Depiction is a child’s scribble, even if it has a thousand lines or a million. A depiction is effectual through either reminding the recipient of something already experienced or enabling the recipient to imagine a new experience synthesized from aspects of things known to the recipient. It is important to emphasize that, however convincing the depiction, the process of creating a depiction is fundamentally different from the process (however abstracted) that led to the experience being depicted. A certain kind of IMAX movie, for instance, can cause real vertigo, but not by actual movement on the part of the viewer. Because so much of our subjectivity is based on reacting to perceptions rather than the perceptions themselves, it takes a conscious effort to detach from depictions that are particularly well-made (or conventional) & to see them as artifice.
This has obvious applications to what we’ve started calling “Artificial Intelligence”. One of the things it can now do very convincingly is depict human utterances in written form (less so, in spoken); our world of obtuse managers is about to undertake a wholesale replacement of many if not most linguistic labors by humans with their close simulations, & not everyone sees this as a bad thing. As for decision-making, while one could argue that given our present selection-process of decision-makers by various extraneous criteria (such as tallness & relatability) the present cohort could not but be improved upon, & thus AI (unthinking as they are) might mimic good decisions at least as well as our “leaders” who stubbornly cling to their bad ones. But I think that is not the way to solve problems that have never happened before.
Fealty to a particular depiction is ideology; in a world of rampant ideologies, it is not surprising that the view could have arisen that we are living inside a simulation, since the very nature of depiction is placed beyond question & above analysis. If seeing the world & not just responding as if it were one of our depictions is “mindfulness”, then only this discourse which concerns the world should be called “philosophy”.
You can have all those big words.