Makes about as much sense as anything Palahniuk actually wrote. (edit to add the intended 
)
Iâm just not a big Palahniuk fan. And no offense to those who are (and your post was good too, I should have included a smiley in my reply 
). I just donât like his stuff. It reads as âfake deepâ to me, like heâs throwing a bunch of vague nihilism or overreaching skepticism at the wall and seeing what sticks. âEverything is an illusionâ can make some amount of sense (at least internally) when itâs supported by a framework like Hindu metaphysics, but it seems more like Chuck is taking something more like Cartesian skepticism and moving past the âwe canât knowâ to âI do know, and what I know is that itâs all fakeâ. It seems to me like Palahniukâs fans make more sense than he himself makesâthey read his stuff, which to me comes across as shallow, and they insert ideas into it that he himself didnât have.
But I donât like Tarantinoâs work all that much either, for some of the same reasons. They both come across as the kids who are smoking in the bathroom to try to seem cool. I actually think Tarantino is himself pretty funny, and I greatly appreciate his love of filmmaking as an art form. Filmmaking, real filmmaking where people are trying to do more than just blow up fast cars, doesnât have much stronger of a supporter than Tarantino. I just donât like a lot of his own stuff all that much. I donât âhateâ it, and I see why other people like it, I just donât. Some of my good college friends were Tarantino fans, and Palahniuk fans too, and weâd often sit down over beer and try to convince each other of how terrible/great they both were
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Iâm not sure thereâs a hard line between Schopenhauerâs stuff and the Wachowskis. I liked the first Matrix movie, but the general premise is nothing you canât trace back to Plato (to whom everything else in philosophy is âa footnoteâ, at least according to Whitehead), by way of Descartes most famously, but through plenty of others too, including Kant. There is a note of âhopeless sufferingâ in those movies that Schopenhauer might have appreciated, but itâs counteracted by the very notion in the films that there might be some way out of it. And that way out in the movies isnât art and beauty, as Schopenhauer would claim. Itâs leather and guns
The âreal worldâ in the Matrix is absolutely knowable in a way that Schopenhauerâs noumena is not. His noumena was knowable to us, but only indirectly. Had the Wachowskis done what they should have done and have everyone, machines included, realize that they canât know whatever the âultimate real worldâ is, and then they all gave up and started painting and making music together, Agent Smith would likely just have turned into Schopenhauer himself and headed to the nearest rave. But the sequels just disappointed on any level other than shoot-em-up.
Zwift is a mild analogy for the phenomena-noumena distinction, but no one is separated from the non-zwift world around them when weâre zwifting. Itâs not any different in that way than playing Super Mario Brothers. To be clear I do think that our minds extend beyond our bodiesâpart of my mind is in the phone sitting next to me right now, in that it holds memories for me, and can be used for perceptive purposes. But Iâm not relocating the bulk of my mind anywhere when I play zwift. And if by questioning realism youâre talking about skepticism of the external world, you donât need zwift for that, and it doesnât even help. Just read Descartes Meditations again. Zwift isnât particularly special in an interesting metaphysical sense.
This is off topic. Time to close this one.
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