary. I can understand the hyperreal situation of social media vs reality, but I cannot break free of it. I don't know where, in my experience and mind, my friends' online persona and their real physical persona start and end. They influence each other and blurs together. It's easy to just say that the person standing in front of me physically is the real friend, but that doesn't help my experience and feelings towards this person. Everything they are online influences my "real" experience. So how much of this relationship is based on their persona online and how much is based on their persona in real life? It's impossible to answer, and that is the point of the hyperreal.

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