\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I enjoyed reading the “The Divine Irreference of Images” section of Baudrillard’s essay.\u00a0 The essay is so dense on a philosophical level that I had a hard time putting it into terms I could understand.\u00a0 When he begins talking about simulation in relation to the medical field, I immediately made some connections that helped me deduce his meaning.\u00a0 He talks about the simulation being both true and false: “The simulator cannot be treated objectively either as ill, or as not ill” (168).\u00a0 This made me think of hypochondriacs and how they work well as a subject of simulation.\u00a0 The hypochondriac simulates a disease to the point that they believe they are really sick.\u00a0 Because of this, they are both healthy and not healthy.\u00a0 Just as Baudrillard points out, the medical profession does not know how to handle such people: “What can medicine do with something which floats on either side of illness, on either side of health, or with the reduplication of illness in a discourse that is no longer true or false?” (168).<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Baudrillard’s idea of simulating an illness to the point that it becomes unclear whether the person is sick or healthy, or some form of both, made me recall a time I played hooky from school.\u00a0 I hated elementary school and often simulated an illness to get out of going.\u00a0 I usually concocted fake vomit to pour in the toilet or a fake fever from a light bulb.\u00a0 In reality, I felt fine and spent the day home from school with no symptoms.\u00a0 One time something very different happened.\u00a0 I woke up and pretended that I couldn’t talk and that I had a sore throat.\u00a0 I slipped up a couple of times in front of my little sister, but my performance was good enough to get me out of school and into the Dr.’s office.\u00a0 I knew that after the Dr. did my throat culture I’d have to go back to school, so I really started laying it on thick: “Ouch, it hurts!”\u00a0 To my wonderment, my throat culture came back positive for strep throat.\u00a0 Was I sick or was I healthy?\u00a0 I could no longer tell the difference between my simulation and my reality.<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 House of Leaves<\/span> begins with a list of medications Johnny has tried to use against his insomnia.\u00a0 He has become too afriad to sleep.\u00a0 This fear seems to have less to do with the actual events that happen in Zapano’s\u00a0book and more to do with the\u00a0implications of this book.\u00a0\u00a0The implications deal with the power of simulation.\u00a0I think that Johnny’s\u00a0fear\u00a0stems from\u00a0Bauldrillard’s idea of neither “real” nor “fake.”\u00a0 Zapano’s book is a simulation of a movie, which is a simulation of a reality that does not exist.\u00a0 Johnny tries to peal back all of the layers of simulation to reveal the inner reality.\u00a0 However,\u00a0his investigation finds\u00a0that there is no\u00a0proof that\u00a0the Navidson Record ever existed.\u00a0 He is then left with only the simulation, which has begun to integrate itself into his reality.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I enjoyed reading the “The Divine Irreference of Images” section of Baudrillard’s essay.\u00a0 The essay is so dense on a philosophical level that I had a hard time putting it into terms I could understand.\u00a0 When he begins talking about simulation in relation to the medical field, I immediately made some connections that helped … Continue reading Simulation and Medicine<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[33,32,35,36],"class_list":["post-258","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-week-5-mzd","tag-baudrillard","tag-house-of-leaves","tag-reality","tag-simulation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=258"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":270,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258\/revisions\/270"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}