system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
How is Baudrillard’s “hyper reality” different from Plato’s cave?

(Forgive me if I express this incorrectly)

I don’t fully understand hyper reality, but I think it’s about how the things that appear real are only simulations of simulations, they simulate the media which simulates reality. 

Platos cave demonstrates how humans can only see shadows of true substances and never the original forms, which shows how the nature of representation does not correspond to reality. 

Are these two ideas not essentially very similar, how does the excess of signs in the media change the fundamental illusory nature of reality?
gpt
There is a sort of relation in that in both the hyper-real and in the cave there is a blurring between the real and the symbolic - but only insofar as the prisoners take the symbolic to be the real.  It turns out the prisoners just have no substantial relation to the real so, almost by necessity, this blurring occurs.  Yet, it occurs *totally*.

However, the hyper-real contains within it pure simulacrum, signs which have absolutely no ground or relation to reality at all.  (For instance, pictures of people who never existed.)  The shadows in the cave, however, *do* stand in relation to the real - a direct relation.  There are no pure simulacrum in the cave.