From the comments section

In response to my essay on simulation, Ben Stevens writes that simulations are fictions that have been around a long time.

So, too, is Sophocles' Antigone. Are these fictions not simulations? For my money, then, what remains to be seen is whether increased pervasion of simulation is qualitatively different from traditional or non-technoscientific modes of mediation including products of verbal art like drama, poetry, and 20th-century philosophy. Are these last of such a different quality or order, of such a factual humanity, as still to make technoscientific modes of mediation seem, by contrast, the more (dis)simulative?

In the comments, I responded: Is a book (a technology) the same as a story (also a technology). Is a film the same as a book? Is facebook the same as a movie?

My point is that Turkle argues that that simulation wants something different than stories or books or movies. Those are media to entertain. Simulation wants a total immersion that becomes a proxy for the real. Contextualizing is important, but you have take seriously the claims of the new technology. It may turn out that the claims are inflated and all will revert to a mere tool for human entertainment. But that is not necessarily true. Some times there are new things in the world.

Professor Thomas asks:

I truly don’t understand the question you are posing, and I hope you will clarify it. “Simulation” isn’t the type of thing that can “want,” right? So are you asking what the many developers and users of simulation want? Or are you asking toward what ends the possibility of simulation drives its users?

The question "what does simulation want?" is, as you say, a question of what does simulation--insofar as we use it--reveal about our wants and drives. Your formulation, to "what ends the possibility of simulation drives its users" is perfectly fine in my view, although I would replace "possibility" with "activity." Insofar as we develop and use simulations, what does that reveal about our wants? And in what ways will simulation transform our wants and desires--thus, what does Simulation want?

This is the question Sherry Turkle asks and her answer is: Simulation wants immersion in a virtual world that is so profound that it replaces the real. or blurs with the real. Or is a proxy for the real. These aren't the same. This needs to be flushed out.

Ben says, haven't we always been living in fictions, thus simulations. I agree. All common life together depends on fictions of unity and common ideas, customs, that form our sense of identity and comprise our world. Plato understood that politics is about the unification of a multitude, and this unity is always based in a fiction (see Nietzsche too, and Arendt). The question we are debating, as I understand it, is a version of "is this time different?" Always a difficult question in medias res. I don't know the answer. But I do think that simulations, as I am coming to understand them, pose the possibility of a radical fictionalizing of the world in ways that will further attenuate our belief in a shared, commonly accessible world. If different people "see" and "feel" the world differently because of neural enhancements and oracular implants and artificial skin grafts, then the very idea of a common world of sense perception falls away and a new idea of reality--one suffused with simulation--takes its place. This is fundamentally different from the fantasy of a book or a movie. Even a religion, which offers a complete worldview, can be confronted with reality as Galileo did. But in a world of simulation, that reality threatens to disappear.

I say all of this not entirely sure of how it works. But the confidence with which such researchers now embrace simulation is a shock to my system.

rb