Why I haven't reviewed Applied Ballardianism yet (non review)

I thought it would be quite easy to review Simon Sellars' Applied Ballardianism.

In fact, reading the book was quite easy - and enjoyable for a number of reasons, including the several They Live-style beating scenes.  The non-places - airports, parking lots, freeways and hotels. The Heart of Darkness/Lovecraft island of Nan Madol, which I thought was fiction at first and had to look it up.

Reviewing it is proving harder, however, because of my woeful lack of knowing who the hell Baudrillard was.  On attempting to remedy this, I hit a patch where the entire world dissolved into an unsorted pile of unreferenced signs which interfered with my ability to write anything down. In fact, I was so discombobulated, I wasn't even happy working at my Twitter mine.  I usually put my shift in pressing the "like" button and occasionally "retweet" for several hours a day but Baudrillard took the fun out of it.

You know Searle's Chinese Room? After I got to a certain point in the Baudrillard thing I realized Baudrillard thought of us as the AI in the Chinese Room, taking in signs from the left door in one language, looking up the corresponding sign in the second language and handing that word out of the right door.  Maybe a bit more, as we occasionally add a "LOL" or "AYFKM" as we hand it back out.

Except I'm not seeing an argument for us as Strong AI, i.e. all of the handling of the signs is done by an unthinking, inhuman machine. Which means I don't exist.

Of course, that may be because I'm reading Baudrillard For Dummies, but that's about my level.  I don't usually do this, but a scan of the book is available online. It's Chris Horrocks's and Zoran Jevtic's Introducing Baudrillard 1999. I have some other books in the same series - Derrida, for example - but came across the full text of Baudrillard while I was investigating whether to buy it.  I thought it would take me a day to figure it out. I'm still stalled on day 8. The relevant part starts on p 103.

French philosophers are weird. It's 28 been years since the reunification of Germany so there must be a crop of German philosophers just about ready to harvest and then we can drop the French ones.