The term hyperreality comes from the work of Jean Baudrillard, who defined it as "the generation by models of a real without origin or reality" in Simulacra and Simulation. The hyperrealist movement in art and philosophy is associated with a poorly defined anxiety that arises from the inability of conscious thinking to distinguish easily between what is real and what is virtual. This problem is one only insofar as it remains valuable to distinguish between real and virtual in the first place - many Millennials and Zoomers have grown up so enmeshed in technology that wasn’t around for their parents as kids that we’re already beginning to catch glimpses of a post-hyperreal world. Technologies such as blockchain address epistemic uncertainty with respect to the virtual, which is a key worry that has long been a source of anxiety for people who ponder the limits of things. Think of this essay as an invitation to pause and reflect upon art, philosophy, and culture.

The cover image for this piece of writing was generated by StableDiffusion, and is an excellent example of the hyperrealist style requested. The piece seems to have a real face in it - almost so real it could be a photograph of a person, but the hues become wrong in some areas, creating impressions of features that no real face is likely to have. The result is that the piece has an unreal quality to it. We could imagine someone seeing it from a distance and thinking it resembled someone they knew, but upon closer inspection our imaginary friend would almost certainly be tipped off at some point that this wasn’t a real person, much less a photograph of an acquaintance. When StableDiffusion does it, it’s hard to guess what the machine might be trying to tell us; it isn’t trying to tell us anything, it is randomly combining elements until its trainer tells it has gotten its result.  Still, when people use the hyperreal style, as in the photo to follow, there is often a message or at least an idea behind the piece, even if it is vague and difficult to describe verbally.

Indeed, we find hyperrealism in literature as well as art and philosophy. Philosophy, when employed by thinkers such as Baudrillard and Gilles Deleuze, comes up with lots of concepts - the image that becomes the real, rather than the other way around. Elements of this style of cognition go at least back to thinkers such as Spinoza, but the duplicitousness of modern consumerism really ran things into high gear. In my work Formal Dialectics, I critiqued Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy from what might be considered a hyperreal angle.

The general line of reasoning there was centered around a lot of time I had spent studying Plato, reading the existing primary source texts, and almost never finding Forms or Ideas in any of them (much less the rigorous and well-formed positive account that Russell seems to swear Plato defined). Then I read HoWP, and I just couldn’t understand where Russell was drawing his conclusions from. So, I argued, perhaps the body of philosophical work around the Platonic Theory of Forms is one example of an image becoming the real. In plain English, someone made it up and convinced someone else it was true, and before you know it, it’s accepted canon being taught in classrooms everywhere. Philosophers are a discerning group, though, and if one thing can be said in Russell’s defense, it is perhaps that most philosophy lessons on the subject come with a bit of skepticism.

Granted, not everyone is so concerned about what a long-dead Ancient Greek philosopher thought the world was like. These traces of history are extremely tough to follow, too - we can’t exactly go back in time and simply ask Plato what the right answer is, so we’re limited to guessing mostly. In Thomas Hobbes’ famous work Leviathan, my favorite concept had little or nothing to do with political philosophy—that book was the first one in which I encountered the concept of ratiocination, of which addition is one sort. Essentially, Hobbes argues, our minds take simple concepts and combine them to form more complex ones. We can trace this process consciously by analyzing our thinking. One key worry of hyperrealism in philosophy is that there is no sensory base layer to ratiocinate our way back to, leaving it difficult if not impossible to ever discern the strength or weakness of a given line of reasoning based upon virtual grounds!

Literature does a good job of getting to a line of reasoning that philosophy doesn’t seem as well-equipped to handle, in this case, what it feels like to experience a situation in which one does not know what is real and what is virtual. The vague anxious tone that can be found in hyperrealist works like Don DeLillo’s classic White Noise, for example, comes from shifts in the culture. What enshrined White Noise as a classic, in my opinion at least, is the element of incomplete attachment to a greater whole that comes through as we read the book. The narrative is always shifting, always changing, being updated piece by piece over time and by an instrument that was never understood to be perfect for the purpose in the first place. Mostly these shifts in the context of the story come through the radio, or the TV, or the kids. Almost never are we really sure what is going on.

With a growing suite of technologies directed at the underlying problem - how to discern and analyze the veracity, origin, and value of things that happen as we interact with technology, and with each other via technology - of hyperrealism, it appears we may at last be able to begin to peer beyond this curious historic moment in which it first became necessary to question the massive flows of information that gradually became available to us. Public blockchains in particular seem likely to be useful sources of truth.

There is plenty of room for speculation, as the culture in general has not yet integrated anything like public blockchain or decentralized web services at scale, as to what may be coming next. For now, it appears that deepfakes and superintelligent AI systems with arbitrary goals are a new form of hyperreal problem posing, the very art of presenting such things changed by the emergence of technologies that make it possible to respond to the Baudrillard problem of a model of a real without reality. The response can be simple, even: if it happens on-chain and I can see it happen there, I may believe it to roughly the same extent I would believe something I saw with my own eyes. It is always possible to be fooled, and to have the rug pulled from beneath my feet, but something very remarkable is happening at the intersection of contemporary philosophy and blockchain technology.

Critics may respond to this line of reasoning by claiming that the telephone cut through the white noise of the postal service, just as the television provided a better means to transmit information from one mind to another than did the radio. It is impossible to argue that the pattern will not repeat, but the very fact of the public availability of on-chain information in atomic and simple (if early) form is something new. It is now possible to know with certainty that a given wallet called a given method on a given smart contract on a given blockchain - and as these utterly reliable seeds of information grow, perhaps hyperrealist anxieties will give way to something more hopeful: scalable coordination.

https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0xdA0060876E7342771e12eccf2B8d966D25007be0/0

The term hyperreality comes from the work of Jean Baudrillard, who defined it as "the generation by models of a real without origin or reality" in Simulacra and Simulation. The hyperrealist movement in art and philosophy is associated with a poorly defined anxiety that arises from the inability of conscious thinking to distinguish easily between what is real and what is virtual. This problem is one only insofar as it remains valuable to distinguish between real and virtual in the first place - many Millennials and Zoomers have grown up so enmeshed in technology that wasn’t around for their parents as kids that we’re already beginning to catch glimpses of a post-hyperreal world. Technologies such as blockchain address epistemic uncertainty with respect to the virtual, which is a key worry that has long been a source of anxiety for people who ponder the limits of things. Think of this essay as an invitation to pause and reflect upon art, philosophy, and culture.

The cover image for this piece of writing was generated by StableDiffusion, and is an excellent example of the hyperrealist style requested. The piece seems to have a real face in it - almost so real it could be a photograph of a person, but the hues become wrong in some areas, creating impressions of features that no real face is likely to have. The result is that the piece has an unreal quality to it. We could imagine someone seeing it from a distance and thinking it resembled someone they knew, but upon closer inspection our imaginary friend would almost certainly be tipped off at some point that this wasn’t a real person, much less a photograph of an acquaintance. When StableDiffusion does it, it’s hard to guess what the machine might be trying to tell us; it isn’t trying to tell us anything, it is randomly combining elements until its trainer tells it has gotten its result.  Still, when people use the hyperreal style, as in the photo to follow, there is often a message or at least an idea behind the piece, even if it is vague and difficult to describe verbally.

Indeed, we find hyperrealism in literature as well as art and philosophy. Philosophy, when employed by thinkers such as Baudrillard and Gilles Deleuze, comes up with lots of concepts - the image that becomes the real, rather than the other way around. Elements of this style of cognition go at least back to thinkers such as Spinoza, but the duplicitousness of modern consumerism really ran things into high gear. In my work Formal Dialectics, I critiqued Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy from what might be considered a hyperreal angle.

The general line of reasoning there was centered around a lot of time I had spent studying Plato, reading the existing primary source texts, and almost never finding Forms or Ideas in any of them (much less the rigorous and well-formed positive account that Russell seems to swear Plato defined). Then I read HoWP, and I just couldn’t understand where Russell was drawing his conclusions from. So, I argued, perhaps the body of philosophical work around the Platonic Theory of Forms is one example of an image becoming the real. In plain English, someone made it up and convinced someone else it was true, and before you know it, it’s accepted canon being taught in classrooms everywhere. Philosophers are a discerning group, though, and if one thing can be said in Russell’s defense, it is perhaps that most philosophy lessons on the subject come with a bit of skepticism.

Granted, not everyone is so concerned about what a long-dead Ancient Greek philosopher thought the world was like. These traces of history are extremely tough to follow, too - we can’t exactly go back in time and simply ask Plato what the right answer is, so we’re limited to guessing mostly. In Thomas Hobbes’ famous work Leviathan, my favorite concept had little or nothing to do with political philosophy—that book was the first one in which I encountered the concept of ratiocination, of which addition is one sort. Essentially, Hobbes argues, our minds take simple concepts and combine them to form more complex ones. We can trace this process consciously by analyzing our thinking. One key worry of hyperrealism in philosophy is that there is no sensory base layer to ratiocinate our way back to, leaving it difficult if not impossible to ever discern the strength or weakness of a given line of reasoning based upon virtual grounds!

Literature does a good job of getting to a line of reasoning that philosophy doesn’t seem as well-equipped to handle, in this case, what it feels like to experience a situation in which one does not know what is real and what is virtual. The vague anxious tone that can be found in hyperrealist works like Don DeLillo’s classic White Noise, for example, comes from shifts in the culture. What enshrined White Noise as a classic, in my opinion at least, is the element of incomplete attachment to a greater whole that comes through as we read the book. The narrative is always shifting, always changing, being updated piece by piece over time and by an instrument that was never understood to be perfect for the purpose in the first place. Mostly these shifts in the context of the story come through the radio, or the TV, or the kids. Almost never are we really sure what is going on.

With a growing suite of technologies directed at the underlying problem - how to discern and analyze the veracity, origin, and value of things that happen as we interact with technology, and with each other via technology - of hyperrealism, it appears we may at last be able to begin to peer beyond this curious historic moment in which it first became necessary to question the massive flows of information that gradually became available to us. Public blockchains in particular seem likely to be useful sources of truth.

There is plenty of room for speculation, as the culture in general has not yet integrated anything like public blockchain or decentralized web services at scale, as to what may be coming next. For now, it appears that deepfakes and superintelligent AI systems with arbitrary goals are a new form of hyperreal problem posing, the very art of presenting such things changed by the emergence of technologies that make it possible to respond to the Baudrillard problem of a model of a real without reality. The response can be simple, even: if it happens on-chain and I can see it happen there, I may believe it to roughly the same extent I would believe something I saw with my own eyes. It is always possible to be fooled, and to have the rug pulled from beneath my feet, but something very remarkable is happening at the intersection of contemporary philosophy and blockchain technology.

Critics may respond to this line of reasoning by claiming that the telephone cut through the white noise of the postal service, just as the television provided a better means to transmit information from one mind to another than did the radio. It is impossible to argue that the pattern will not repeat, but the very fact of the public availability of on-chain information in atomic and simple (if early) form is something new. It is now possible to know with certainty that a given wallet called a given method on a given smart contract on a given blockchain - and as these utterly reliable seeds of information grow, perhaps hyperrealist anxieties will give way to something more hopeful: scalable coordination.

https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0xdA0060876E7342771e12eccf2B8d966D25007be0/0