Simulations and Textbooks
abstraction, academia, academics, analogies, Baudrillard, comprehension, creationism, different things, disneyland, education textbooks, evolution, fairytale land, high technology, history textbooks, illusion, phenomena, philosopher, Philosophy, real world, simulacra, simulation, simulation and simulacra, simulations, Textbooks, trains
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This is on Baudrillard’s famous concept. While now Foucault has slowly become my favourite philosopher, I still think my philosophizing always seems to alternate, or perhaps synthesize, Baudrillard and Foucault, the former who once argued for people to “forget” the latter, when some academics seem to think that Foucault actually had influenced Baudrillard’s trains of thought. Anyway, Simulations and Textbooks takes a look into the world of structured academia, and how lectures and textbooks themselves are a system of simulation in themselves.
To get some terms clear first, according to my understanding of Baudrillard, simulation and simulacra are different things. Simulation is that which copies the real world, representing it “virtually”. To put it rawly, simulacra is simulation which is a corrupted, or different, copy of the real world, in turn affecting the original subject copied.
Structured academia could be a simulation, but not likely to be a simulacra - while there have been arguments about biased history textbooks, untruthful texts on creationism and evolution, analogies which falsely illustrate scientific phenomena and such, these to my knowledge do not cross-over back into the real world to seriously corrupt the truth as is known. However, textbooks, notes and lectures, of the structured academia - these are simulations of knowledge to me.
Contemporary examples of simulations are the Internet, the media and high technology. Some of these are simulacra, and away from technology, there is always Baudrillard’s Disneyland, which he finds to be offering one the illusion of a fairytale land, but sadly unconsciously bound to the rules of the real world. Before all these, however, I should think that we were already living in yet another first-generation, unconscious simulation, in education.
Textbooks and theory create the illusion of learning, when actually what was involved was memorizing, comprehension, and at best an abstraction of real-world knowledge. In the classroom alone, actual learning of knowledge can almost always never take place. What happens all the time is the simulation of knowledge, as “known scientific facts”, social phenomena, empirical research becomes coded in paper, and the knowledge within the words becoming represented very-much like a simulation.
Science fiction once gave us the “knowledge machine” - the machine with the one plug that could be plugged into any human directly, feeding information into his or her brain. Walking out of the kiosk containing this machine, one could perhaps have learnt new knowledge about flying helicopters, performing martial arts, or even understanding quantum physics.
While we are still quite away from this ideal “knowledge machine”, we are pretty near in terms of the concept. Walk in, sit down, go out with new knowledge. I should think that this resembles the classroom a lot. We live a simulation in the classroom.
Let’s see - we know by enough understanding of the scientific method, that whatever your science teachers speak of in class may always be proven independently by yourself via experiments and enough brainpower. While simpler scientific experiments by the teachers may be done to illustrate phenomena, in primary schools usually, I find that as you progress, your experiments become theoretical and mentally-performed, and empiricism gives way to rationalism. Eventually when you reach junior college physics, you are left pondering about how exactly does an atom split, and what is a quark and all. To understand such, you definitely must draw on your theory. I ask, to prove my point further, how many of us have actually witnessed a particle smasher in action during our academic days?
It is all a simulation in the mind, where one does not experience the learning, but instead learns the experience. What happens on a molecular level when water boils? Certainly anyone educated in it can tell you the answer - but it is all based upon a conceptual understanding, not so much of personal observation under magnification.
I guess that no one exactly escapes from this easily, until one reaches the tertiary level of education in universities and polytechnics. With the adequate funding and specialization required in these cases, most if not all one has learned since young is finally redone in experiments and empirical research. Then, one actually learns, because there is finally an experience with the phenomena.
Hence science education can be a simulation. What about the humanities and arts?
Unless science bears us birth to the time machine, we can never experience history in the making - that is for sure. Given this, there is no chance of actually experiencing any learning as is possible with science. History, especially, feels like a drama serial in the making, with all the weekly lectures involved.
“On the next week of “YOUR HISTORY LECTURE”, Gorbachev faces widespread opposition to his reforms. Hardship falls upon the Soviet people and a coup in in the making. Will Gorbachev survive history? Or will history destroy him?”
The next week, we learn all that which Gorbachev went through. More accurately, while the lecturer is speaking, we visualise all that spoken text into a moving picture. We see Gorbachev being outshadowed by Boris Yeltsin, and we see the fall of the former. It is like watching a show - and a simulation a show is always.
Learning equates to simulation - or is it? For history it is a sad fact for we cannot revisit the past and at least witness the facts before we search for opinions. Yes - opinions, perhaps this is what saves the humanities and the arts from certain simulation?
Ah, this too is questionable. Does one actually think through what the teacher analyzes and take it critically, or does one choose the easier path towards examinations and grading, memorizing opinions and arguments? Is one allowing his education to be a simulation, or is one more wanting to actually learn?
The arts is a realm where those in simulation cannot easily survive. The blank stare on the face when one who memorizes theory of music speaks of it tells it all - the arts is not for simulation.
Take your education seriously. It is not up for simulation. Unfortunately structured education gives no escape route at times, and ultimately, we must ask - is it us who make the simulation, the system which makes the simulation, or is it both us and the system working together to create a simulacra? Ah, it would really become a simulacra, if our teachers too were educated in the form of this simulation, and have it passed onto us. Even more hyperreal, would be when somebody actually offers exams-based tuition to polytechnic and university students, caring only to ensure knowledge of all that is required for tests, and not for the knowledge that a professional of his field must have. Education as a simulation? Not much of a problem for general “learning” - but mind you, it should not become a simulacra if education is for skills specialization.
I wish Baudrillard could have said something on this.
