Synthetic Realism

A name for the second movement of Bratton's For a General Theory of Simulations; the phrase itself is never spoken in the lecture, though the idea organizes it. The talk turns away from simulations that give cognitive access to physical reality and toward simulation as designed synthetic experience: VR as a toy world for people and "a digital twin for experience itself," augmented reality merging shadow and cave, cinema and the Las Vegas Sphere as virtual environments already. Bratton asks whether VR frees experience from ground truth and proposes "baseline reality" as the name for the non-virtual, making the virtual the reference point and the real the derived term, while allowing that designed worlds may teach philosophers of mind something about the real. Maughan's Infinity Mirror takes a harder line, treating many such worlds as diversions from truth that resist baseline reality. Relates to Model Epistemology and Digital Twin.