We are living in a computer-programmed reality, and the only clue we have to it is when some variable is changed, and some alteration in reality occurs. We have the overwhelming impression that we were reliving the present - deja vu.
This... is a synthetic world many of us live in today - a dream, if you will.
... nothing lasts long. We all come to life and gather allies and build empires and die, all in a single moment - maybe a single pulse of some giant processor somewhere.
Painting can feign reality without having seen it.
The reality of nostalgia is nowhere better invoked than at the end of Tarkovsky's 'Solaris.' When the camera pans away from Kelvin embracing his father on the rain-soaked steps of his dacha, we realise that the scene is yet another of the simulations produced by the inscrutable planet.
I've seen descriptions of advanced TV systems in which a simulation of reality is computer-controlled; the TV viewer of the future will wear a special helmet. You'll no longer be an external spectator to fiction created by others, but an active participant in your own fantasies/dramas.
Nothing in this world is real
Nothing is real.
The functional freedom that anybody can buy a gun and go out and murder a lot of people at a McDonald's is prevalent, yes. But through the effects of TV and interactive video systems and so forth, we'll also have the freedom to pretend to be a mass murderer for the evening. I've seen descriptions of advanced TV systems in which a simulation of reality is computer controlledthe TV viewer of the future will wear a special helmet. You'll no longer be an external spectator to fiction created by others, but an active participant in your own fantasies/dramas.
There's this idea that it's all natural, but everything's been staged to look natural. It is also an invention. It's just that my inventions are different. I often get asked about my artifice, but isn't fashion based on the idea that we can create a fantasy?
Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination.
I am in the Matrix and I just took the blue pill.
The drama is make-believe. It does not deal with truth but with effect.
We are now able to create virtual realities on computers. Are we all living in one created by someone in the future?
Am I living in a simulation?
When the machine of a human being is turned on, it seems to produce a protagonist, just as a television produces an image.
I do like 'The Truman Show.'
Life had become a reproduction: it was not the real thing.
Things that try to look like things often do look more like things than things.
What is consciousness? Our brain simulates reality. So, our everyday experiences are a form of dreaming, which is to say, they are mental models, simulations, not the things they appear to be.
The idea that when one reacts, one is not reacting to any one of those moments. You're reacting to the accumulation of the moments. I wanted the book, as much as the book could do this, to communicate that feeling. The feeling of saturation. Of being full up. I wanted it to be simulacra.
For all the spectacle of CGI, there's something alien and unreal about that domain, like a videogame.
A face painted in a picture gives a pitiful parody of life. . . but a painted surface lives.
When real is gone, then there is no longer a litmus test for that which deviates from it. It's all real because it's all 'real.'
One day the virtual world might win over the real world.
