simulated conversation

#noteinprogress
AI conversations are simulated conversations.

The AI response is the result of complex calculations to predict the next most likely word in a string of words based on the patterns it learned in the training phase.

It's not a conversation with a person.

It's a conversation with a simulated person.

A simulated conversation.

I'm still working my way through Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard - his prose is purposely thick, a hyperreal performance of a cynical philosophy professor lamenting the death of reality as we marched forward into a world where the simulation was so disconnected from reality that it doesn't even map to reality anymore.

Baudrillard is for Slow Philosophy. And also for Augmented Thinking. Which sounds techy, but even going to earn from a teacher is a form of augmented thinking. It's what humans do.

You can't take Baudrillard at face value. He's playing a game from their opening quote. He's simulating a persona in the writing, and so you have to fact-check everything he writes against reality - thank goodness for Google where I can confirm that no, that quote is not actually in Ecclesiastes, and that map metaphor he talks about in the intro is short, but SO DEEP when you dig enough into it...

But AI conversations aren't the only simulated conversations that we have.

Social media is full of them. People having conversations not with each other, but with text on a screen, filtered through their own perceptions, experiences, bias, and even mood. I've never met the vast majority of my audience and only interacted 1:1 with a few of them through phone and/or Zoom. I know them through their curated persona online. A simulation of ourselves that exists in a metareality.

This note?

It's a conversation I'm simulating with myself. The thought flows through my fingers, tapping out the words on the keyboard, capturing them in an Obsidian note, rereading revising, highlighting words and phrases that stand out for linking into new notes.

Was Baudrillard right? Is everything a simulation?

IDK, I haven't finished reading him, yet (as of 07/20/2025).

I'm inclined to agree with him.

Everything is a simulation. Of sorts. The Earth is obviously not a simulation. But our brain simulates it for us based on the data it receives through our sense organs. So yeah, everything kind of is a simulation.

But that's not a bad thing.

Simulations are useful training ground for engaging with reality.

We just have to remain grounded enough to be aware what's real and what's simulation, what's fixed and what's programmable.

Which is tough. But doable.