Virtual Reality is Genuine Reality w/ David Chalmers
EPISODE #60
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Recorded on 02 February 2022
Summary
Philosopher David Chalmers shares his thoughts on how virtual worlds are challenging our understanding of reality, the possibility that could be living in a simulation, and what techno-philosophy can teach us about the nature of consciousness.
Guest Bio
David J. Chalmers is University Professor of Philosophy and Co-Director of the Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness at New York University. His previous books include The Conscious Mind and Constructing the World. He has given the John Locke lectures and has been awarded the Jean Nicod Prize. He is known for formulating the 'hard problem' of consciousness, which inspired Tom Stoppard's play The Hard Problem, and for the idea of the 'extended mind', which says that the tools we use can become parts of our minds.
Show Notes
Transcript
Luke Robert Mason: You're listening to the FUTURES Podcast with me, Luke Robert Mason. On this episode, I speak to philosopher David Chalmers.
"We don't yet have perfect simulations of physical reality, but in a hundred years we might. At that point, we'll be able to build these simulations ourselves. That will really raise the question: could we ourselves be in one of those simulations? And I don't think you'll ever prove that you're not."
Luke Robert Mason: David shared his thoughts on how virtual worlds are challenging our understanding of reality, the possibility that we could be living in a simulation, and what techno-philosophy can teach us about the nature of consciousness.
So David, in your new book 'Reality+' you make the assertion that within the next century, we will have virtual realities that are indistinguishable from the non-virtual world. Importantly, you explore the impact that these might have on our understanding of both reality and consciousness. So I guess the obvious question is what do you actually mean when you talk about virtual reality?
David Chalmers: Virtual reality, I define as an immersive, interactive, computer-generated environment. There are really three conditions. The most important is that it be computer generated. These are environments that are generated on computers. Even a video game environment counts as computer generated, as does a whole immersive VR environment.
What's distinctive of VR - virtual reality technology - compared to, say, ordinary virtual world technology you might find with a video game is that it's experienced immersively, from the inside. It's as if you are present in a three-dimensional world. I can put on a virtual reality headset, like say the Oculus Quest - currently quite popular - and I will experience that computer-generated reality from the inside.
The third condition is that it be interactive; that I can actually interact with this reality. What I do actually makes a difference. I don't just experience it passively like a movie, like a script playing out. I can choose my actions and my actions will make a difference. If you've just got two of those conditions, like if it's computer-generated - many video games are computer generated and interactive, but not immersive - then we'd say, okay, that's not full-scale VR. Or maybe you can watch a virtual reality movie that will be immersive and computer generated, but not interactive. Maybe that's not full-scale VR. So for full-scale VR, we want all three conditions: immersive, interactive, and computer generated.
Luke Robert Mason: It's important to understand that nuance, isn't it? Because when you talk about virtual reality, it's something very different from talking about the virtual world. Could you explain why that difference is?
David Chalmers: Yeah, well virtual worlds can be experienced in principle without immersiveness. I mean, my first virtual world was actually a text world. An adventure game, 'Colossal Cave Adventure', that I discovered when I was 10 years old in the mid-1970s. Yeah, no graphics, no immersiveness, just commands: go north, go south, fight the snake, pick up the treasure and so on. But it was still a computer-generated world. It was still interactive. So that's a basic virtual world.
The average video game that you're playing on a computer screen also involves a virtual world but isn't yet immersive. No one would say that these realities have a hope of being indistinguishable from physical reality. The moment you're using them, you know it's just a different kind of experience. You're looking at a world on a screen for virtual reality.
On the other hand, when it's immersive, that's experienced much more like the way we experience physical reality. Our perception of physical reality is immersive, almost by definition. We experience it all around us. So once we move from ordinary virtual worlds to VR, then we're moving much closer to something much like an ordinary perception of physical reality, something which might eventually be continuous without the perception of physical reality. Maybe as you were saying, eventually indistinguishable.
Luke Robert Mason: Well, that's the central concept in the book, that virtual reality is a genuine reality. So what do you mean when you make a statement like that?
David Chalmers: Yeah, for me, there's this common attitude towards VR - virtual reality - which is it's basically an illusion or a hallucination or a fiction. William Gibson said back in 'Neuromancer' that cyberspace is a consensual hallucination. When he said cyberspace, he meant virtual reality. Virtual reality is basically a hallucination. None of it is real.
What I want to say is that what goes on in VR is perfectly real. The objects you encounter in virtual worlds are perfectly real. They are digital objects. They're made of computational processes or, you know, made of bits and so on running on a computer, but that doesn't make them any less real. They make a difference to the world and to us. They're out there independently of us. They're not illusions. You can interact with digital objects just as we can interact with physical objects. They're different. Digital reality and physical reality are different, but virtual reality is no less real.
Also part of that thesis for me is a thesis that you can actually live a meaningful life in the virtual world. It's in principle, no less meaningful than life in physical reality.
Luke Robert Mason: Well, surely virtual objects are fundamentally different from, as you say, their physical objects. So yes, a virtual object can be made up of bits. You're saying it's no less real than an object made up of atoms, but surely when it comes to virtual objects, they're representations, aren't they? They're representations of objects from non-virtual, AKA physical reality. When you slice a virtual object, it's often hollow. So ultimately what gives a virtual object its realness or its meaning is the fact that it’s equivalent to an object we would recognise in physical reality. So they must be fundamentally different, mustn't they? In short, they don't incorporate the full complexity of the object that they choose to represent, or that gives rise to its creation. These are fundamentally different things that we're interacting with.
David Chalmers: Well, I agree. They're different. I don't want to say that physical reality and virtual reality are the same. It's true that right now, VR is very primitive. The virtual worlds we have now are far more primitive than the physical world. You open up a virtual object. You will not find a substructure of cells and molecules and atoms as you will in physical reality. But this I take to be a difference of degree, rather than a difference in kind. If we moved to, for example, a full-scale virtual reality - an entire universe simulation - then in principle, you could have virtual objects as complex as physical objects.
I'm not sure it's true that virtual objects have to be representations of physical objects. We can build VRs that are basically simulations of the physical world. I can go into a VR which is a fishing simulation that's meant to give me a pale shadow of the experience of going fishing in physical reality. I'm not sure that's essential to VR. It can give you wholly new experiences that have no analogue in the physical world. You can enter into virtual worlds that have entirely different laws of physics - anti-gravity devices, new forces and so on. So I don't think it needs to be an imitation of the physical world.
I'd argue that either way, even in the cases where it is an imitation of the physical world, then it's still real. When I clone Dolly the sheep, you clone one sheep to get another. One is based on the other. It's an imitation of the other, but they're both real objects. They're both real sheep. And I think maybe that would be the status of VR imitations of the physical world.
Luke Robert Mason: Well, then it feels like the tricky word is 'real'. The tricky word is 'reality'. So when talking about virtual reality, should we approach it the other way? Should we actually be asking the question of not what is virtual, but what is reality? Or more importantly, what you believe reality is.
David Chalmers: Yeah. I mean, 'real' is one of those slippery words. It doesn't have a single defined meaning. One of the chapters of the book is all about this. What is real? What is reality? What are the different meanings? And I distinguish five different things you might mean by real. Five different strands in the concept.
One is that you say something is real if it makes a difference in the world. If it can affect things. One is that something is real if it's out there independently of our minds. One is that something is real if it's not an illusion if it's roughly the way it seems to be. I want to argue that in each of these senses of real, virtual reality can be just as real objects in virtual reality can be just as real as objects in physical reality.
Luke Robert Mason: Well, you call those five things 'the reality checklist'. Is the reality checklist something that we need to go through to ensure that we are in a consensus reality, that we are sure that we're all experiencing perhaps the same reality? Is there such a thing, even, as consensus reality? And if so, how does it formulate and present itself in the everyday?
David Chalmers: I think this is certainly the ideal case. I mean, you can have single-user virtual worlds. I could have a virtual world that only I was interacting with. I'd still say that would have a degree of reality, but intersubjectivity is one important strand in our concept of reality. If there's consensus, we take that as counting for more. But I take it that in your average virtual reality, there is a degree of consensus - sorry, at least in a multi-user virtual world. We can be hanging out in this virtual world, interacting with the same digital objects, saying all this is going on.
So I think in an appropriately social virtual world, you will find consensus and you will find intersubjectivity. Maybe not complete consensus - we'll still disagree with things. I'll say that a virtual object is beautiful and they'll say it's ugly. We might disagree about politics, but all that happens in physical reality as well, so I'm not sure that's a strike against virtual reality.
Luke Robert Mason: Well does the way in which we create these virtual worlds - often, as we mentioned previously, to mimic the non-virtual world - does that mean that we have almost come to form some consensus over what the world created by our minds looks and feels like? I mean, a lot of these virtual worlds try to mimic physical reality. The avatars are always bipedal. There's always a ground, a sky, or some form of artificial gravity. Do you think that the way in which we're creating these virtual worlds shows us that we at least have a collective understanding of what non-virtual physical space looks and feels like?
David Chalmers: Yeah. I don't know. I've been in some pretty weird virtual worlds. Certainly, there are, you know, gravity-free virtual worlds. I've been into virtual worlds where avatars are things like plants that may not exactly be bipedal. But you're right. There is a fairly standard formulation for this. Right now, we're interacting with VR through our eyes and ears and so on, which are set up for interpreting worlds of a certain form. At least right now, maybe there's a certain conservatism when it comes to virtual worlds, which is natural because our brains are set up for things that work a certain way.
It wouldn't surprise me if, in the long run, we get to explore a much broader range of virtual worlds that go well beyond the kind we have now. Especially maybe once brain-computer interfaces develop, and we don't just have to interact with VR through our eyes and our ears, but maybe there's direct interaction from a virtual world to the brain. I think we may find that many of these constraints are freed up.
Luke Robert Mason: So then I guess my question is who are you or what are you when you are interacting in an immersive virtual world? Are you your avatar? Or are you experiencing the virtual world as an extension of your own human experience? Or conversely, is it just purely an emulation of what we understand to be a human experience? What is the relationship between the human body, human consciousness, and these virtual worlds in the moment of immersion or interaction?
David Chalmers: Yeah, I don't want to say that I am an avatar anymore than I want to say that I am a body. I have a body and I have an avatar which is my digital body. In principle, they are roughly analogous. But what I actually am is a conscious being, as Descartes said, I am a thing that thinks. I do also have a body. In principle, I could have multiple bodies - a physical body and a digital body. But I'd say that when I interact in VR, I'm the same person I always was. The same conscious person is now embodied in a slightly different way. Just as my brain could, in principle, be transplanted to a different physical body in physical reality, I'd say I'd still be me. I wouldn't be a new person. I'd be the same old person with a new body. Likewise, when I enter a VR, I'm now the same old person with a digital body.
Luke Robert Mason: So simplifying that, would you say that interacting with virtual worlds is an extension of one's self?
David Chalmers: Well, the body is always an extension, I think, of oneself. It's a kind of tool. It's the way we interact with the world. So yeah, you could think of avatars as extensions of the body. We're used to interacting with our environment via a physical body, but now we can also interact with digital environments via a digital body.
We're already used to our bodies getting extended in various ways. People use prosthetic limbs or a cane for walking. Maybe even something like a guitar or a car or a bike can somehow be an extension of your body. Well, I think likewise an avatar can be thought of as an extended body in the digital domain.
Luke Robert Mason: Would it ever get to the point at which you could become your avatar or your avatar could potentially become you? There's a different sort of relationship there isn't there, because there are feedback loops when it comes to cybernetics. These virtual worlds feedback on how you interact with the physical world. You know this as much as I do. You spend time in virtual reality environments, you spend time in virtual reality gaming, and there is that moment of coming back to the physical world and bringing back that experience into lived physical or non-virtual reality. I'm still trying to decide on what we're going to actually call this thing that we do as human beings. Is there something that we can retrieve and pull from virtual worlds that teaches us how to navigate physical reality?
David Chalmers: I don't know about becoming your avatar, but I think you can certainly come to identify with your avatar. People who spend a lot of time in virtual worlds often become quite attached to their avatars. It becomes very meaningful to them. It becomes an expression of their identity. People spend a lot of time thinking about their avatar's form, its shape, its gender, its clothing, its cultural expression. These become very important expressions of identity, I think, for many people in virtual worlds.
Some people experiment with different forms of gender expression in virtual worlds, for example. Sometimes in advance of doing that in the physical world, they'll try on certain forms of expression, see how it is. Then as you say, some people can then bring that back to the physical world. Forms of expression in virtual reality can, I think, sometimes reveal something to you about yourself and your identity that then transcends the virtual world and can be brought back to physical reality.
Luke Robert Mason: Well is that what you mean when you talk about living a meaningful life in virtual worlds and virtual environments? To be able to explore the multitudes of your own identity is a way in which you can find meaning inside of virtual worlds.
David Chalmers: Yeah. That's at least one aspect of living a meaningful life. Meaning in life is so rich and multifaceted, but yeah, exploring your identity is a big aspect of a meaningful life. More generally building relationships, building community, helping others, developing knowledge, developing understanding - all of these are aspects of a meaningful life.
I'd want to argue that many of those things can be present just as much in VR as elsewhere. But actually, identity is one of those places where VR may even have some distinctive advantages. Maybe it's possible, for example, to experiment with new forms of embodiment in VR. I mean, for example, disabled people quite often have been big users of virtual worlds like Second Life where access to physical reality can sometimes be difficult. Those obstacles aren't present in VR and some disabled people have experimented with different forms of embodiment in VR. I've already mentioned experimenting with different forms of gender identity. So I think, yeah, the possibilities inherent in VR allow for potential new forms of expression, which are more difficult in physical reality.
Luke Robert Mason: It certainly feels like this is not just a technological question that we're dealing with. It's as much a philosophical question. There are often old philosophical questions that we should revisit in order to decide whether virtual reality is a genuine reality.
David, what are some of the useful thought experiments that we can take from how we thought about philosophy and its relationship to reality and apply them to thinking about technology and virtual spaces?
David Chalmers: Oh boy, I think it kind of goes both ways there. Technology can help us think about traditional philosophical issues and traditional philosophical issues can help us think about technology, you know. Descartes had this whole idea of: how do you know you're not being fooled into thinking that you're in an ordinary reality when in fact an evil demon is deceiving you and none of this is real?
The modern version of that is: how do you know you're not in a computer simulation right now? People have had a lot to say about that Cartesian scenario of the evil demon. Some of that, I think, could apply to thinking about computer simulations, but it actually goes both ways.
Thinking about computer simulations, if I'm right, if we're in a simulated world, the world around us is still real. It's not a situation where none of this is real. I think something like that might apply to Descartes' scenario as well. If the evil demon is creating your reality then there's still a reality out there, it's just created by the evil demon. So I actually find this two-way interplay between traditional philosophy and the leading edge of technology to be very rich.
Luke Robert Mason: It's interesting what you say there about how we decide what is real within our lived experience. I always wonder what's going to be the long-term impact of virtual spaces and what will the long-term impact be specifically on the human brain or perhaps even human memory. Because if we take seriously the idea that virtual reality is genuine reality, for some people there will eventually be a bleed between what they experience in physical reality and virtual reality. Some may start generating new realities in their minds. I think of future dementia patients who won't be able to differentiate between the experiences they lived and the experiences that they had in virtual space. How will that affect them?
David Chalmers: I think people with well-functioning cognitive capacities are usually pretty good at keeping these things straight. We know when we're in physical worlds and we know we're in virtual worlds. I think this is actually kind of important, a lot of the time, for our sanity in interacting with these worlds. Right now, we know when objects are virtual.
It's going to be interesting once we get to mixed realities, augmented realities through glasses where you see physical reality and physical objects and virtual objects at the same time. My view is that I think there are going to be a lot of reasons to mark the virtual objects as virtual and mark the physical objects as physical in some way so that people can always keep track of which is which.
Yeah, for people with mental disorders - forms of mental illness like schizophrenia or forms of cognitive malfunction like dementia - I think it's complicated there. Yes, there's certainly in principle the possibility for all kinds of confusion and so on, but there's also the possibility of using virtual worlds in therapeutic ways. I think quite a lot of people have started using virtual worlds, for example, with patients with schizophrenia to help actually provide them with some guidance as to what's real and what's not. I know that some interesting work I was looking at recently involves, for example, taking a schizophrenic patient who has voices and externalising those voices in a virtual object. Then say, okay, well, this is not really part of the physical world. For some patients, this is actually helpful.
I think it does matter how the technology is used and certainly, it's possible to use VR to confuse people. Boy, there's gotta be a whole industry of VR deepfakes in the future. You think you're talking to somebody in VR, but it's just a deepfake version of them. I think that that's gonna have to be carefully controlled and regulated. Yeah, there's the possibility for a lot of confusion, but I think there's also the possibility for some very helpful effects of these things too.
Luke Robert Mason: Well, again this goes back to the trickiness of the feedback loops that are generated by certain forms of technology. When we talk about virtual reality being used in a clinical setting, often one of the great examples is how virtual reality can be used to cure people of PTSD. But then you think if virtual reality has that sort of power to cure someone of PTSD, then surely it may also be able to cause PTSD.
We have to use these technologies very carefully because as Jaron Lanier said in his recent book on virtual reality, "this time reality is at stake."
David Chalmers: Yep, all the more so once we recognise that virtual reality is genuine reality. If you thought all this was just escapism, fictions, illusions - "okay, it's just a big video game" - it doesn't really matter. But if I'm right and this is a genuine reality, what happens in VR really matters. That absolutely raises the stakes. It means trauma in VR is really genuine trauma. We've seen many people have reported traumatic experiences in VR, the likes of virtual sexual assault and so on. If I'm right, that's really happening and that's really traumatic. So absolutely it raises the stakes and we need to be as attentive to what's going on in virtual reality, as we are to what goes on in physical reality.
Luke Robert Mason: One thing we always need to remember is that virtual worlds are human-generated. They're fundamentally different because they have been created by us. And it feels like physical reality, non-virtual reality. The reality we're born into comes kind of pre-available to us. Whereas these technological worlds - these technological environments - have been created. Because they've been created, they amplify certain things and mute other aspects of reality.
So are these technological worlds - because they are creations of human beings and human technology - will they always slightly devoid, or slightly alien, or slightly lacking? And perhaps is that actually an important thing? Because that's the point of differentiation which allows us to understand what is real in physical reality versus what is in virtual reality.
David Chalmers: Yeah, I don't know. I live in a city. Cities are largely human-constructed. They are just not the state of nature here. These were constructed by human beings in a very rich and complex way. But does that mean cities are devoid of meaning or lacking? No. They're different from natural environments and natural environments are wonderful, but I think that means cities are just meaningful in a different way. They're full of meaning. Most of us live most of our life indoors. How many hours a day do you really spend outside? Few of us spend that many hours outside. Does that make our life indoors devoid of meaning because we're living in a human-constructed environment? I don't think so. I think humans can create their own meaning and we can invest things with meaning. We do that with physical reality and we can certainly do that with virtual reality,
Luke Robert Mason: Listening to you talk about meaning, I'm wondering whether virtual reality could actually help us solve some tricky philosophical questions. Could we ever get to the point where virtual reality would allow us to simulate certain experiences that might help us to answer some of the great philosophical questions? Thomas Nagel's 'What is it like for a bat to be a bat?', for example. Could we generate and simulate bat-based experience to answer those sorts of philosophical questions? Are there any philosophical questions, David, that you think virtual reality might be able to help solve?
David Chalmers: It's interesting, yeah. I mean, I think you could try and get a VR "What is it like to be a bat?" I suspect that Tom Nagel would say, "Oh, that's just gonna give you what it's like for a human to be a bat. Not for what it's like for a bat to be a bat." There are already things you can get into that simulate, say, flying. I can get into a contraption where I wave my arms around. Then within the VR, I swoop around like a bird. That looks really cool. I actually haven't done this, but it looks super cool.
People talk about virtual reality as an empathy machine. Maybe it helps you understand what goes on in someone else's mind. Maybe that can really make a difference in morality. Then people started coming up with virtual reality versions of some of the great philosophical thought experiments, like the famous trolley problem. The trolley's going down the track. If it keeps going, it'll kill five people. You can divert it so it kills one person. You are there and you're on the trolley, and you actually get to make the choice. People find this interesting, traumatic and very engaging.
Does it solve the problem? I'm a little bit sceptical that just going through a VR experience like this will solve the problem, but it might give you data. It might give you a first-person appreciation of the situation you previously only thought about objectively from the outside. That may well give you philosophical insights.
Luke Robert Mason: When I hear the word virtual, I often think about Henri Bergson, and Deleuze's reading and understanding of what he meant when he was talking about 'virtual'. Because to him, 'virtual' was the opposite of 'actual'. It wasn't about whether something can be real or not. It was about whether something could be actual or not.
So to explain that with an example: Sherlock Holmes. I mean, he's real, he lives at 221B Baker Street but he's not actual, he's not materialised. He lives in our collective imagination as fiction. So is that what you mean when you talk about these virtual realities being genuine realities?
David Chalmers: Yeah, it's interesting. Now I'm not an expert at all on Bergson or Deleuze, but I did read a little bit of their work in thinking about virtuality for the purposes of this book. I came to think that actually what Deleuze and Bergson mean by virtual is something quite different from what it means in the context of virtual reality. As you say, the contrast is with actuality and at least to a first approximation, I think a key idea is a form of potentiality.
Luke Robert Mason: Yes.
David Chalmers: We get the example of an embryo a lot, which is potentially a human being, but isn't yet. It's that kind of potentiality that seems to be crucial, actually. Charles Sanders Pierce, the 19th-century American philosopher, had an entry in a dictionary of philosophy from the late 19th century where he defined 'virtual'. He said the standard meaning of 'virtual' is something like 'in effect'. The roots of all these things come from the Latin word 'virtus', which means something like the 'strength' of an object. It's also the root of 'virtue' - your virtues, or your strengths, some of your powers.
At a certain point, 'virtual' - I think in medieval literature - came to me. You've got the power to do this. You can have certain effects. And then, so for a while, 'virtual' came to mean in 'effect'. Something as a virtual tie. If it's effectively a tie - an election or something. Maybe you can see that usage is playing a role in the history of virtual reality. Well, it may not be exactly a car, but it looks like a car. It feels like a car. So we say it's a virtual car. It's a car in effect.
The Bergson notion and the Deleuze notion is something more like: it has the potential to be a car. It's got that potential. Pierce and his definition actually distinguished a different notion of virtual, which is tied to potentiality, which I think is mostly not the one that's used in the current discussions of computer technology, but is still living in this strand through Bergson and the Deleuze. It would be interesting to try and trace out the connections between the notions. I'm presenting it now as if it is just two different notions, but of course, there are deep connections between virtuality as potentiality and virtuality as in effect. I don't know. What do you think?
Luke Robert Mason: Well, I've always found it useful to differentiate between real and actual. When we think about, for example, dreams, our dreams are real. They're something that we've experienced, but the experiences aren't actual. They don't present themselves in physical reality.
Another example: I could mention a purple elephant. In the minds of our listeners and in your mind, David, you are probably conjuring in your imagination an elephant that is coloured purple. Well, that doesn't exist in actuality, but it's real in your head. The same can be true when we think about psychedelics, imagination, and dream states. These are all real experiences, even if they're not actual experiences.
So when we come to tackle your idea of virtual reality being a genuine reality, then I guess that's kind of a helpful entry point, you know? These things are real. They might be a real virtual car. It's not an actual, physical car, but it's still something that you are experiencing. It has a form of meaning.
David Chalmers: Yeah, philosophers here like to talk about possible worlds. Even if this purple elephant doesn't exist in the actual world, it might exist in some possible world. So in some sense, it's merely possible, but your experience of the elephant is real. You're having a real experience of an elephant that exists only in some possible world. This is actually very common. A lot of thought, a lot of consciousness, and certainly the imagination typically take this form. Imagination is a real experience that puts us in contact with other possible worlds. Actually, you can think about virtual reality as a tool for doing just this; a tool for imagination. It's a technological way of having real experiences that put us in touch with other possible worlds. I just argue that when you actually build the technology to experience another possible world, in a certain way we're actually making those possible worlds actual.
Luke Robert Mason: Yeah.
David Chalmers: We're making them digital. So they really exist in digital worlds. That's a special feature of VR. We're taking what was merely virtual and making it, in a certain sense, actual.
Luke Robert Mason: Is it a failure then of imagination just to create virtual worlds that mimic or represent physical reality?
David Chalmers: I would like to think it can go way beyond that. Boy, this actually connects...we just discussed Deleuze. Now we can discuss another philosopher I don't know very much about, Jean Baudrillard, who talked about four degrees of simulations in his book, 'Simulacra and Simulation'. The first degree is just a simulation of the world as it is. Like a map that tries to reproduce the world as it is.
Then you get some different degrees to like the world as it could have been, as it might have been. And then the last thing - the simulacra - that's a representation of no genuine reality. Representation of something that doesn't remotely exist in reality. I think that something like that distinction applies to VR. You can simulate, precisely, some bit of history. You can simulate an alternative course of history that might have happened but didn't. Something that might one day happen. Or, you can simulate a world of different laws of physics that doesn't correspond to anything that exists in reality.
For me, actually, I think all those forms of virtual reality are interesting. But this radical form of VR that gives us totally new forms of life, maybe correspond to Baudrillard's simulacra, which I guess he didn't like. I think when it comes to VR, these forms of virtual reality that represent wholly new forms of reality are in some ways the most exciting,
Luke Robert Mason: I mean, that, that is where this space gets really interesting - when we start talking about virtual reality as a possible world generator. The way in which virtual reality has been sold to us as Zuckerberg's metaverse seems like such a constrained form of virtual reality, which is forced through the bottleneck of a form of artificial reality, which is capitalism. Or the corporation, you know? Something that we've artificially created, and now we're going to use that artificial creation in physical reality, i.e. capitalism, to create a new reality born of the artificial creation in physical reality.
That gets a little tricky, but basically what I'm saying is it feels like the only time virtual reality or the idea of being able to spend long periods of time in virtual worlds became real was when money became involved. The greatest artificial creation by an operating system of human beings. We generated money. That's fiction. That's a virtual reality in its own right. Now the money's the thing that's underlying the creation of our new realities.
David Chalmers: Yeah. That's interesting. I guess the internet got started not exactly through money, but through the military, through the defence department and the need for communication. That really provided the impetus behind the internet. But yeah, with the coming metaverse, a lot of the impetus is coming from these corporations. Money is playing a very, very central role.
Maybe they're trying to enable new forms of relationships and new forms of communication. All that's true for social media as well, but unquestionably social media became structured by financial incentives. Every user is themselves, a product. We're all monetised on social media, so yeah, you can bet the same is going to happen with virtual worlds. At least if they're controlled by corporations like Meta, or even Google or Apple, they're going to get their pound of flesh. This is going to structure the virtual worlds.
I really hope that there's gonna be such a thing as the open metaverse.
Luke Robert Mason: Yeah.
David Chalmers: Which involves open standards so that anybody can create virtual worlds. Groups of users and communities will be able to run their own virtual worlds which are user-controlled, and user governed. I mean, obviously, there are going to be corners of the metaverse. Meta will have its corner and Google will have its corner. Yeah. Google Reality, Apple Reality, and Facebook Reality. Those will be corporate-controlled.
I mean, the internet has a form of life that transcends these corporations, even though these corporations have become increasingly powerful on it. I would like to think that this is going to be possible with the metaverse, but I don't know, maybe that's naive. Maybe the corporations are just doomed to be dominant here, but I hope there are going to be other ways it can go.
Luke Robert Mason: Part of me almost wonders, should we just let the corporations have the metaverse and should we, as human beings, just reclaim physical reality? I mean, we have an open-source reality. It's the reality that we are living in, and it doesn't feel open source because there are certain rules and certain power structures that have been created by this thing called society, which we as human beings generated as the operating system for this thing that we call reality, but that operating system could potentially be changed.
One of the places we can explore and experiment with possible worlds that don't have these sorts of power structures is inside a virtual space. But if we're entering these virtual spaces through our wallets, then we kind of assume that reality, as it's lived - or society as the operating system of reality in which we're living in the physical world, now - is just the thing. It feels like we're missing a trick here, David.
David Chalmers: Yeah. I don't know. The trouble is, of course, this corporate influence is hard to escape in both virtual reality and physical reality. It's not like we've done a great job of liberating physical reality from corporate influence and corporate control. Look at climate change, which is potentially destroying the planet, but largely due to corporate incentives. We're just doing an absolutely hopeless job of doing anything about it.
You might think that virtual reality at least offers some new potential here. We can create wholly new worlds of our own that are somehow beyond this corporate control. I don't know. Maybe the corporations will find ways to extend their influence into those as well.
One of the attractions of the metaverse idea - the metaverse of many different virtual worlds - is that it could be very different models in each of these worlds. Some will be corporate-controlled, some might be state-controlled and governed. Some might be user-controlled and governed. The philosopher, Robert Nozick said, "instead of looking for utopia, we should look for meta-utopia." Meta utopia is a choice of different models, where everyone can choose their own utopia.
I always quite liked that idea, that maybe if there are enough virtual worlds out there, then there'll be some models where if you want to be free of corporate influence, then there'll be ways to do that. Again, maybe that's naive. I'm not a political theorist. But it's a model I find appealing.
Luke Robert Mason: Well, that just reminds me of, "Hell is other people." You have to share this physical reality with other human beings, but hey, in your own personal meta-reality, you can create all the circumstances set up specifically for you. Surely the reason why reality is so interesting is that it is complicated, it's messy, it's problematic. It doesn't always work as we hope it may work. We often get caught with our lot in life. I wonder, do these virtual worlds offer the potential that you're talking about, or is it really just more about escapism? Escapism from the social situations we find ourselves in, within physical lived reality.
David Chalmers: Well, I think there are so many different reasons to use virtual reality in virtual worlds. Yeah, you could just use them, for example, as a video game. Games are often a form of escapism. Even within games, people build communities that are very much meaningful to them. But as social virtual worlds develop, I think many people in, say, Second Life would resist the idea that this is just escapism. They build communities that really matter to them.
I think once you get to social virtual worlds...I mean, in a single user virtual world, maybe you can make it whatever you want - which is great - but it's also limited. Most people don't want to spend life by themselves. They want to actually interact with others. The moment you get into multiuser virtual worlds, in fact you've got a community, you've got disagreement, you've got potential struggle. I think in practice, these multiuser virtual worlds are not trivial worlds which are a paradise for everybody, but they are common environments in which people can build communities, build their projects, and so on.
I mean, it's a little bit hypothetical right now. So many of the virtual worlds we have our game environments. I could point to Minecraft, or Roblox which is a wonderful virtual world, but that's so limited. Then Second Life, which is probably, actually, the most developed social virtual world. It's now 15 years past its peak. Facebook is now trying to build their own world, Horizon Worlds, but it's limited. You've got the worlds like VR chat out there. But I really hope that over the coming 10 or 20 years, we'll see forms of virtual worlds that really are largely not as game environments, but just as environments for people to build more and more of their lives.
I think we're going to find that there are politics within these worlds. There's struggle in these worlds. There's going to be disagreement about where they go. They're some of the central elements of the human condition. I'd be disappointed if there wasn't.
Luke Robert Mason: Yeah, it sounds like hell.
David Chalmers: Other people. Do you want this whole obnistic planet where you get to hang out?
Luke Robert Mason: Well, me personally, no, but it does feel like there's that impetus in the reasoning behind why some people want to extend themselves into virtual spaces. The great thing about what your book, 'Reality+' does, is it explores how these virtual reality environments that we're seeing today make us question our own reality today.
One of the ways you do that is by revisiting the simulation hypothesis through the lens of how we understand virtual worlds today. The development of virtual worlds raises new questions about our knowledge of our external world. Can we actually know whether or not we are living in a computer simulation? Could this reality, as we see it today, be some form of simulated environment in which our consciousness - whatever we want to call the 'we' - happens to have found itself?
David Chalmers: Yeah. Well, my view is that we could be. We might be in a simulation. I'm not going to say that we are in a simulation. I don't think you can prove that we are, but I don't think you can prove that we're not, either. In principle, there are going to be computer simulations of reality which are indistinguishable from reality. If we were in a perfect simulation - one of those indistinguishable ones - by definition, almost, it couldn't be distinguished. Maybe if we're in a glitchy simulation, we could know. The cat crosses your path twice. Maybe the laws of physics are only approximations that leave signs, but if it's a perfect simulation, we'll never know.
Furthermore, the technology we know is advancing quickly. We don't yet have perfect simulations of physical reality, but in a hundred years we might. At that point, we'll be able to build these simulations ourselves. That will really raise the question: could we ourselves be in one of those simulations? I don't think you'll ever prove that you're not.
There's this case that Nick Bostrom has made. There's actually a statistical case that we could be in a simulation because there'll be many more simulations in the history of the universe. Many more simulated worlds and unsimulated worlds. Probabilistically, we're likely to be one in one of the simulated worlds. I think there are various ways that argument can go wrong, but I at least think that the simulation of hypothesis is something that we can't rule out and something that we should take seriously.
Luke Robert Mason: Well, I was going to ask the question. Why does it even matter? If we'll never be able to know whether we are or are not in a simulation, providing this reality that we are experiencing works, why does it really matter whether it's a simulation or not?
David Chalmers: Well in certain respects, my view is that it doesn't matter that much. Many people would say, "If we're in a simulation, none of this is real. It's all a nightmare." Whereas I'd say no, if we're in a simulation, all this is still real. Other people are still real. Historical events really happened. It's just all a digital world, but no less real for all that.
So in a certain sense, I want to say yeah, the meaning in our life remains much the same whether we're in a simulation or not. Of course, it could make some difference to our world. On the downside, if we're in a simulation, could it be that our simulators are going to terminate the simulation at some point? Maybe they're just trying to collect some data. Maybe they're interested in humanity up to a certain historical period. Then they say, "Okay, got the data. We'll turn it off." Okay, that wouldn't be so good.
But more optimistically, perhaps, the simulation possibility gives hope for certain possibilities for life after death. Maybe when we die, the simulators take our code or at least take some people's code and upload it into a different virtual world. Maybe there's a form of heaven. I don't know. I don't know if that's likely.
Once you've got simulation and simulators in the equation, it at least opens up new possibilities which are actually in some ways not totally different from the possibilities opened up by the hypothesis that the universe was created by a God. God has enormous power for good or for bad. The simulators might have much the same thing.
Luke Robert Mason: I mean, it opens up so many new and tricky questions when we go down that route. I guess one of the trickiest questions of all is, as you famously said, consciousness. The hard problem of consciousness. How does consciousness factor into the possibility that we live in a simulated reality? Is that simulation a global simulation? Is it something that we're collectively accessing? Is it a local simulation? Is it created by our consciousness? In other words, do we project our reality or do we share the same reality? From a computational perspective, would it be easier to run multiple simulations on one server, or just run one simulation that everybody kind of plugs into? How would you think that consciousness and simulation would coexist to produce this thing that we collectively call reality?
David Chalmers: Well, yeah, I think consciousness is rather crucial to our sense of reality. Consciousness is what gives our life meaning. We invest everything around us with meaning. If we weren't conscious, then there wouldn't be any reality for us in the first place. One way these issues interact is - if we're talking about a simulation of the whole universe - one question is, will a simulated universe even contain consciousness at all? I mean, presumably a simulated universe will contain simulated brains like ours, but then the question arises of will a simulation of a brain actually has consciousness.
Some people think computer simulation could never be conscious. If we knew that was the case, then maybe we could rule out at least certain versions of the simulation hypothesis. Hypotheses of pure simulation, by the fact that we're conscious. If we're conscious, therefore we're unsimulated, but all that turns on the question of whether you could have consciousness in a simulation.
My own view, which I've argued for elsewhere - and I argued for again in this book - is that in principle, if you simulated a human brain well enough, you very likely would get consciousness along with it. The same kind of consciousness that the original brain had. It's part of my view that if you then simulate the universe and simulate the brains within it, you will then get a consciousness, which experiences all of this from the first-person point of view.
If you disagree with that, we could still get a version of the simulation hypothesis going, but this would require what I call 'the bio-sim idea'. The biological creature that connects to a simulation. Maybe I'd have a brain, and I'm connected to the simulation. Roughly as Neo is in 'The Matrix'. In that case, Neo himself is not simulated. Neo himself has a biological brain. As long as the biological brain gives you consciousness, we'd still have consciousness in there. I do think we need consciousness within or attached to these simulations for it to make sense as a viable hypothesis about the nature of our reality.
Luke Robert Mason: But I'm almost trying to push you one step further and ask whether consciousness itself is the example of the simulation. That consciousness is the thing that's been simulated, and our experience of reality is us tuning into the simulation, i.e. consciousness. They're one and the same. Is that one of the multitudes of possibilities for how something like a simulated reality could work?
David Chalmers: Yeah. So I'm thinking there is consciousness, and there's a physical reality, and these are distinct. There's a version of philosophical dualism that says there is the mind, and there's physics, and they're distinct from each other. So the way I'm thinking about it, your consciousness is somehow connected to this physical reality, but they're not the same.
But there are other ways of thinking about this. One way of thinking about all this is that physical reality is itself some kind of construct of consciousness. This is the philosophical view known as idealism where the physical world all amounts from, somehow, the interplay of consciousness. One idea I explore in the book is what I call the 'it from bit from consciousness' idea. The 'it from bit idea' is that physical reality is made of bits. You can see how that connects to the ideas we've been talking about. But then there's the idea underneath those bits might be a level of consciousness. There are some fundamental bits of consciousness in the physical world, and physical reality is itself an interplay of consciousness.
Now we get to ideas which are actually very close, in some ways, to Ancient Indian ideas, in both the Buddhist and Hindu traditions. Where all that exists is consciousness. Somehow, maybe I'm experiencing a little slice of it, but the physical reality out there is consciousness. Some people think that God's consciousness could play that role. God's consciousness could sustain physical reality. Then instead of a computer simulation out there, you've got God's mind out there, in effect running the computer simulation. Then somehow, my consciousness is interacting with that. I don't know if that goes in the direction of the one step further you are interested in.
Luke Robert Mason: So in other words, there is no reality without consciousness and no consciousness without realities. There is an interconnection between the two.
David Chalmers: Yeah. I think there's at least a deep interconnection between the two, in our world. I mean, I don't know. There can be no reality without consciousness. In some other work, I've talked about the possibility of a philosophical zombie - a creature that was physically like us with no consciousness. I still think there's some reality there, even though there's no consciousness there. Maybe there could be pure consciousness without any external reality, but in our world, I think the two are probably, at the very least, very deeply intertwined.
Luke Robert Mason: And then just to play a little further with you, David, and ask the question of not just a simulated reality, but a simulated self. Are artificial minds possible? Could we simulate our brains?
David Chalmers: I think, in principle. I think our brains appear to be giant physical machines. Neurons work according to physical principles that are connected up in specifiable patterns. We're not yet great at simulating it, but give it a while. We've mapped out the neurons in C. elegans, the worm, which has 302 neurons. Even then, we can't simulate it very well. So simulation is hard, but I don't see why it's impossible, in principle, given that a brain is a big machine following physical laws that I think could be computationally specified.
Maybe Roger Penrose is right. Something in the human brain could be uncomputable and beyond classical computers.
Luke Robert Mason: Yeah.
David Chalmers: Even then, I'd like to think that there's some special quantum mechanical principle that makes them work. In principle, we could take that quantum mechanical power and bottle it to build it into our computers of the future - quantum computers, our quantum gravity computers of the future - and then simulate the brain that way, with these new computers.
So yeah, I think it ought to be possible one way or the other to simulate the brain in artificial systems. My own prediction is that if you do that, that will also replicate the consciousness as well.
Luke Robert Mason: There are things that we are learning about. Our bodies, our consciousness and the effect of virtual reality. Those are encapsulated in moments when we have whole-body illusions. Where we're in VR and we start feeling things or experiencing things that are so uncanny, they feel like reality. How should we pay more attention to those sorts of experiences, and what are they teaching us about, I guess, what it means to be human in the 21st century?
David Chalmers: I don't know that I think these whole-body illusions are actually illusions. People say, "Ah, you have the illusion." And so they give you an AR, an avatar with a certain shape. Someone says, "Ah, you've got the illusion that that's your body." Actually, as I think I said before, I don't think VR has to be an illusion. I think when you experience your avatar having a certain shape, you really do have an avatar with that shape. You really do have a virtual body with that shape. What's not true is you have a physical body with that shape. If you were to think this was your physical body, that would be an illusion, but I think a sophisticated user of VR - this is part of why I think VR is not an illusion - sophisticated users of VR, interpret the virtual world as virtual. We see virtual objects as existing in virtual space. We experience this body not as a physical body, but as a virtual body.
I think, yeah, when you have a whole body illusion, then you can experience a body with a very different shape, but that's not an elusory perception of a physical body. It's a genuine, accurate perception of a virtual body. It may well be that in the future, these virtual bodies - these avatars - are going to become much more central aspects of the ordinary human experience. Thinking of that as an illusion kind of understates the centrality they're going to have in the human experience of the future. We're not gonna have the illusion of having these digital bodies. We are really going to have these digital bodies.
Luke Robert Mason: Well, I mean, the trickiness is in the language there, because you are saying you can 'have' a digital body, but at what point will you say "I am my digital body", or "I am my avatar", or equally your avatar or simulated consciousness could say, "I am a thing and I deserve certain rights, responsibilities, and protections as much as a physical self." Is there an element of genuineness to these avatars that could start to emerge?
David Chalmers: I dunno. I don't think I am my avatar anymore than I think I am my physical body. Again, I'm a conscious person who has a physical body, who has an avatar, but there's just one person here, even though there are two bodies.
Now there is another case. Just say my whole brain gets emulated and uploaded into a computer. Then we've got the old person - the brain - connected maybe to a physical body. And we've got a new person - the simulated brain, the uploaded brain - connected to an avatar. Well, that situation is totally different. Now we have two people.
Luke Robert Mason: Yeah.
David Chalmers: In the first situation you've got ordinary VR. You've got one person connected to multiple bodies. Ultimately not too confusing. Now, this is a wholly different situation. Now we have multiple people. The original, biological, me. The uploaded version. Maybe I've uploaded myself three times. So there are three uploads each with its own body.
Now the questions are enormous. First of all, are they all me? I'd say that even if they were at the beginning, very quickly they become four different people. Are they all conscious? I would say so. Is one of them the original? Well, yes, clearly one of them was there first. But more deeply is the moral question: do they all have equal rights? Does the original have certain rights? I suspect we're always going to say the original has some rights. Say if the original was married, for example, we're going to say afterwards that the original was married to this person. The other ones are not. But nonetheless, I think all these copies are going to certainly have moral rights. They can't be exploited, degraded, and so on. Legal rights of their own. Figuring out exactly what their moral and legal status is, is going to be extremely difficult. I'm sure you've already figured out the answers to this question in previous episodes of this podcast. Yeah, that's a non-trivial question.
Luke Robert Mason: Well, I love the side that you come down on with this which is, look, if we're going to do the whole mind-uploading thing, let's destroy the original at the same time we're uploading the new or the copy. It's very similar to Greg Egan's idea of 'Learning to be Me' - if you've ever read that short story.
David Chalmers: You have the backup jewel, right?
Luke Robert Mason: You have the jewel that slowly learns to be you, and then they scoop out your brain, leave the jewel behind you, throw out the original.
David Chalmers: You're right, actually. For a period there are two, and then there's just one.
Luke Robert Mason: There's just one. That seems to be the way to solve that. Just slow, incremental -
David Chalmers: Gradual uploading. I like the idea of being even more incremental than Egan. Replace the neurons one at a time with silicon chips. At no point do you have two systems in there? There's only ever one system that gradually transmogrifies from being all biological to all digital.
Luke Robert Mason: Well, in that case, I have to ask you this question before we part ways, which is: given the choice, would you want to either upload your mind or spend your entire life in virtual reality? Or extend your life into virtual reality? Does that seem personally appealing to you?
David Chalmers: I mean, I think it really depends on the alternative. If physical reality is degraded, then virtual reality looks better. If my biological brain is about to die in less than a year, then being uploaded looks better. If physical reality is wonderful and I'm having a flourishing life here, and I'm already immortal in my physical body, then I might say, "Okay, I'll stick mainly to physical reality and go into VR occasionally." If, on the other hand, VR offers amazing new possibilities way beyond what physical reality does, and if uploading offers the possibility of immortality, then yeah, absolutely. Given the choice, I would.
Being immortal would be very nice. I'd like to stick around and see what happens in the future. If uploading offers that possibility, then absolutely. I would worry about whether uploading will still be me at the other end, which is why I would probably choose to do my uploading gradually if I can. Stay conscious throughout, gradually make the transition, and say, "Okay, yeah, I'm still here." I mean, there'll be many philosophical questions, but if it's the only way to achieve these things, then absolutely. I'm for it.
Luke Robert Mason: Yeah, you are quoted as saying you would love to come back every couple of hundred years to see how things are getting on. That made me think about - and I know you're not an advocate of it - but it made me think about cryonicised brains. Could they be the first, I guess, test cases for these virtual worlds? Could the cryonicised brains be resurrected? Although you're not allowed to say 'resurrected' because technically a cryonicised brain isn't dead. I've got in trouble about that before. But could you plug those into virtual worlds? Would it be easier than creating new bodies for these brains and then seeing how they sort of get on in this simulation of reality in a couple of hundred years' time?
David Chalmers: Yeah. That's certainly one possibility. I'm not an expert on cryonics, but yeah, that provides. The general class here is reconstructive uploading. You reconstruct somebody. Using the brain is one way to go. Of course, there are other ways to go. You might try using brain scans. Maybe you'd just try and use a lot of films, and video, and text. It's already the case that AI systems like GPT-3 can reconstruct people from text transcripts of their conversations.
One guy managed to reconstruct his dead girlfriend using GPT-3 from all their text messages. He would continue to text of this simulation every afternoon. Somebody came up with a GPT-3 version of me, which I quote in the book, and they have a conversation with David Chalmers. I actually managed to fool a few of my friends into thinking it was me.
Luke Robert Mason: Well, what does that say about you, David? I mean, that's the real question there, isn't it?
David Chalmers: I say, come on. Somebody was very kind. They said, "Sounds like you on a bad day." You know, that's predictable.
Luke Robert Mason: Well, there we go. And you use, throughout the book...the wonderful thing about how 'Reality+' is written is that throughout the book you are using these illusions to science fiction. Science fiction almost becomes a tool in your philosophical armoury. You constantly refer to and use some of the science fictional concepts and fictional concepts that we've seen through popular media, to think philosophically about these ideas. I do feel like I have to ask: in what way is science fiction so important to how to think philosophically in the 21st - and onwards to the 22nd - century?
David Chalmers: I think philosophy - at least as I think about philosophy - centres on thought experiments. Thought experiments are also central to science. You imagine the situation and then you try and think, okay, what happens next? The philosophy just provides a way of stretching our concepts beyond the mundane - or even interesting situations we're currently faced with - to possible future situations. What would we say about consciousness? What would we say about identity? What would we say about reality? What would we say about value? Philosophers have come up with some pretty good thought experiments over the years, but the masters of this are science fiction writers.
Luke Robert Mason: Yeah.
David Chalmers: That's their business. Science fiction is usually one giant thought experiment. Just say we had waters like this, just say we had robots like this, just say we had artificial realities like this, just say we had planets without gender. Then they throw out the situation they say, "Okay, and then what would happen?" They develop a thought experiment in creative ways, but it's really all a giant thought experiment.
I find the thought experiments produced by science fiction authors are incredibly relevant to me as a philosopher. It doesn't mean I have to accept everything that science fiction writers say about their thought experiments. I often disagree with them. The writers of 'The Matrix' think that the Matrix is a giant illusion. No, I think they're wrong. I think the Matrix is a form of reality. I got into an argument with Greg Egan, who mentioned 'Permutation City' in one chapter of the book.
So I may disagree with them about the conclusions, but these thought experiments they've come up with are such rich and interesting scenarios. They help to illustrate an idea for a very broad group of people who may be familiar with science fiction - that helps. They also provide us with tools for thinking about these very difficult concepts. That, for me, is at the core of philosophy.
Luke Robert Mason: Well, in that case, we've been talking about simulating all of these different possible worlds. Let me ask you to - just for a second - take the techno-philosopher hat off and put on the hat of someone who can create whatever form of reality they choose. What sort of future might you simulate, or what sort of possible past would you want to explore? What would be something that you would love to experience through a virtual world or reality?
David Chalmers: Oh, I don't know. I think anything I could actually name now would seem kind of mundane compared to what's possible. I'd like to experience something that's beyond my imagination. I'd like to experience a 26-dimensional reality and perceive that directly, and see what that's like from the inside. I'd like a consciousness machine that could transform my brain into every different form of consciousness. I'd like what I call a 'cosmoscope' that gave me access to the full character of reality that I could dial in on and see what's happening.
I don't know. The sky is the limit here, but I feel like the most exciting virtual worlds will be the ones that we can't yet imagine.
Luke Robert Mason: Well, that certainly feels like that's what psychedelic drugs are for, David. So maybe take off the Oculus Rift and drop into a different form of reality through some other form of technology. On that wonderful and exciting note, David Chalmers, I just want to thank you for being a guest on the FUTURES podcast.
David Chalmers: Well, thanks for the great conversation.
Luke Robert Mason: Thank you to David for showing us the ways in which virtual reality is genuine reality. You can find out more by purchasing his new book, 'Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy, available now.
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