The above is a strong formulation of the zombie argument. There are other formulations of zombie-type arguments that follow the same general form. The premises of the general zombie argument are implied by the premises of all the specific zombie arguments.
wikipedia on philosophical zombies
I was upset with the number of synonyms for “indeterminacy” and needed something to hold onto. I made a bunch of AI slop and wallowed in it, but not that way.
So I went down a “Supervenience” rabbit hole. I learned about a small class of problems the logical form associates. I am not looking for randomness, but what, I do not know.
I was upset with the number of analogs of supervenient physical zombies, negated tables, single atoms of ammonia on Saturn’s ring. There was no need to consult philosophical Vulcans. I needed to feel something real, but otherworldly.
Enter the Matrix. Back it up.
Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard was issued to cast members of The Matrix as a way to improve the performances. Baudrillard reportedly did not like the film. Keanu Reeves reportedly gave stunt actors motorcycles for “risk and work”. He would later reportedly donate part of his take from the sequels to crew, to costume and make-up. His character Neo shares this trait of needing to acknowledge such commitment to undervalued effort that benefited him so asymmetrically. This hyperreality is explored in the trilogy, beginning with meditative forms and ends with Neo’s Christlike absorption into the Matrix. He becomes analog to God. He sold his soul to the Company Store. I’ve heard the trilogy itself in an exegesis at USF decades ago explained as a documentation of religious forms moving through Eastern to Western metanarratives in a progressive form. It’s hard to get all that in when you’re mixing John Woo and CGI into so much of it.
Sometimes you just want bald action that does not seem derivative.
So I ask the receptacle of my corpse, the AI consuming my world. I ask my coffin about the next world. I ask my ship about the next shore. I ask my pen about the next word. I explore this question.
Can you provide me with specific feedback from the cast and crew of the movie The Matrix regarding the issuance of Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulations to improve their understanding of the film project?
me
from Copilot, which sucks, fundamentally because some of these links are unsecure:
Absolutely — and there’s some fascinating, very concrete material on this. Thanks to production trivia and interviews, we actually do have specific comments from the cast and crew about being given Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation as required reading for The Matrix. Here’s a clear, sourced breakdown of what they said, along with some context to help you see how it shaped the film’s development.
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🎬 What the Cast and Crew Said About Reading Simulacra and Simulation
The Wachowskis didn’t just casually reference Baudrillard — they assigned his book as mandatory reading for the principal cast and crew to ensure everyone understood the philosophical backbone of the film IMDb.
Below is a structured summary of the feedback we have from those involved.
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🧠 Cast & Crew Feedback (Sourced)
✅ Keanu Reeves (Neo)
• Feedback: Reeves said that before he even opened the script, the Wachowskis had him read Simulacra and Simulation along with two other books.
• Impact: He eventually became able to “explain all the philosophical nuances involved,” suggesting he took the assignment seriously and found it essential to understanding the film’s conceptual layers IMDb.
✅ Carrie-Anne Moss (Trinity)
• Feedback: Moss commented that she had difficulty with the required philosophical reading.
• Impact: Her reaction shows that the material was challenging even for the core cast, but still considered necessary by the directors to ground performances in the film’s themes IMDb.
✅ Wachowskis (Writers/Directors)
• Feedback (indirect but documented): They required the cast to understand The Matrix “not only as a film, but a philosophy.”
• Impact: Issuing Baudrillard’s book was part of their effort to ensure the actors could articulate the film’s metaphysical and epistemological ideas, not just perform the action sequences IMDb.
✅ Production Notes
• Feedback: “Simulacra and Simulation” was required reading for most of the principal cast and crew.
• Impact: This wasn’t a symbolic gesture — it was part of the formal preparation process for the film’s production IMDb.
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📚 Why Baudrillard’s Book Was So Central
The Wachowskis drew heavily from Baudrillard’s ideas about:
• Hyperreality
• Simulated worlds
• The collapse of the real and the copy
• The “desert of the real” (quoted directly in the film)
The book even appears as a prop in Neo’s apartment — a hollowed-out copy hiding illegal software — which is itself a meta commentary on simulation and concealment.
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🧩 A Quick Table Summary
Here’s a clean snapshot of the feedback:
Person Feedback on Reading Baudrillard Impact
Keanu Reeves Assigned the book before reading the script
Helped him grasp philosophical nuances
Carrie-Anne Moss Found the reading difficult
Showed the material’s complexity
Wachowskis Required cast to understand the philosophy
Ensured thematic coherence
Crew (general) Most were required to read it
Unified conceptual understanding
Sources: IMDb
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🔍 Want to go deeper?
If you’d like, I can explore:
• How Baudrillard himself reacted to The Matrix (he was famously critical)
• How the book’s themes map onto specific scenes
• Other philosophical texts the Wachowskis assigned
• How the cast interpreted the film’s metaphysics
Just tell me which direction you want to explore.
It never works. It is, after all, a movie. You need to stay in thev theatre. It has a showing. People are starved for release from the bonds of this world (clock), bonds we have made (time) our caretaker, time itself. It is this struggle which keeps us from unity and “becoming forms of pure energy”. Maybe we were designed by such beings to imperfectly connect, provide trivia, provide time, as a source in a universe so hyperreal as to negate time. That might be impossible to endure.
Also, you never hear repentant country boys who can survive walking back their statements after going into a Labubu store and finding that perfect gift for their SO.
I liked trout fishing, but the convenience in finding just the right future garbage for my otherwise completely familiar apartment. Wow, in this Labubu store, I can find peace and purpose that is making me want a cup of hot candied bean juice.
someone I made up wearing plaid, fishing in waders in a swamp
but walking the asphalt oval at my neighborhood park sure beats that. How many times do you walk the track before evading eye-contact from the same people walking the opposite direction. Almost immediately? Imagine asking someone if anyone really knows what time it is. If anyone really cares (about time)? I cannot stand this song. It was a recession. People cared about time because the times were not good. Unemployment is not a form of freedom. Poverty is not a goal. Alienation is not a philosophy, but a tool of the ignorant and greedy, a response of a healthy sociopath to invasive empathy and commiseration.
So I ask ChatGPT to do that thang: It basically gave me the same answer. Both LLM-parsers are squaring the same circle. ChatGPT offered to expand on the “desert of the real” motif in the films.
Baudrillard saw this schism as specifically why the films were unfaithful to his work. The world is not able to refer back to a “real world”. There is no reference to the real that still exists to the observer in the simulacrum. You have simulations without origin. Semiotics becomes a sort of hybrid animal that feeds on meaning, the only fuel of hyperreality. New equivalences, same Hamiltonians, so to speak.
This brings me to the use of prequels in semiotics. They involve less work and risk. They deter the evolution of a story by confabulating an a priori set of actions that create parameters that supervene iterative design progressions of the worldview. Precessional freedom is the “precession of simulacra”, in the way that the actual disaster of Three-Mile Island happened a few days after the box office debut of “The China Syndrome”. So, the train derailment in Palestine, Ohio was preceded by a film shot in that town about the same type of disaster, an homage to the book White Noise by Don Delillo
https://youtu.be/jVqGP-ScDTU?si=C-DfmqwbHCOvqpnd
Post-modern realism. Invention of hope. Philip K. Dick’s “The Iron Prison”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1G6NTFVv8sA Critique of Don Delillo, with White Noise prefiguring in his conventional representative work. Critique of the movie from a stunned extra and East Palestine, Ohio resident Ben Ratner who participated in its production. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhxYTR8nnR8
Not to be confused with the film director of “Downriver” 2014. That movie was about
So, our Ben Ratner, someone with an incomplete account of a movie with an incomplete account of the physical impact of the actual vinyl chloride derailment on February 3, 2023, at 8:55 p.m. EST. in the town where it was being filmed. A superfluidic perforation in a paraconsistent fashion, infinite transition without friction and such nonsense.
When I use the term “metanarrative” I mean to use the definition where it is something that is in conversation with the meaning of an object from the culture removed in time, in dialect, in tribal history, territory, language, or predominantly indepedendent of a common antecedent in terms of history of place or of meaning within that semiotic system. Of different cultures entirely. I don’t know what Zuckerburg means by it. Probably something ad revenue something, something confined to number go up.
On February 3, 2023, at 8:55 p.m. EST, on 02/03/2023 at 20:55 pm. The repetition of zeros, 2s, 3s and 5s makes me wonder what went on at 8:23 pm, 2023 hrs, like a fool looking at tea leaves to read the future again. It fits a pattern, maybe. Maybe not. Seems fallacious anyhow. But still magnetically interesting. Is there a dispositif object there, because one is expected at this point in writing. I pause, I go to the prison of meaning, the internet, this ideasthesia of eternal giggity.
What we know for sure via Copilot
- The train was approaching East Palestine.
- The defective wheel bearing on car 23 was continuing to overheat.
- The train had not yet reached the final hotbox detector — the one that triggered the alarm shortly before the derailment.
Who is we? Also, that is an idea of a decaying simulacra. Entropy spreads. Also, the iteration of an event at 8:23 pm yielded nothing, but the number of the car, no. 23, somehow supplied a simulation of the ongoing pattern, an echo of meaning chewed up by a vocoder. The car with the critically overheated bearings was approaching disaster. The number one hit song in the country was “Flowers” by Miley Cyrus, born November 23rd. Whatevs. I see whatevs everywhere. The more I look, the more I see. I see dead whatevs.
Back to zombie capitalism, you don’t know how lucky you schism
What did Baudrillard think of power?
What can one brandish today? No longer even the ruins of
knowledge, of culture-the ruins themselves are defunct. We
know it, we have mourned Nanterre for seven years. 1968 is dead,
repeatable only as a phantasm of mourning. What would be the
equivalent in symbolic violence (that is to say beyond the politi
cal) would be the same operation that caused nonknowledge, the
rotting of knowledge to come up against power-no longer
discovering this fabulous energy on the same level at all, but on
the superior spiral: causing nonpower, the rotting of power to
come up against-against what precisely? There lies the prob
lem. It is perhaps insoluble. Power is being lost, power has been
151
Simulacra and Simulation
lost. All around us there are nothing but dummies of power, but
the mechanical illusion of power still rules the social order, be
hind which grows the absent, illegible, terror of control, the ter
ror of a definitive code, of which we are the minuscule terminals.
Not getting anywhere, one supposes. AI paddling in an AI river. Sempre piu lunga. From here on in it just becomes complete gibberish. I am floating free of meaning, lost in a semiotic simulacrum that is perpetuating signals with decaying meaning. Generation is decaying. https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.13366 . Tropical KP Theory on Banana Curves Let me
I get tired. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/12/01/capitalism-a-global-history-sven-beckert-book-review
Fifty State Banana 