Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy

"David Chalmers is probably most famous for the term ‘the hard problem of consciousness’. This is the problem of reconciling qualitative experiences that we have of the world with the strong likelihood that we are physical beings. How could material neurons give rise to such complex experiences as the conscious experiences that we have? That’s the hard problem. He’s also written on many other topics connected with the mind. This book is meant for a general reader, but it has an original take that drives it. It introduces many central questions about philosophy, but it does it through the angle of virtual or enhanced reality, and the way that tech has taken us in the direction of the possibility of a Matrix -like existence where you’re in this created world that has been simulated by computers or some kind of machines to give us a very convincing illusion we’re living in the real world. The interesting angle that David Chalmers takes that is unexpected in some ways is that enhanced reality and virtual reality are real, in the same sense that anything else is real. This book is, I suppose, a response to the classic philosophical problem that René Descartes introduced in the 17th century in his Meditations . He’s trying to find out what he can know for certain about reality and he takes a skeptical position. He recognizes that his senses are fallible, they make mistakes, so they can’t be a reliable source of knowledge. Even more extreme, he recognizes that he could be in a dream. He can’t tell whether he’s dreaming or not. But even more extreme even than that, he could be the victim of an evil demon that’s constantly manipulating his experience. So although Descartes, who was a mathematician, thought that two plus two equals four, maybe it equals five and the demon is just deceiving him all the time. That seems to be a very deep degree of skepticism: how could we ever know that we weren’t being deceived by this godlike, very powerful demon, to create an illusory world? Descartes’s famous response is, ‘Well, even if that were the case, I would know that I exist, because there must be something that’s being deceived. And so whenever I think, I must exist, the controversial cogito ergo sum of the Meditations . This book is, in some ways, a response to that line, because the modern successor of Descartes’s evil demon could be the creator of a Matrix -like virtual world that we find ourselves immersed in. What David Chalmers wants to say is that the reality that we seem to experience if we see a table in front of us is in some important sense real: it’s not an illusion. That goes against the Cartesian way of seeing those imaginary or created worlds. He gives reasons for this. He identifies five senses in which we use the word ‘real’ and four out of five of them are found in virtual worlds as well. That’s only part of the book, but that’s the main thrust of it. He’s very clever because he’s managed to then rehearse many of the key arguments that you would encounter in most philosophy courses, but through that lens of virtual reality—although I don’t think lens is necessarily the right image, it’s a bit of an archaic technology to use… Through the VR headset of created worlds. Yes. It’s an entertaining way of moving through philosophy and thinking about it. Even if you don’t agree with him, he leaves you room to disagree. It’s a very stimulating book in the way that it makes you think, because some of the key ideas are counterintuitive, some of the things he’s saying. But he does provide rigorous arguments to try and support those counterintuitive ideas. It genuinely is thought-provoking (or virtual thought-provoking). It’s well-written too. Chalmers in some ways reminds me of Daniel Dennett , another major thinker who has a great capacity to make ideas interesting and accessible to a wide audience."