READ MORE: Interview: David Chalmers (Philosophy Now)
“These creatures you call mice, you see, they are not quite as they appear. They are merely the protrusion into our dimension of vastly hyperintelligent pan-dimensional beings.”
In Douglas Adams’ classic cosmic comedy The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, extra-terrestrial beings who manifest to us as mice are in fact creators of a massive supercomputer that is running a simulation of Earth and everyone in it.
Even if we found this out to be true, would it actually alter any of our actions? David Chalmers, a philosopher who has ruminated on the nature of reality as computer simulation, thinks probably not.
“I wouldn’t say it’s ‘likely’ we’re in a simulation, I’d just say that we might be and that we can’t rule it out,” Chalmers told Philosophy Now. “I speculate that there is at least a 25% chance. Maybe more important is the idea that virtual reality is genuine reality: that it is just as real as ordinary physical reality. VR will become an increasingly central part of our lives, and I think life in VR can be perfectly meaningful.”
Chalmers’ latest book, Reality+: virtual worlds and the problems of philosophy, has generated a lot of interest and he has been doing lots of interviews in support of it.
His argument — that we can live genuine, fulfilling lives in a virtual realm — has been savagely deconstructed by armchair philosopher Michael Sacascas here at NAB Amplify, not least for the seeming scant regard Chalmers seems to pay to “real world” problems like climate change and also what Sacascas feels is the unlikely scenario in which we would actually want to live most of our time in VR.
READ MORE: The Dream and Reality of Virtual Reality (NAB Amplify)
Reading Chalmers’ own explanation of his thinking, however, he doesn’t come across as someone whose drunk on electric Kool-Aid acid. Just someone who has watched and read an awful lot of sci-fi.
Science Fiction Philosophy
His acknowledged inspiration comes from sci-fi as much as metaphysics, which makes his writing a lot of fun. The Matrix receives more attention than the works of Kant. Sci-fi classics like Snow Crash and Ready Player One stand shoulder to shoulder with Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy and Putnam’s History, Truth and Reason.
“The Wachowskis do a beautiful job in The Matrix of illustrating so many deep philosophical ideas,” Chalmers told Ars Technica. “I think almost every science fiction writer is a kind of philosopher because what is a science fiction story but a kind of thought experiment? What if there were machines as intelligent as humans, or what if we were living in a simulation? We think about these scenarios, and we reason about what follows. When done well, that can bring out something important about the nature of the mind or the nature of reality.”
As more and more of our lives play out in the virtual space, or the metaverse, this is becoming more than an abstract debate. Philosophy students at universities today are being asked to ponder questions like “You might be in the Matrix right now,” or “You might be in a simulation right now.”
“Once we reach a point where computer processes directly communicate with the areas of the brain associated with the body and with pleasure and so on, you can imagine long-term technologies where that is used to give you a much more realistic sense of living in VR.”
— David Chalmers
This is a reframing of a puzzle that goes back to thinkers like Plato and Descartes. If you follow Descartes, then we can’t trust anything that we experience with our senses as real. The only thing we can trust is our mind. Follow that through, and Chalmers is arguing that virtual realities are genuine and invested with just as much meaning as anything that happens in the physical world.
“Some people will say if we’re in a perfect simulation, then our lives are just illusions — deceptions — and this is a terrible thing,” Chalmers says. “My view is that if we’re in a perfect simulation, it’s not an illusion, it needn’t be a deception, the world around us is perfectly real, and our lives can be just about as meaningful as before. Even if we discovered we were in a simulation, that would be shocking at first, but I suspect after a little while, life would go on.”
Reality or Realities?
“But then there’s the question what does it mean to be real?” Chalmers poses to Philosophy Now. “Joe Biden is real. Santa Claus is a fiction. So what is the difference between being real and not being real? One key difference is: something is real if it has causal powers, if it can make a difference in the world.”
He makes the case that, in principle, if we’re in a simulation-like world, then the digital objects there make a difference. “When I have an experience of, say, a tree in front of me and I’m in a digital world, then that needn’t be an illusion,” He elaborates at Ars Technica. “It’s just that the tree is digital. It’s made of bits. That’s kind of like being made of atoms. We don’t say the tree doesn’t exist just because it’s made of atoms. So, likewise, I think we shouldn’t say the tree doesn’t exist, or the tree isn’t real, just because it’s made of bits. So in principle, a virtual world can be just as real as a physical world.”
READ MORE: Exploring mind-bending questions about reality and virtual worlds via The Matrix (Ars Technica)
Part of the theme of his book is that reality might be made up of many different realities, both physical and virtual. In that case, he explains to Philosophy Now, “reality is more like an interconnected space of goings-on that are all interacting with each other.”
He continues, “We all acknowledge there’s a physical reality and then there are these virtual realities, which are created within the physical reality and to some extent depend on it. We say things like ‘in real life’ all the time in order to draw a distinction between physical reality and the virtual world.
“Maybe we’ve got to rethink the relationship between the mind and reality so that simulations are more real than we might have thought. Some people think, by its very nature, the metaverse can only ever be escapism or illusion, not something on par with ‘real’ life. But if I’m right that virtual reality is a genuine reality, then you can, at least in principle, lead a meaningful life in a virtual world. I think this really matters.”
Thinking this way could be generational. He speculates that older people are much more inclined to count digital worlds as second-class and not fully real, whereas people born in the last 20 years or so are basically digital natives who are used to hanging out in digital realities. “From their perspective, virtual worlds are part of reality and treated that way,” he says.
NAVIGATING THE METAVERSE:
The metaverse may be a wild frontier, but here at NAB Amplify we’ve got you covered! Hand-selected from our archives, here are some of the essential insights you’ll need to expand your knowledge base and confidently explore the new horizons ahead:
- The Metaverse is Coming To Get You. Is That a Bad Thing?
- The Metaverse Opens the Door to New Creative (and Commercial) Possibilities
- Don’t Expect the Metaverse to Happen Overnight
- How Do We Make Sure the Metaverse Is Equitable?
- Neal Stephenson: Who Cares About the Metaverse When We Have Real-World Problems?
VR Has Both Utopian and Dystopian Potential
Just because virtual worlds and the nascent metaverse are likely to be dominated by corporations in the near future, Chalmers holds out hope they won’t hold sway in the long term.
“When people are living half their lives in a virtual world it’s hard to imagine that they’re going to give over control of that to corporations,” he says. “I’m optimistic that they might come to new forms of government and regulation, and not simply be run by corporations. If [the metaverse] does end up being run by corporations that has major dystopia potential. Whoever owns these virtual worlds are going to be basically like the gods. They’ll be omniscient and omnipotent with respect to those worlds, and we don’t really want to put that power in the hands of corporations. But in the long term I think it’s going to develop in ways we can’t even imagine.”
Which pill red or blue gives you the outcome you want?
Virtual and Physical Blending is Our Future
Chalmers seems to think it’s inevitable that we’ll reach a point where the virtual world is practically indistinguishable from the physical world, but that this is going to happen outside of all our lifetimes.
For the next two to three decades VR won’t even be that good. “Maybe in 20 or 30 years, we’ll get to really high-quality VR, probably not yet indistinguishable, but at least where things like vision and hearing and so on are concerned,” he says.
“The real challenge is embodiment and having an experience of your body, the sense of touch, the sense of moving your body, the sensations you get from eating and drinking or sex. That’s a much bigger challenge, and that probably is going to require more than just standard virtual reality or augmented reality, maybe something like brain-computer interfaces.
“Once we reach a point where computer processes directly communicate with the areas of the brain associated with the body and with pleasure and so on, you can imagine long-term technologies where that is used to give you a much more realistic sense of living in VR. But I suspect really good brain-computer interfaces like that are probably close to a century away.”
Can Consciousness Be Uploaded?
The simulation hypothesis leads to different ways of thinking about life after death. Science fiction features like Transcendental and the BBC drama Years and Years have explored the idea of “uploading” human consciousness into the internet where our personalities would live on infinitely in some sort of collective AI.
“Maybe if we’re all bits of code inside the simulation, then there’s a possibility that upon physical death inside the simulation, that code could be lifted up by the simulators and moved to some other virtual world or some other portion of the simulation,” Chalmers posits. “Who’s to say that couldn’t qualify as some kind of life after death?”
The concept of “uploading” can be directly compared to religious ideas about the afterlife, and Chalmers appears conflicted as to whether he believes this concept or not.
“Some people think, by its very nature, the metaverse can only ever be escapism or illusion, not something on par with ‘real’ life. But if I’m right that virtual reality is a genuine reality, then you can, at least in principle, lead a meaningful life in a virtual world.”
— David Chalmers
On the one hand, he says. “When I die, I will cease to exist. My conscious self will go out of existence,” and he also says he doesn’t believe in a soul which is separable from the physical brain and body. However, he has also stated that in thinking about simulation he is now more open “to the idea that perhaps we could have some existence that goes beyond the mirror existence of this physical body, although it may still be tethered to something quasi-physical in the next universe up.”
And if we are in a sim then it begs the question who created and controls the sim? It’s another classic ontological puzzler.
“For all we know, the simulator is just a teenaged hacker in the next universe up,” he says, adding “there’s no reason to think we should worship this simulator or build any kind of ethical system around them.”
Free Guy and the Consciousness of Sims
If you thought Ryan Reynolds’ movie Free Guy was a lot of fun but a load of nonsense, think again. What if non-playable characters actually did attain human level consciousness? What, then, would be the ethics of killing them off?
Chalmers has processed the idea. A central tenet to his work has been arguing that machines can be conscious. Artificial minds are potentially genuine minds, he states, and that’s quite important for thinking about simulated realities.
“Very few people would argue that the NPCs we have right now have moral status on par with humans,” he tells Ars Technica. “If someone shoots an NPC in a video game, we don’t feel they’ve done something morally wrong. On the other hand, if we fast-forward into the future, once artificial intelligence has been developed and we get to human-level AI, then it’s possible there could be NPCs inside a virtual world that are as complex and sophisticated as we are.”
“Some people will say if we’re in a perfect simulation, then our lives are just illusions — deceptions — and this is a terrible thing. My view is that if we’re in a perfect simulation, it’s not an illusion, it needn’t be a deception, the world around us is perfectly real, and our lives can be just about as meaningful as before.”
— David Chalmers
The question then becomes, “do they deserve moral status?” For Chalmers, that question very much turns on a question about consciousness. Human beings are conscious. We have subjective experience. We experience everything that happens to us from the first-person point of view, whether it’s seeing or hearing or feeling pain or pleasure. Will these AI systems or complex NPCs be conscious? Will they have real, first-person subjective experience? Chalmers thinks they would.
“My own view is there’s nothing special about biology. Both silicon and biology, in principle, can support the same kind of consciousness, despite the difference in substrate.”
He even calls Free Guy “an enlightened movie” and quotes from it.
“There’s this great conversation between Guy and his best friend, Guy asks, ‘Does that mean none of this is real?’ And his friend says, ‘Come on, I’m sitting here with my best friend, who’s going through a tough time, trying to help him through all this. If that’s not real, I don’t know what is.’ And in the end, they start what amounts to a civil rights movement for NPCs in this video game.”
How Will We Know When We Are in Virtual Reality?
Today when we put on a headset we know the objects around us are not physical. Virtual objects and physical objects behave in very different ways — at least for now.
“Your hand will go straight through a Pokémon Go creature, but it won’t go through a real animal. The AR objects tend to be a bit cartoonish, but I think it’s going to be important going forward, when we’re using augmented reality, that we have a clear sense of what’s physical and what’s virtual,” Chalmers says.
“Maybe we can’t know what the world is made of, whether it’s ultimately virtual/silicon or physical/biological,” he adds. “But we can at least know the structure of things. It turns out that’s good enough for many purposes. Maybe I can’t know for sure whether I’m in a simulation, but there is this structural core of reality that we can know about. The more you think about virtual reality and augmented reality and physical reality, at least for me, the more that rings true.”