photo by Rea Tajiri.

Simulation Politics: Persuasion and Possibility

From the earliest man who used forms of ‘predictive modeling’ of future predators to plot their next movement, to contemporary epidemiological simulations that predict our movement en masse, we have always been embedded in acts of simulation. We need to be able to predict future actions – and affective responses – to be able to survive physical threats, and complex social settings. We simulate constantly; we use simulations to model hurricanes and stars exploding; we create long-lasting public policy and law based on predictions that are taken as truth, despite being virtual evidence. Simulation helps determine how warm and cool air masses will move; how to train in battle and space flight; how humans will respond to fear and an unknown quantity; how water levels will rise, and then, how people will leave a flooded city. Simulation dominates our shared cognitive and computational landscapes, but is, strangely, still obscurely understood as a science in wider culture.

As a result, narratives of simulation as truth, or near-truth, come to dominate culture. As this year has demonstrated, simulations strongly guide and overdetermine individual choices for navigating through scenarios with big Unknowns. Simulations actively shape reality; they build worlds. How simulations are communicated – can dangerously flatten necessary complexity and nuance in favor of scalable prediction, which tends to create devastating real-world consequences. Further, the story of simulations as representations of good-enough or near-truths about what’s to come, abrades the public’s ability to see possible points of intervention, debate, and contestation.

In these seminars, we will dig deeper into simulation: as science, yes, but further, as mental and cognitive strategy, as a powerful collaborative tool for negotiation within complex settings. We will examine a few dominant simulations and models, in order to understand them as persuasive tools as much as statistical ones. What happens to our engagement with simulations when we understand them as rhetorical tools which convince us of a kind of reality? How does our relationship to simulations change when we understand how their embedded assumptions produce reality?

By engaging with philosophers and theorists of simulation, cognition, and rhetoric, we venture to explore simulation as collaborative practice. We will examine forms of simulation, mapping, and modeling that predate computation, like semantic walking maps, and early forms of simulated sound and movement. Working within a larger landscape, we will examine the messiness of simulations, as wild, collaborative compromises between conflicting perspectives and worldviews. Simulations reveal themselves as rife with conflict and choices between competing worldviews and ideologies, a necessary diversity that helps us maneuver through a world of uncertain knowledge and emergent complexity. As we find our day to day shaped by competing predictions of our behavior, choices, and movement, we might brainstorm collaborative practice of simulation and predictive thinking. Throughout, as we look at modes of world-building, through short prompts and guided exercises, we will together debate, unpack, and attempt to design some of our own rough models and simulations as a group.

• Questions we’ll probe:
• If we understand arguments for the brain as a simulator, constantly predicting and strategizing in relation to virtual evidence, what methods of revision and reevaluation should we consider using actively?
• How might we think critically about simulation as a mental strategy, and a mode that we constantly enact in order to survive?
• How can we learn to sort between competing simulations to make the best model for our own ethical action?
• How do simulations embed cultural fantasies and narratives – such as the frontier, or the blank slate? How do techno-utopian or technocratic ideals find their way into ‘objective’ simulations?
• How do we make simulations that allow for clashing personal and social histories?
• Who do we (culturally) predict and imagine living well into the future?