Mirrors are more true than photos

What if I told you that your reflection in this mirror is more real than a photo?

In order to determine if it's more real or not we have to know what a reflection is. Let's start with a simple question: why is my reflection left-handed when i'm right-handed? To answer, I'll use a 2-dimensional example: no matter how much I rotate a 2d "L" it can't become a "J". The only way for that to happen would be to rotate it along a third axis, a rotation in three dimension. In the same way, to mirror an object in three dimensions would require rotating it along a 4th axis. Therefore, what a mirror shows is projection of a rotation through the 4th dimension. I'll call this the "physical" reflection.

That being said, the word reflection has more meanings. It's also used to refer to imperfect reproductions, to signs that point to something. A picture, for example, is a reflection of the moment it was made in, a refecltion of the past. Another meaning is that of pondering, of thinking. When I think about somethink I "reflect". Now that we know what reflection are, why is the one in the mirror "more real" than the other ones? For that we'll turn to Ludwig Wittgenstein.

I'll be using here the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, beginning with statements 2.12 - 2.131. These entries define pictures. Here a "picture" is described as being a representation of reality, where the elements that compose it are equivalent to the ones that meke up the real world. Therefore, reflections could be thought as pictures. "Physical" reflections have their elements flipped, videos are "temporal" refelections and the act of pondering constructs a "mental" reflection.

Now I'll turn to 2.223-2.225. These statments say that the only way to know whehter a picture is true or not is by comparing it to reality. We can use this to find out how close to reality our reflection are, by finding out how true they are. This will be done by finding out how much they have in common with reality. This is why I said that mirrors show a "truer" reflection: that reflection exist in the same moment as the reality it is showing. Videos are reflections of the past, and that's why we can't propperly evaluate their reality.

The same goes for thoughts: they are a lot more abstarct than reality. Simply because the mirror reflects physical objects, it has much more in common with the reality it represents. This is why we could even say that the mirror, or any type of physical reflexion for that matter, is the "truest" of refelxions.