[landryraccoon]

How far does this go? If I am watching a Youtube video of Jenna Marbles, is your claim that I am not really seeing Jenna Marbles, because I am only seeing a pattern of electromagnetic radiation that I falsely attribute to being Jenna Marbles?

Your view strikes me as solipsistic. I have no problem saying Mark Twain was both an author and a character in his own books, and Jenna Marbles is both a human being and a character in her own streams.

In fact, given that Mark Twain the human being is now food for worms, arguably the character in his writings is considerably more real and more alive than the author himself. I would argue that since human lives are ultimately ephemeral, the representations and images of ourselves that we leave behind in the world are potentially more meaningful than our biological bodies ever can be.

[marginalia_nu]

Throughout our lives, we impact the world in various ways, we leave footprints on the ground, we cast shadows and show up in mirrors, and form ideas in people's minds, but even though those effects look and act like we do, they aren't truly us, they don't actually experience the world.

There is an equivocation there. The Mark Twain that appears in his book is not the same as the Mark Twain that wrote his books. It's two entities bearing the same name. It's a category error to say the two are the same, it's conflating the idea of a thing with the thing the idea represents.

We do of course both have an idea of Mark Twain the dead author, and Mark Twain the literary character, and that may muddle and be the same idea in our mind, but that idea is not the same entity as Mark Twain the person. Unlike a person, an idea does not have subjectivity, it does not experience.

You can write a book where the character Mark Twain has a conversation with Harry Potter, even though Mark the human could never meet Harry the fictional character. If people and characters the were truly the same thing, wouldn't they be subject to the same constraints and limitations?