The Artifice of the Real

There's an old Zen Koan that goes something like this: A warlord is walking up the steps to a temple. He is contemplating himself, his world, thinking about the temple, etc. A monk runs out of the temple, rushes down the steps to the warlord and slaps him hard across the face, crying "Wake up!" Often, when I'm reading the news or listening to people on the train I'm tempted to exercise the Zen Monk Option. There's a conflict at the heart of the American experience between the subjective and the objective, the trivial and the real. When the nation was riveted to the artificial drama of OJ's bronco wandering down the highway, I would have slapped my hands bloody walking down the street. Wake up! This is not real. Well, it turns out I am not only not alone in this style of perception. I need the ZMO myself. Phillip Ball has an interesting book review in Nature entitled "Is technology unnatural?" What is the boundary between natural and artifice? Check it out. He crawls right to the heart of the matter of where that boundary is drawn. Greg Bear, in the same issue, takes on the state of artificial life. Again: the artificial versus the real. You can read it here. When is life the product of artifice?