Hey you,

The matrix has you.

You're in a pretty deep simulacrum here. Ever realize how far representation has gone? Humanity started symbolically with the verbal, to written, to virtual, how much farther can we get? We've drifted as far from reality as can be. Whatchya gonna do about it?

Post-modernism discussion begin!

I had to wikipedia "post-modernism", but... wow. Why have I never heard this term before? Anyways, I don't know what discussions in particular are to be had regarding post-modernism, so maybe somebody else can start us off.

remember in The Matrix at the beginning when Neo opens up a hollowed out book to get the CD? Well if you pause it there you'll see the book title "Simulacra and Simulation" which is by Jean Baudrillard, a french sociologist, philosopher, and cultural theorist of post-modernism. In fact The Matrix has a lot of post-modern themes to it as seen from the documentary Philosophy and The Matrix

People don't realize it, but we are already deep in "the matrix" from the post-modern perspective. It doesn't necessarily entail being plugged into machine and in a virtual reality.

"Opti and I"
Have you read that thread?

It's funny to think that there weren't always so many letters in the alphabet. We had to have started with only a few, and then added gradually over time. It amazes me that we have come so far in our standardization of language (though, when you think about it, language is far from unitary). The fact that things like quotation marks have not always been a part of language is, in my opinion, evidence that there was a time before which people used written language but were not able to directly write about written language itself. Perhaps we will add punctuation in the future that allows us to more directly write about things like punctuation.

I am fascinated by the evolution of language. Adults (having advanced understanding of language) become accustomed to using many idiomatic phrases which are sometimes grammatically incorrect. And yet children learn the meaning of words in the context of these idiomatic phrases. Thus the meaning of words changes gradually over time. We don't usually think about what we unintentionally imply individual words to mean in hip phrases, but the hip ways in which words are used today will become the standard of meaning for those words in the future.

Likewise, ideas evolve over time as do the words used to define/describe them.

Travels in Hyperreality by Umberto Eco is a good read. He talks about how our representations of events give way to representations of the representations which eventually become more real in the public mind than the original event itself and how this affects our views of reality as a whole. It is a bit dated in that some of the political examples are from the Reagan era, but it still holds true. Good stuff.