Factually! with Adam Conover - Is Virtual Reality… Real? with David Chalmers

Episode Date: February 2, 2022

We spend more time in digital, virtual spaces than ever. But are those places really real? If they are, does that mean we could be living in virtual reality right now? Or does it even make sense to ask such a question? Philosopher David Chalmers joins Adam to talk about consciousness, the nature of reality, and the limits of digital technology. Pick up David's latest book, Reality+, at http://factuallypod.com/books. Support Adam at http://patreon.com/adamconover Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Bokksu.com. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's alright. Yeah, that's okay. I don't know anything. Hello and welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me once again. If you are listening, if you are not listening, I don't know how you're hearing me talk about this, but you know what? You're doing fine to do what you have to do. Come back, listen to the show another time. For all of you who are listening, welcome to the show. So happy that you're here. I want to remind you that if you want to support the show, you can join my brand new Patreon community at patreon.com slash adamconover.

And if you do, you'll get access to bonus podcast episodes and our community book club. That's right. We're all going to be reading a book together and gabbing about it. Our first selection is Four Lost Cities by Anna Lee Newitz, an incredible book about four ancient civilizations and the mysterious truths they have to teach us. And when we get together to discuss it, Anna Lee themselves will be joining us. We will be chatting with the author on our Patreon. If you want to join that conversation, sign up at patreon.com slash Adam Conoverover and thank you once again for supporting the show now let's talk

about today's episode you know like a lot of kids i was pretty dissatisfied with the real world growing up you know i was like this place sucks everyone's always yelling at me i can't do a lot of things i'm very short i don't like it here so i spent a lot of my time elsewhere. I loved books. I loved computers. And especially, I loved Nintendo. It was really great when I was dissatisfied with the real world to enter an alternate reality in which I could jump super high, kill some mushrooms, and gain fire powers. It was awesome. But you know, there wasn't necessarily a lot to those early virtual worlds. You know, I knew that in Super Mario Brothers, World 1-1 was a sunny place with some blocks and that 1-2 had more of a dank underground

dungeon vibe. But you know, no matter what level you were on, there wasn't a lot of conversation with the Koopa Troopas. You know, you weren't really, you didn't really place yourself there. Interactions with the world were pretty simple, bound by very simple game logic. But this all changed when I got the internet, because then I could finally experience a virtual world that felt in some ways more stuffed with possibility than the real world. When my family got our precious AOL membership, oh boy, I burned through a lot of those free hours in chat rooms, forums, social spaces with real people where I wasn't tethered to my physical form or that of an obscure Italian employment stereotype.

Instead, I could just be a screen name and I was whoever I wanted to be in that conversation. But the virtual world that had the strongest pull on me was a place called Lambda Moo. Yes, my children, sit around the fire as Grandpapa Adam tells you about Lambda Moo. I know it's a weird name. Let me explain. Lambda Moo was a text-based, multi-user, social, virtual world. Imagine an old text adventure where you'd be in a room and the room would be described by text.

There would be exits. You could go to other rooms. But instead of just you and a computer, there were other people there. They were logged into and all of you, everyone who was logged in could program new objects, new rooms, new places that could look, act, or behave any way that you wanted them to. It was a space where your creativity could run wild. And I got so into it. I created a character for myself. I created a home that was a tiny bottle full of mist that was placed in a bar area in the space.

And you could go into it. You could look at the bottle. You could shake it. When you shook it, you would see me rattle around inside. And then you could shrink down and enter it. This incredible fantasy that emerged just from my own mind and my little, my little 13 year old computer fingers, like typing code into a telnet session. It was fucking incredible. And I made real friends there, friends who would

visit the spaces I created and whose spaces I would visit and play around in. We formed real connections at 1am staring at that white on black text, but we felt like we really knew each other. And here's the coolest thing. Lambda Moo is still there. Nearly 30 years later, my user account is still there and all those places that I created as a kid still exist. And once a year, I log in just to, you know, make sure my character doesn't get deleted in a periodic purge. And I go look at these places that I created when I was a child. These objects that meant a lot to me, messages that my friends wrote me way back when in the mid-90s. I go visit it and I remember who I was at that time. I'm connected with a past version of myself by visiting that place. In other words, Lambda Moo was a real place to me and still is.

The day that those servers are finally turned off, and I hope they never are, but the day they're finally turned off, that place will cease to exist. I won't be able to go there anymore and access that part of myself in the same way. It was my first experience with a virtual world that felt that real and it meant and still means so much to me. Now, 30 years later, virtual spaces are more numerous, more consuming, and worse than they ever were. Now they're a lot less fun. Now a virtual space I visit is something like Slack, a space where people I work with notify me that they need my feedback on something urgently, a space that I wish I could leave more often than I actually can, a space that stresses me out when I enter it, a virtual space that I'm as excited to leave as I am the office on a Friday night. But that doesn't make it any less real, right?

a Friday night. But that doesn't make it any less real, right? I mean, just like an office, the architecture of Slack influences how I feel while I'm there. The design of it, the color scheme, the way the rooms are laid out, all of it affects my daily reality in a real way. The fact that that charming, fantastical bottle of mist has been replaced with a boring office cubicle doesn't make either of those virtual spaces any less real. They are real. So all of this is to say that we need to start acting like these are real places and take them seriously. And that means asking ourselves, are there better, more liberating ways that these virtual spaces could be designed? Instead of virtual places that make us stressed out, unhappy, angry with each other,

what would it look like if we focused on making virtual spaces that allowed us to be creative, free, flourishing in ways that Lambda Moo did for me back in the dark ages of the internet or in new ways that haven't Moo did for me back in the dark ages of the internet, or in new ways that haven't even been thought of yet. What would happen if we started taking the reality of the virtual world seriously? Well, our guest today is a fascinating thinker who's the perfect person to talk to about some of these questions. He is the renowned philosopher David Chalmers. He's the

professor of philosophy and neuroscience at NYU and the co-director of the Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness. But more importantly, he's simply one of the most influential philosophers of the last few decades. Having worked on topics like consciousness, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, you name it, he has some very influential ideas on it. And let me tell you, I have a personal connection to him, which I mentioned at the very beginning of the interview. So let's get to it. His most recent book is called Reality Plus, Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy. Please welcome David Chalmers. David, thank you so much for being on the show.

Yeah, it's great to be talking to you. This is actually a first for me for an interview because I have, as I've mentioned on the show before, I have a bachelor's degree in philosophy, very difficult degree to get. For my degree, I had to write a senior thesis, which is our baby bachelor's version of a dissertation. And I wrote about your work in my senior thesis, which is our baby bachelor's version of a dissertation. And I wrote about your work in my senior thesis. I don't want to get into what I said about it because it was 20 years ago. And I don't stand by anything I said, but I wrote my senior thesis on the mind-body problem, which your work was inescapable at that time, and I'm sure still is. So it's very cool to talk to you. Wow, that is news to me. That's very, it's very exciting. And I'm sure I was refuted left, right and center, but well, it's an honor. The reason I'm nervous about this is I know that I disagreed with you, but I don't want to get into

on what grounds because I don't, I feel like I'm, you know, it's sort of like maybe every undergraduate's worst nightmare that the eminent scholar who they are arguing with in their Microsoft Word document in their dorm room at 1am that they'll suddenly have to talk to them and like actually bring to bear the horrible things that they're saying. Okay, now afterwards, you're going to send me a copy and I'll send you a red line critique. I might take you up on that just to see how humiliated I can possibly get, how much I could flop sweat. But no, it's- I'm sure it was good. Thank you.

Well, it's wonderful talking to you. I'm sure we'll probably get into questions of consciousness and the connection between the mind and the body, which are questions that still fascinate me. But I want to start with your new book, which is called Reality Plus. Did I get it right? And I want to start with, you describe this as a work of techno-philosophy. Can you explain what you mean by that? Yeah. Techno-philosophy is all about a two-way interaction between philosophy and technology. So on the one hand, using philosophy to think about technology. So artificial intelligence technology is coming, it's developing fast. What does this mean? Are we actually going to have artificial people soon? soon. Virtual reality technology is going to be with us soon. Can we live a meaningful life in a virtual world? So those are philosophical questions about technology, and that's half of what the book is about. The other half, though, is using technology to shed light on philosophy, on very

traditional questions about philosophy. So maybe thinking the right way about virtual reality can actually help us understand ordinary reality and our relationship to ordinary reality. Thinking about artificial intelligence might actually help us understand the mind-body problem, the relationship between mind and body that you worked on in your thesis. Maybe a bit of technology will help. Actually, this word comes from some people. You said you were at UC San Diego? No, I didn't. I went to Bard College in upstate New York.

Bard College, okay. There was a philosopher at UC San Diego, Patricia Churchland, who talked about neurophilosophy. And it was the same kind of thing, using neuroscience to shed light on philosophy and also thinking philosophically about neuroscience. Yeah, and I remember when I was writing that paper 20 years ago, there was a lot of, you know, cognitive philosophy using discoveries in, you know, cognitive science to inform philosophy. And I remember being very excited by that at the time because it's, oh, you know, philosophy is this reputation as an ivory or not just reputation, reality as an ivory tower, sort of, you know, a priori up in the clouds field. And so actually using, you know, quote, real world discoveries to or ways of thinking to understand it has always been very compelling to me. So what does that

look like with technology? Like what's an example of using thinking about virtual reality or artificial intelligence to shed light on a philosophical problem. Well, the technology I've really been interested in lately is virtual reality technology. Artificial realities in general. But, you know, the central stuff which is coming right now is virtual reality through headsets. You put on your head and immerse yourself in a three-dimensional world. The Oculus Quest is an example. I have one. I see one behind you on your desk on our Zoom conference here. At least I think I see

one of the handsets. Yeah, fantastic. Do you use it much? I don't use it that much because I find it so uncomfortable to wear and I find the experiences that have been created for it mostly underwhelming. I'm a big video game player and I've, I've have found the promise of the software to not nearly match the hardware. And even when it is very good, it makes me very nauseous very quickly. And so I'm reluctant to put it back on again as much. And I've practiced, I've spent a lot of time with it, but I have experienced it. And, and so I feel like I do know what it's like to be in a virtual VR world for two hours at a stretch. I have done it. Yeah, the technology is pretty primitive for now. I mean,

they're very heavy, these things, holding it up now. And yeah, it's a little bit uncomfortable on your head. The visual quality is okay. Not amazing. But I always say, don't look at where it is right now. Look at where it's going. They're going to get thinner and smaller. There's going to be a glasses version of this. Eventually, it's going to be super high quality. They'll figure out how to avoid the motion sickness so you don't get sick. In 20 or 30 years, these things are going to be ubiquitous. And we're going to be spending, well, A, some time in virtual reality, but also in what they call augmented reality, which is where you still see the physical world around you, but digital objects are projected into the physical reality. Maybe it'll recognize people for you. And I walk into a room and it'll say, Adam,

above your head to help me recognize you and so on. I have to say that is something that my regular brain does already do for me. It does help me recognize people. But I'm actually, I'm getting worse at it as the years go by. And I'm really counting on this technology to extend my mind, improve my memory.

Maybe in a couple of decades, this is a prosthesis that I will really desire. But that's an example, actually, of how techno-philosophy can work. I think, actually, if you think about the role that, say, augmented reality or even a smartphone can play in augmenting your memory or your recognition, I think, you know, thinking about that case, I think sometimes, you know, a lot of my memory is now stored in my smartphone. It's got all the phone numbers for me.

I used to do that with my brain. My brain used to have hundreds of phone numbers there. No longer. Right. And there's this idea of, I don't know if this is the term that's normally thrown around, but like the extended mind that like when you write notes down in a notebook, you are thinking using, you know, physical pen and paper. That is like an extension of your mind in a way when you are, you know, putting your mind into a big Evernote file or

whatever it is that you're doing that is changing your thinking. And so that's like, we could consider that a part of your thought process and a part of your mind. So that makes sense to me that these are real ways of augmenting or changing the way that our minds work. That is exactly right. And that, in fact, was the title of a paper that I wrote with another philosopher, Andy Clark, back in the 1990s, The Extended Mind, all about how your mind can extend beyond your head.

And yeah, that example of a notebook, maybe you read that as an undergraduate. It must have infected me, and then the idea must have gotten into me, and then I forgot where it came from. And now here I am like embarrassing myself. Uh, but okay, good. I'm glad I got it right at any rate. Now, in the age of the smartphone, where everyone is carrying around this amazing device with them that does their memory, stores a lot of our memories, you use it for navigation, for planning, and so on. Now it's almost common sense. Yeah, of course. A lot of my memory and a lot of my mind is out there in the smartphone. And as augmented reality technology develops, it's probably going to get more and more ubiquitous.

We're going to recognize people, recognize things using our augmented reality glasses. We're going to get somewhere. It's just going to send us the information directly about how to get there. It'll do navigation for us. So, yeah, technology is becoming more and more intimately related to us. And I think this actually is relevant to that traditional mind-body problem. Is the mind the same as the brain? Well, no, sometimes the mind can go beyond the brain. Okay. I see. So the traditional mind-body problem

is how does my conscious experience arise from like the physical meat that i'm made of and just by including things like technology in our understanding of the mind that would change how we answer that problem or how we attempt to answer that problem yeah also there's more in the mind than uh than consciousness so uh yeah there's all this subterranean stuff uh beneath our consciousness. I've actually focused a lot on consciousness in my work and talk about explaining that. But then you think about all the aspects of our minds, like our memories most of the time are not conscious. We're not calling them to mind. But I still know that, you know, Paris is in France, even if I'm not consciously thinking about it.

Right. And so that's all offloaded to my memory, whatever. And in the same way, a lot of that can be offloaded to smartphones or the Internet, where that can serve as like the substructure. Right. that part of it is literally in my phone at this point. When you talk about like, who is Adam? What does he think about? Right, like how does his mind work? Like you also have to include those technological tools that I have like invested part of my mind in or I'm using to do mental tasks for me.

Yeah, I might also bring in other people like close relationships, your family, your partner, and so on. You know, my partner remembers so much stuff for me. You know, where did I leave that thing? What is my favorite dish at this restaurant? She knows all that stuff for me. She's kind of serving in part as my extended memory. And technology does all that too.

I mean, there's a part which is conscious, what's happening with me right now, and maybe that's internal. But so much of what we are is in our long-term beliefs, our goals, our personality traits, and so on. And all that, I think, can be affected very strongly by our tools and what's in our environment. This is like when you go to a meditation class and they say, well, there is no self and the self dissolves. It's like, it's just starting to get to that level of headiness of what I think of as my mind ends up becoming more and more diffuse

into this thing around me, which is a wonderful train of thought to go down. But the points that you're making so far are as true about a paper notebook as they are about virtual reality. How does virtual reality and where you think virtual reality will go, how does that specifically affect these ideas? Yeah. So I started off thinking philosophically about the mind and about consciousness. And for a long time, that's been my specialty. But these days, and especially in this book, I'm focusing on the world, on reality.

I mean, philosophy is kind of all about the relationship between the mind and the world. What is the mind? What is the world? How can the mind know the world? How should we act in the world? Deep foundational questions. And lately, yeah. So I used to think about questions like,

could an artificial mind be a real mind? Could an augmented mind, like with this smartphone technology, could that be part of the mind? But now I'm asking those questions about the world and about, not about artificial minds, but about artificial realities. And here, the new, the big kind of artificial reality technology is VR, virtual worlds.

I mean, you get it even to a minimal extent with the virtual worlds in a video game. Those are digitally generated worlds that we interact with. And with VR technology, they become immersive. We experience those worlds three-dimensionally, just as we do in an ordinary world. And that just raises so many philosophical questions. One of the big questions is, are these artificial realities? Are they genuine realities? A lot of people say they're fake or fictional realities. This is just second-class reality. It's not the real thing. It's all an illusion. So the central thesis of my book, Reality Plus, is virtual reality is genuine reality. I want to argue against those people

who think that VR has to be illusion, has to be a fiction, has to be escapism. I want to say, in principle, VR is as real and can be as meaningful as physical reality. I mean, it's not there yet. Current technology is definitely a long way short of that. Already people have pretty meaningful experiences in environments like, say, Second Life. Some people have built a lot of their life there, have real jobs there, real relationships in Second Life. And in all kinds of virtual worlds.

And as someone who, look, I grew up in virtual worlds, right? I was literally the first person in my town to have broadband internet, which was for some reason my parents allowed to be piped directly into my bedroom. So I started at the age of like eighth grade, started spending eight hours a day just at the age of like eighth grade, started spending, you know, eight hours a day just on the internet, on, you know, all kinds of video games,

virtual social worlds, all these, you know, just I was fucking in cyberspace, baby. And so those places always felt very real to me. They felt like a heightened version of real reality, a place where I could do things I couldn't do in real life. And I do feel the realness of them in a lot of ways where right now I'm going through a phase where I'm going back and playing old video games from my youth. And the reason I'm doing that is because when I do that, I feel like I am returning to my hometown and nothing has changed. I'm like, oh, I remember this place. I remember this feeling. I remember the atmosphere. I remember these people to the extent that they're, I mean, very, in old video games,

very rudimentary people. But, you know, I really feel, it feels like a place to me and it returns me to a previous sort of person I was. I feel, you know, 11 years old again. It was a very powerful feeling. So I'm sympathetic to this argument, but I'm very curious when you say that they are real, what kind of reality are you talking about?

Because I could imagine someone saying, well, look, the works of Jane Austen, those are real too. They're physically printed and we can read them and we can access them. And, you know, that's a shared mental space we're all in. That's a form of reality. Do you mean they're real in that sense? Or do you mean they're real in the sense that, you know, my desk is? Or what? What the hell are you talking about? Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of different definitions of reality.

But, you know, one central one is that something is real if it can make a difference in the world, that it has causal powers, the power to make a difference in the world. And I want to say that objects in virtual reality, you know, they're digital objects, to be sure, but they really, they affect other digital objects. They affect us. They have all the powers and potentialities in principle that you could get, or at least very much analogous to the powers that you get in physical reality. I mean, a Jane Austen book is okay, but it's got a little bit of reality, but it's more like it's a script, at least on the page. It's just a novel laid out there that can just go down one pathway.

It doesn't have powers and potentialities to do different things. Well, maybe in your mind, but that's a different thing. Whereas a digital world, a virtual world, it's not living out a script. You can do a million different things, perform a million different actions in a virtual world. You've got kind of free will and free choice about what to do there. The history of the world is not pre-programmed or fixed. So that, I think, gives it a rich kind of causal reality that goes beyond what you'd find in, say, a novel. Yeah, and they can affect, the events that happen in virtual worlds can also affect

objects and things in the physical world that, you know, the events that happen in online worlds can affect, have economic outcomes that affect real people, you know, etc. Like, there's a lot of causal efficacy that comes out of these worlds. Yeah, two of us could have a conversation inside VR and it would be real for us. It would affect us in a real way. In fact, there's a great moment in this

I don't know if you've seen the movie came out last year, Free Guy. I did not see it, but I'm aware of it. It's about non-player characters inside a video game. And you see this guy living his ordinary life as a bank teller. And then he turns out to be an NPC. And these players come to visit the world. And one reaction would be, ah, none of this is real.

But actually, they don't take that attitude. Two of the characters sit down. One of them says, does this mean none of this is real? The other one says, I'm sitting here having a conversation with my best friend who's going through a tough time trying to help him. If that's not real, I don't know what is. And so that, I think, is expressing the philosophical truth that these virtual realities are genuine realities, not illusions, not fictions.

They're having a real relationship. Real things are happening to them. Yeah. Okay. I follow that, and certainly to the extent that they have impacts on people. and certainly to the extent that they have impacts on people, but the, the scenario, the fictional scenario that you're talking about,

these are presumably, these are computer programs, these characters, these are, these are like, these are NPCs in the sense that these are characters in a video game who are not being piloted by a human with a mouse and keyboard or virtual reality controller.

Is that, is that true? I haven't seen the movie. Is that, is that the case for these characters? Yeah, we are led to believe that they're artificial, they're AI video game characters. There's an amazing new form of artificial intelligence

has developed so that these previously very simple algorithms have now developed consciousness and intelligence of their own. So yeah, they're creatures of the simulation, but they're actually fully conscious beings. Of course, that's science fiction for now. We don't have that yet. Right now, we are the players. We are biological creatures connecting ourselves up to the simulation. In 100 years time, who knows, maybe we'll have conscious AI creatures in there to interact with. That's what I was going to ask, if that's something that you consider in your book. Oh, yeah. One of the big questions is, eventually, will simulated minds be real minds? Will they be,

just as I argue, simulated worlds or real worlds, could simulated minds be real minds? Yeah, the kind of non-player characters we have right now, the kind of AI systems we have right now are very primitive, and not many people would say these are conscious. But get to the point where, say, we simulate a whole brain, we get to AI creatures with the behavioral capacities that you and I have, I would argue that if you had a simulation, a full simulation of, say, my whole brain, it would end up being conscious. From the inside, being that being would be an awful lot like being me. And then this is very relevant because do these questions then, do they deserve moral and legal rights? And I argue that in principle, they do. Yeah, I mean, that is to

the extent that I've considered this, you know, these questions in my own very brief time as a student of philosophy. I agree with that, that if you were to, you know, create an artificial being that were able to, you know, behave in the same way a conscious being does, we would have to consider it conscious. For the same reason that when I'm talking to you, I'm like, all right, David seems to exhibit all the characteristics that I do. He seems to be upset when I'm, when I am rude to him and, you know, yelps when I, when I stab him and, and all those sorts of things, it seems to like be happy and sad. All right. I think this is a conscious being. I'm going to treat it as such. Um, we would have to get to such a point with a, as such um we would have to get to such a point with a you know an artificial mind but how would we how would we know that uh that that threshold has been crossed do you have any any sense of that like certainly right now when i'm playing the sims i don't mind i don't give a shit if i

lock up my sim in a little room and it you know pe, pees itself and dies. Right. But is there how, at what point would I start to feel otherwise? It's a really tough question. That's one that we already face, say with non-human animals. Is a fish conscious? Is a cow conscious? Is an insect conscious? This is actually super relevant if you're trying to live a moral life and there's no direct way to measure consciousness in another being this is philosophically this is called the problem of other minds how can you ever prove that anybody else has a mind and as you're saying often all we can go on is things like behavior the more they're behaving like me then we take that as evidence that they're like me. Some people insist that, oh, well, they'll be even more like me if the biology is there. So they've got to have the right biology. And that kind of leads to one opposing view here, which is

biological systems, they'll be conscious. Silicon systems, not conscious. But one way I like to come at this is to imagine actually going through this yourself and gradually replacing say the biological neurons in your brain by silicon chips that play the same role uh first you replace one you replace 10 you replace a thousand eventually you you replace all 84 billion neurons in your brain with silicon chips and you could actually be here uh the whole time and you could see you could see what happens. And, well, we know what's going to happen from the outside. You're going to report, there's going to be someone who reports at the end of this, yeah, I'm here, I'm conscious,

at least if the silicon chips are good enough duplicates of the neurons. And, well, there's always going to be a question for other people, what's happened here? But if you actually, if I went through this myself and then came back again, I would find that pretty convincing that if I'm conscious at the other end, still conscious now, if I uploaded myself and said, I'm still here, that'd be pretty convincing. Might not be convincing to you. You might say, no, I think you just turned into a zombie. You just lost all your consciousness. might say, no, I think you just turned into a zombie. You just lost all your consciousness. You are now a robot automaton. Right. We might not agree about what is conscious and what is not. And I think the comparison to animals is a really good one because, you know, we sort of understand that the amount of empathy that we have for animals or the amount, you know, which animals

we consider conscious beings and which we don't, we all have to sort of decide for ourselves. You know, like I'm not a vegetarian, but when I eat beef, I feel like I'm eating a conscious animal. When I eat fish, I'm like, I don't know. Lobster, I do not feel. You know, I'm like, all right, for me, that's below the line.

I feel guilty about octopus though. Yes. Increasingly not eating octopuses. We're all, there's been a lot of publicity lately about how intelligent octopi are, and that has prevented me from eating calamari because I've seen those documentaries about – or wait, is calamari squid? Did I get it wrong? It's prevented me from eating octopi anyway. But the point is people disagree about this, right? There are people who think that, you know, eating meat is a sin or, you know, unjustifiably, ethically. And there are folks who think it's not at all.

And so what this raises for me is that we could eventually end up in a situation where there are like vast cultural disagreements about which agents inside, you know, whether it's okay to kill bad guys in a video game, right? Like different philosophical positions on that point, which is, I don't know, I'm not looking forward to that argument. Yeah, no, I fully expect this is going to be a very difficult social legal issue. And suddenly philosophy is going to become very relevant to the pressing questions of the day. Yeah, if you think it's a big issue for, I mean, boy, there have been so many equal rights movements for people, for people of different races and ethnicities and nationalities, but then for animals. And so, yeah, the one we're going to get for AI is going to probably replicate that much and more.

It's easy to see people. But first, there'll be people who think, oh, no, those AIs aren't conscious because they're not biological. And I think of that as a kind of bio-chauvinism that we should oppose, but the view is going to be there. Second, there's going to be people who feel threatened. Boy, well, if AIs can have equal rights,

then people are going to create a whole lot of AIs and suddenly, I don't know, what if somebody suddenly creates 100 billion AIs overnight and then they win all the elections automatically? So yeah, there's going to be a lot of resistance. And I don't know when this eventually happens. I don't know how it's going to play out. But philosophically, I think there's a right answer. Yeah. One of the really fascinating things that happens to me, though, when we think about this question is that I often feel that people are too credulous about what AI is capable of, and their fears are founded in not understanding what's actually going on. For instance, I know a big trend for the last

couple of years has been AI-generated text. I trained an AI to write a script for Seinfeld, and then it outputs a very funny script. And I have friends, I'm in the Writers Guild of America, I've had conversations with other writers saying, this is going to put us out of work. These AIs are writing funny scripts now. And I'm like, oh no, this is terrible. I got to go vote for Andrew Yang because I'm going to be put out of a job. And I have to explain, well, no, hold on a second. This AI algorithm was written by a human and a human selected all of the initial corpus, right? And then tuned the algorithm to output a piece of text that, you know, other humans would find funny. So this was essentially a human using a sophisticated tool to generate a piece of text. The sense in which an AI has done

this is extremely overblown, right? Because that helps it make it go further. People, oh my God, an AI generated this. But, you know, it's a much better story than a human used a sophisticated piece of magnetic poetry on their fridge to say that an AI generated something. And so a lot of times when we're having these conversations, I feel like there's a, we jumped to science fiction so quickly, to the science fiction version, when the actual technology is much more banal. I'm curious if you have any thoughts about why we're so attracted to that maximal version of what this is. trade. We've got this thing, a thought experiment, where there's actual experiments when you look at the real systems around us, and there are thought experiments, where often we go to a more extreme version just to see what enlightenment we can get from that. Okay, let's not imagine just artificial intelligence as it is, but as it could be, and partly because, hey, that's coming, so we need

to think about it before we get there, and partly because it's just a purer and more extreme case. So that can be useful philosophically as well as practically for thinking about what kind of world we want to build. But it is true that AI right now is very primitive. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's this program GPT-3 that does a lot of this text generation. And yeah, it's still primitive, but it's impressive compared to what we had a few years ago. Somebody did a GPT-3 version of me that I quote in the book. They put an interview with David Chalmers online.

And people looked at this and a bunch of people, they actually thought it was me. I was kind of offended. They said, yeah, this kind of sounds like you. Someone said, no, it just sounds like you on a bad day or maybe you'd been drinking or something. And yeah, you're right. It was probably handpicked by someone who did this five times. So the technology is limited, but it's also moved. I did my PhD in an AI lab now back in the early 90s. And then AI was so primitive. Someone used to say,

a year spent working in AI is enough to make you believe in God, because it's so hard to create an intelligent system. But there's been amazing progress over the last five or 10 years, deep learning, neural network technology. Look, I don't think it's coming in five or 10 years, but it could be coming in 50 years. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's, I see, I see both ways at once, right? Because at the same time, there's also an incredible game produced with GPT-3 called AI Dungeon. Have you are familiar with this? Yep.

Where for those who aren't, it's, it looks like a text adventure where you type, you know, it says you are standing here and you type what you want to do, but it generates all the text with GPT-3 with this huge AI text generation system. And so basically it can just generate infinite like text adventures for a person to play. And these are actually entertaining enough that people really enjoy playing it. The interesting thing, though, is that it's only interesting because of the human mind on the other, that's receiving the text, that is processing it and turning it into a story. The, the algorithm is just like outputting text, you know, all the, the corpus that it's taking in and spitting it back out. Um, and so the, it's, the fascinating thing to me is whenever we look at what are these

examples of, oh, wow, the AI is doing such cool stuff, there's almost always a human on the other end turning the AI's output into something interesting in our own minds, even if it's just us believing in the existence of the AI at all. I find that really fascinating. I don't have a question. Yeah, no, for now, you know, like people talk about intelligence augmentation technology. There's AI, which is getting computers to do smart things, but then there's IA, intelligence augmentation, which is getting AI to make humans smarter. And, you know, it kind of connects to this extended mind idea, add some technology to a human, and we can both be smarter.

So, yeah, humans and AI in conjunction with each other can be smarter than the original human. And maybe that a little bit less, you know, the AI are going to come and replace us and be a replacement for a human mind. But look, I'm more interested in what you have to say about it, but we have to take a really quick break. We'll be I don't know anything Okay, we're back with David Chalmers. We've talked about how technology and our understanding of technology can affect philosophical problems. I'm curious, as a philosopher, does it go the other way? does it go the other way? Is there something that you as a philosopher, you feel that philosophy has to add to, you know, people who are making virtual reality, people who are making artificial

intelligence? Is there a connection in that direction? Yeah. I mean, I think there's a lot that philosophy could say about both AI and virtual reality, maybe to focus on virtual reality. There is this, you know, this very common view that VR essentially is an illusion machine, that it basically gives you the illusion of certain things happening to you when, in fact, none of it is real. And the psychologist Mel Slater has characterized VR in terms of the different illusions it gives you, the place illusion, that you're at a certain place and so on. I want to argue on philosophical grounds that this is just the wrong view of virtual reality.

It can be an illusion. Maybe if someone puts you inside a VR headset for the first time and you don't even know you're in a VR headset and you have an experience, like if something's out there in front of you, then you'll think it's out there in physical space, And that'll be wrong. Maybe that'll be an illusion. But I think for a sophisticated user of VR who's used to these things, we just naturally interpret the worlds around us as virtual worlds. I call this the sense of virtuality. Anyone who's used VR for a while, you know, you just naturally interpret all these objects around you

as virtual worlds. And I would argue that sense is not an illusion. You really are at that virtual place in that virtual world. You really do have a virtual body doing these things inside the virtual world. All of that is really happening in the virtual world. It's not an illusion. So I'd want to say, yeah, what people are calling this illusion, this place illusion, this plausibility illusion, let's call it, yeah, you get a sense of place. You get a sense of

plausibility that all this is happening, but nothing about that needs to be an illusion. So that's one philosophical analysis of this technology I'm trying to push. So you would say rather than it giving the illusion of you being in a place, you're like, no, you are in a real place, but it is a virtual place. And you know, it's a virtual place. You're experiencing it as a virtual place. Exactly. You've got a sense of physicality when you experience things as being out there in the physical world. But when we use VR, at least for a sophisticated user, you're experiencing all this as a bunch of, as a virtual space with virtual objects. And that is really happening. There are real virtual objects sitting on their digital processes, sitting on a computer

to be sure, but there's real digital objects interacting in this digital way. And that's not an illusion. So what's the upshot of making that argument? Why make that argument? Like, are you just saying, hey, don't be mean to VR. Don't call it a shitty fake place. It's cool and real and let's be nice to it and say, let's increase its priority in our ranking of spaces and how real they are. Or is there some consequence of saying that it's a real space that you are interested and invested in? Yeah, I think, you know, really where the rubber hits the road is in some really practical issues which are going to increasingly face us, which is roughly, can we live a meaningful life in a virtual world? Some people think this is just doomed to be fantasy,

virtual world. Some people think this is just doomed to be fantasy, escapism, fiction, and therefore it could never really be fully meaningful. And I think that goes along with the view that it's all an illusion. If you think that VR is all basically an illusion, who wants to live a life of illusion? That doesn't seem authentic at all. But once you realize that, once you take the view that inside VR, you needn't be experiencing an illusion. All this is fully real, in principle, as real as a physical reality. I think that at least removes one really important bar to the meaningfulness or the authenticity of VR. So in the book, I first try to argue, yeah, all this is real, but then I apply it to these questions of value.

Can you actually live a good life? The philosopher Robert Nozick once, he talked about this case of the experience machine where you go into a world and it's pre-programmed you for all kinds of amazing experiences. And he says, would you enter that world? And he said, no. But I think that's kind of partly because that situation is like what we were talking before that would just be living out a script in the experience machine yeah you are always maybe it's like this in the uh in the film total recall where you live out a script where you go to mars but you never really exerted free will but i think so maybe the experience machine is not great, but genuine virtual reality,

I think you actually get to make choices. There are obstacles for you to overcome. You can make your own life, make your own future. In my view, that can be as meaningful as a physical world. Eventually, we're going to have to decide how much time we're spending in virtual world. So this is super relevant. I think I agree with you, but that it leads me to a different concern, which is that I'm not concerned about how much time I spend on the internet or how much time I spend in video games because I think it's fake or it's not real or, you know, oh, get out in the real world. I'm, I very much feel that these are real place.

I have real friendships with people I've never met. I I've, I've changed my life in real ways. I've changed the world in real ways, all in virtual spaces. But what concerns me is that virtual spaces are, I'm going to say always pretty much always created by another person for me to be in, right? They're all architecture. They're all design. There's very little of the messiness of the real world, right? Even when I walk around Los Angeles, there's a lot of, you know, the sun is in the sky. There's birds flying around. There's stuff that no one designed to be there, which is not the case in virtual

worlds, whether we're talking about Twitter or we're talking about, you know, a new VR game. And my concern is that these are spaces, these are worlds that are, these are realities that are, that are real in the sense that you say, but, but that the ones that we tend to create for each other are created for someone else's benefit, right? For the benefit of the creator. Twitter wants to create a world that operates according to rules that maximize the amount of money Twitter makes, not that maximize my happiness and that they're somewhat impoverished in a way that they have limited choices.

You know, in, in a, in a video game, you have free will and you have agency, but actually, I just spoke with a philosopher of games, T Nguyen who is on the show that I think. Oh, fantastic. Oh, you know him. Yeah, I know T, His work is great. He's fantastic. I think his episode will be the one

that came out right before this. And he talked about his theory, the fundamental quality of games is that they are agency is art, that it's different forms of agency that are constructed by someone for you to experience. And that's wonderful, except it's also limited, right? It's compared to the real world. And so that ends up becoming my concern

that if I might be spending time in a real world that is virtual, but that is, has, I've been tricked into it, into something that has less possibility than the world outside. Does that make sense? Yeah, that totally makes sense. I mean, game worlds especially, I think, they're cool, but they're limited. Game worlds, typically, you're to some degree following not exactly a script, but you're constrained. You've got to do this to level up, and you've got to do that. And it's not totally open-ended.

I mean, I think if you move from, say, a game world to something more like a social vr environment something like say second life maybe in a in a headset because vr second life is typically on a on a 2d screen do you feel like philosophers and technologists should have to pay second life like a dollar every time they're brought because this is broad this is the example that is most used and i feel like it is more popular among philosophers talking about this issue than it actually is on the internet. Not that many people actually use it. It's an old example, right? You're probably right. It peaked around 2007.

It is still out there. There are still a lot of people using Second Life, but not what it was. But what's interesting is that nothing has really come along to replace it as the definitive social virtual world. There are a number of places, a number of companies trying to build an immersive version of Second Life that you would do in genuine VR through a headset rather than just on a computer screen. And, you know, there are some such worlds.

There's VRChat, there's Altspace, there's Rec room, there's Horizon now from Facebook or Meta. But, you know, they're all okay. None of them have really become definitive and caught on in the way that Second Life does. I'm sure that Meta is trying to construct such a world as part of their vision of the metaverse. But so far, they're not there. All they've got is this thing called Horizon, which is really very, very limited. So yeah, I'm just waiting for a new example to replace Second Life. But what's interesting about Second Life

was actually it's the richest virtual world we've had so far by far. People actually worked there and had relationships there and were families and towns and communities. And I don't think anything like that has really happened with other virtual worlds, except maybe the ones associated with games, you know, the ones, Fortnite, Minecraft. Yep.

And so on. Something like that happened there, but then it's an impure case because there's game-like elements there too. Yeah. Well, I think meta is a really good example of my overall, again, I agree with your argument that these are real places, right? But I look at, you know, meta Mark Zuckerberg's big, you know, two hour long concept

video that he made. And I say, well, first of all, all of this is made up. The entire video is made of technology that doesn't exist yet, or that they even have a glimmer of how to reproduce, first of all. But secondly, if I was going to be in a virtual world, why would I want to be in one created by Mark Zuckerberg? That sounds like hell. Exactly. He's an asshole who is trying to create systems that sort of force people into these horrible social positions that make their lives worse.

And we know this. So that to me is, I don't know, perhaps that's far afield from your work, but those are the questions that once we take it seriously, I'm like, well, that's a problem, right? Yeah, not at all. And in fact, the illustrator for my book, I've got an illustrator who did 57 amazing illustrations. He got a bit prescient. And we have an illustration of Plato's cave, the old idea that the philosopher Plato had, that people would be looking at shadows inside a cave wall, except we had Plato's cave for the 21st century. The prisoners are now wearing VR headsets.

Right. Who is running Plato's cave in this illustration? Mark Zuckerberg. He's right there running a VR version of Plato's cave. So, yeah, these questions are super relevant. I mean, the people who create the virtual worlds that we inhabit, they're basically the gods of that world. They create it.

They're potentially all-powerful, all-knowing, and so on. And then, okay, who wants a corporation to be our god? Who wants Mark Zuckerberg to be our god? I mean, you said physical reality is not like this because it's not designed. Of course, a lot of people think physical reality is designed by a god. Oh, of course. I don't know how you feel about that. If it turns out that all this physical world we're in in ordinary life is designed by a god and i don't know how you feel about that if it turns out that all this all this physical

world we're in ordinary life is designed by a god does that make it suffocating and limited in the in the same way yeah i guess i just have to disagree that you know the the version of uh you know people people who believe that the world was literally created as sort of a perfect place by a God who, you know, put thought into every single decision, I feel like is manifestly not true if you're alive for more than a couple minutes and just look at what goes on in reality. Now there's also the version of a God who started everything going and then disappeared and said, you know, meet me in heaven when you're dead. And that I could maybe believe. But, you know, there's just too much chaos out there, man. Yeah, that's right. Well, it's certainly not a benevolent God. You know,

the traditional God is a creator of the world, all powerful, all knowing, all good. Well, actually, virtual worlds, you know, they may be created by people who are all powerful and all knowing and so on. But yeah, they're probably not all good. So that's part of the question. If we live in a virtual world which is run by a corporation, well, this corporation is going to have its own incentives for designing the world. Our life is going to be lived out for its benefit. Maybe it's advertising. Maybe it's exploitation of information um and so on so i would hope that in the long run with

virtual worlds we will go be able to go beyond the model of virtual worlds just created by corporations maybe to virtual worlds created by users or groups of users who can talk about okay here is the kind of world i want to uh i want to live in Maybe there'll be many different virtual worlds of different forms of governance. Some worlds will be run by corporations, but some won't. Maybe there'll be worlds which will be generated randomly in an open-ended way, so they're not quite so predictable.

But I hope in the end there'll be the so-called metaverse. Instead of being dominated by like a single corporation like say facebook or apple that in fact they'll be just it'll be at least as rich as the internet with corners dominated by corporations but then spaces that people can make and live in as they choose i guess something that occurs to me though as you're talking is we keep talking about this as something that exists in the future, right? Even Zuckerberg's own concept video is like, oh, this is what's going to happen off in the future. And I'm sitting here thinking, well, hold on. I've been working from home primarily for two years.

We're talking over Zoom. I've got three more meetings today that are all over Zoom. I'm going to communicate with my audience over a podcast, over Twitter, et cetera. I'm primarily, do we not already live in that world? Like, is there a, is there a substantive difference between, you know, what you were just talking about and, you know, the virtual spaces we already inhabit? Like, and are we maybe, you know, deprioritizing, you know, understanding the world that we currently live in in favor of sort of focusing on the thought experiment version of it? It's interesting, yeah.

I think that what's going on here is at least halfway to virtual worlds and virtual reality. I think of this as kind of computer-mediated communication. I'm talking to you. I'm here in my place. You're there in your place. We're seeing each other. We're hearing each other, and it's mediated by the computer. But I'm not sure there's really an analog of the extra

computer-generated reality that we're both interacting with. In a virtual world, we can both enter a virtual world, but then there'll be a whole new 3D space around us with new objects in there, we can both enter a virtual world, but then there'll be a whole new 3D space around us with new objects in there that we can both interact with. We'll have virtual bodies inside that space, which may be quite different from our physical bodies and so on.

So that's the case which is really analogous to me to a physical reality. I mean, Zoom or something is more, maybe it's more like an extension of communication technology, like, say, the phone. Okay, we have the phone, we do this on audio, and now we can do it with video too. But, yeah, I guess, so the old version with, you know,

computer-mediated communication is already super interesting. But once you actually get a fit, but no one's going to want to live out their whole life on Zoom. That's like almost, yeah, is that a meaningful life? I don't know. That would just be like we're all in our place and all we do is like talk to each other. Maybe you can still have meaningful conversations.

But yeah, actually having a world out there too, independent of our minds, I think is pretty valuable for a meaningful life in the long run. Yeah. So you're saying that it could be possible for us to build worlds that give us more meaning to inhabit them, that don't feel as impoverished as, as living on zoom and Twitter does, but could perhaps give us the same sense of meaning that when I go outside for a walk, I walk my dog at one, 1 PM because I'm sick of being on zoom all day. And I'm like, ah, now I'm alive.

Potentially we could build a virtual world that gives me that same feeling. Potentially. Yeah. And I'm not saying we're there now, but fast forward, say, 50 to 100 years. Sorry, there I go with science fiction again. Maybe there'll be a little switch we can throw, put it on a certain headset, and suddenly, yeah, we're going to be totally interacting with a virtual world that feels as realistic to us

as the physical world does now. And yeah, over Zoom, our bodies are hardly involved. But in future VR, you might well have a new virtual body. There'll be a virtual dog. You're walking. And I don't know. Look, obviously, there's potential for this to be dystopian, depending. I guess spell it out.

It can be awful. But it could also be wonderful. And the main thesis I want to argue is we've got the same range of, the potentiality is the same as for physical reality. Physical reality can be terrible. It can be wonderful. And I want to say the same range is potentially available in virtual reality. Yeah.

Okay. That's cool. And it really comes back to me to the idea of taking these spaces and these worlds seriously as a place that we inhabit and a possibility that we should be thinking seriously about as opposed to dismissing them. Yeah, because they are increasingly becoming part of our life. And if these corporations have their way, then they're going to become all the more part of our lives. And I think as with AI, there's a lot of hype around it right now. And it's easy to overestimate the current state of things. But people say in general, when it comes to the future, we tend to overestimate changes in the short term, but we also underestimate changes in the long term. So I guess I'm focused here a little bit

more on the long term. In the short I'm focused here a little bit more on the long, in the short term, this is going to be a small part of our lives. In the long term, this is going to be a really big part of our lives. Yeah. You raised a second ago, and this is like a philosophical issue that I've always thought a lot about, and I apologize if my thoughts on it are nebulous. But you raised, you know, the possibility of often the future, us being able to put on a super headset that connects with us in heretofore unknown ways that would, you know, really transport us to a much more credible world. I mean, is this, do you write about,

you know, the reality is a simulation hypothesis and those sorts of issues as being something that could become a live question for us in the future? I'm curious. Yeah, totally. A whole bunch of this book is about the hypothesis that we could be living in a simulation ourselves. I mean, you know, for a long time, this is kind of analogous. For a long time, this is just a totally far out science fiction scenario. You know, Descartes, the philosopher, almost 400 years ago now, said, how do you know that you're not being fooled by an evil demon who's producing you, giving you sensations as of an external world where none of it's real? Well, the modern version of that is how do you know that all this isn't running on a computer simulation? But the difference is the technology is now advancing enough that this is actually becoming

a live possibility. Within the next century or so, we actually may have that technology ourselves. You just put on a headset and you're in a reality indistinguishable from this one. And that really raises the question, how do you know this isn't happening to you right now? This is what people call the simulation hypothesis, the idea that we're actually living in a computer simulation. And I take it seriously. I don't know that it's true. I don't want to say we are in a computer simulation, but I do think it's something that we can't rule out for sure. And then the question

comes up, the same kind of questions we were asking before. Just say we are in a simulation. question comes up, the same kind of questions we were asking before. Just say we are in a simulation. Some people say, oh my God, that's a disaster. Nothing is meaningful. Our life is an illusion. I want to say, well, if we are in a computer simulation, well, that's certainly initially shocking and surprising and so on, but then life goes on. Even if we're in a simulation, we can live a meaningful life. Yeah, that's always been my question about this question, because it pops up again and again, right? Like, I was fascinated by it when I read it, you know, read Descartes in Philosophy, literally Philosophy 101. And then around that time, you know, the first Matrix movie came out, and it became a pop culture phenomenon, this idea of,

oh, what if we live in a simulation? And then 20 years later, Elon Musk is on stage somewhere and just sort of farts out the idea again. People start going nuts. Oh, my God, what if we live in a computer simulation? It could be true. The guy who invented PayPal said he believes it. So what if it's true? But the question is, what does it matter? Like, is it, you know, as a philosophical question, if we're postulating something that is, you know, an illusion that is so perfect that there's no conditions under which we could ever tell the difference, well, what question are we really asking? Are we, you know, investigating a question that has any coherence to it. Like if someone were to say, well, I live in a computer simulation, say, yeah, well, Descartes' evil demon could also exist. We have equal reason to believe

either one of those. You also have equal reason to believe that you are a physical being walking around on a planet that is, you know, physical. What's the difference? You've created sort of three equivalent realities between which there's no difference that you would ever have access to. So why talk about it? I mean, it's true if you go to the extreme case, the perfect simulation hypothesis, where the simulation is indistinguishable from reality, then by definition you can never test or falsify that hypothesis.

Why? Because you get exactly the same experiences and observations in a non-simulation. It's set up to be identical to that. But there are versions of the hypothesis where it's an imperfect simulation. Maybe they make approximations. There are glitches and so on. Maybe we can test to see if they're running some approximations.

Maybe they might even leave clues for us. But I actually find this also very relevant, though, as a, again, as the extreme case. Philosophers like to deal with extreme cases. So let's go to the extreme case of a virtual reality where it's indistinguishable from ours and then use that. Think about that. Is that an illusion? Is that real? And I think you were saying a moment ago, what's the difference? It's just as real. So just say we're willing to count that case as real, that kind of virtual reality. Then I want to take that case. Now let's think about less extreme cases, like the virtual worlds which are coming in the future. If those are on a par with the virtual

worlds of simulations, that gives us some reason to think that even these, you know, realistic virtual worlds, which are coming with the technology of the coming decades, those might be real, those might be meaningful too. So start with the extreme case, which is, I call this from the matrix to the metaverse. Start with the extreme case, which is the matrix, the full-on science fiction scenario, analyze that, and then draw conclusions about coming technology, the metaverse. Ah, I see. So you sort of make the same argument I was

to a certain extent of like, well, what's the difference? It's real, right? You're talking about reality. Whether it's an evil demon, a perfect simulation, whether there's an omnipotent God who's making everything that you experience happen. You're describing reality. So if you take that as reality, well, then you should take the Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse

as some version of reality as well, because it's on the way to that. Yeah, that's the idea. I mean, if we found out we were in a simulation, you know, for a few months, we'd all be shocked. We'd be wringing our hands and so on. But yeah, a couple of years down the track, we're going to return to, I don't know, watching the football on the weekend and living our ordinary lives. And yeah, it'll be real.

It'll still be real. It'll still be meaningful. And I think that kind of brings out that life in a virtual world, at least in principle, can be real, can be meaningful. And that also has applications to the more realistic metaverse. Man. Okay. I have to ask you this before we go, because this is what I've been thinking about a lot lately when considering these questions, both philosophically and when I hear them from

technologists. And so I wonder if you have a view about this, that so often, I understand as a philosopher, you deal with thought experiments, with let's go to the extreme and go to the maximal version of it. But, and I have done that throughout my own thinking about these issues for the last decades as I've been thinking about them. But what I've come to realize recently is how often those sort of, you know, reduce away and ignore the complexity of being like a physical being, you know, that like we talk about virtual reality. Oh, it's, it's like you're there, right? It's, oh, we, we put the screen in front of your face and, you know, to your eyes, it's exactly the same thing as in real life. Right. But one of my experiences wearing a VR headset is, is that, hold on a second,

even visually, it's not at all similar because my eyes are focusing on a single screen, right? That's a certain distance from my face and it's taxing to do so. In real life, my eyes are constantly focusing back and forth. They're pushing the lens back and forth that's in my eyes, changing its size, changing the focal length of the light that is hitting my eyes. And I can't think of, you know, even in Palmer Lucky, the dude who invented Oculus is like wildest dreams. What kind of system is he going to come up with that is going to allow my focal length of my, you know, the lens of my eye to correspond to something outside of me. Right. Or

when I, you know, when I'm, you know, using a little handset, right? I can imagine a better handset that mimics every single one of my fingers, right? I can imagine a handset that gives me hot and cold. I can't imagine one that gives me weight, right? That allows me to, you know, feel the weight of any single object, or that gives me, you know, do you pronounce it prior perception, the sense of where your limbs are in a space? All these extremely complex things that are part of the mind and part of the body. And I feel like those extremely complex detailed parts of what it means to be human are so often left out of our conversations about these things. So we end up saying, you can get Elon Musk on a stage saying, well, what if you're in a simulation or when we have perfect AI, right?

We'll have perfect AI drive our cars. But once you look at the details of what it actually takes for a human brain to drive a car or, you know, what it means to be a conscious, you know, being in physical reality, you realize that we're not just 1% of the way there. We're 0.00001% of the way there. And it's hard to even picture, you know, the technology that it would take to get there. Same thing if you talk about downloading a human brain into a computer, you know, it's great from a science fiction perspective. But when you consider, as you say, that your brain includes nerves that go down to your feet, you know, that your brain includes all the physical, your mind includes all the physical reality around you. Um, uh, the, the, the sort of massive reduction starts to be glaring to me.

Um, and it starts to make the questions that some of the questions we've discussing, we've been discussing a lot more complex in my mind. And I don't know if you have any response to any of that, but those are the thoughts that have been whirling around for me when I have these conversations. Yeah, no, that's a totally reasonable point. One way to think about this, one way philosophers sometimes think about this is there's ideal theory and non-ideal theory. sometimes think about this is there's ideal theory and non-ideal theory. Ideal theory is the extreme case where we idealize away from all the current limitations and the messy things towards a possible hypothetical future version. And we can, you know, you can theorize about an ideal society where everybody is a spherical cow. I don't know. That would be an ideal society.

That's the standard mathematician's version. They always start their calculations with, imagine a spherical cow to start with. Then we'll make some modifications for different shapes, for friction, for whatever. Got it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we do the ideal case,

but then we also consider the non-ideal case, the realistic case. And okay, that's going to be a lot more complicated. But then you can think about what are the ways in which the non-ideal case differs from the ideal case. I mean, some people get into big arguments about this. You can't just do one. You can't just do the other. I guess I take the view, you've got to do both. We can think about the extreme science fiction case, and we can also think about what we have right now and analyze that, analyze its limitations, and think about what would be required to get from here to there. So yeah, the cases you mentioned are super interesting limitations of current VR. Maybe the focusing case, I would hope that maybe eventually that might be dealt with dealt with what they call light field

technology, where they give you a full light field that enables you to focus at different places in the distance and so on. And there are people at least thinking about that. But yeah, the body, feeling the weight of your body and so on, that's a lot harder. Right now, people exploit the sense of your physical and so on that's a lot that's a lot harder right now people exploit the sense of your physical body but that's limited probably some of this is going to require brain

computer interfaces which is another coming technology even elon musk has got his company neuralink which is in principle for getting computers to interact with brains more more closely maybe even eventually there'll be know, digital stuff embedded inside our brains, interacting with the centers of our brain that deal with the body. And maybe that kind of direct brain-computer interface will bring all kinds of new possibilities for actually getting realistic proprioception,

sense of your body, sense of touch, maybe even, yeah, the kind of sensations involved in eating, drinking, sex, whatever. Yeah. But yeah, but that is long-term and it's very easy to lapse into science fiction. And yeah, you can go to people who are thinking about that right now technologically,

but they will all tell you, okay, well, there's a long way from here to there. Well, here's the thing, not all of them will tell you, right? And so I always have this concern of, say when we're talking about self-driving cars, there's a whole group of people who design our streets, you know, NHTSA, wait, hold on a second. This technology is not nearly as far along as Elon Musk and others have claimed that it is, that there's hard, hard problems that have yet to be solved. But, you know, we've sort of been taking the technologists' claims at face value and say, OK, we have to plan for the world that they say is coming. But in a lot of cases, they're not nearly're a lot, they're not nearly as good at knowing what's coming as they are at making things right now. And, you know, I look at VR and say,

Palmer Luckey, the, the, you know, the creator of Oculus, you know, believes that perfect VR that is indistinguishable from real life is not that far away. And he's, you know, full of shit because he, he has, he is like, he's like swallowed the science fiction line. And so sometimes I worry that we are allowing our our own thinking about these issues to be sort of colonized by, you know, technologists who are not as smart as they think they are and have read too much, you know, William Gibson and et cetera. You know, do you have that concern at all? Yeah, though again, I mean, very much. I mean, I grew up in an AI lab and there was so much AI hype everywhere about, yeah, imagine the super intelligent creatures

just around the corner who are going to destroy us. And in fact, looking at the AI then, well, it was so primitive. You'd actually talk to anybody working in AI. Most of them would say, come on, all this stuff is just fantasy because we're so far short of that. On the other hand, now AI is moving faster and people are now,

is it possibly 20 years off? No one knows. But it's this general phenomenon of hype. And, yeah, there's a lot of hype out there, and you hope that the people that matter are going to know how to ignore hype. And I think to some extent that's happened with AI and VR. And yeah, self-driving cars may have had a moment, but now that hype is receding pretty fast. But I would like to say that we still ought to be thinking about the extreme cases that are coming in the future in full knowledge that they're

not happening immediately. It's one thing to say, yeah, this is five years around the corner. Okay, that's just irresponsible. But to say, hey, this is coming quite possibly sometime in the next hundred years, we ought to be thinking about it. That's more the attitude I would prefer to take. In fact, at the start of my book, I say I'm focusing especially on VR in principle rather than VR in practice, because I'm interested in where this might get to in principle, but I'm not making predictions about timelines. That's probably irresponsible. Got it. Okay. I appreciate that approach. I think there's folks out there who are less responsible than you, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be thinking about the questions.

I guess here might be an interesting place to end because, as I said, I've been reading your work for 20 years now. And you're talking about techno-philosophy. Technology and our understanding of the human mind and brain have changed so much over that time. and brain have changed so much over that time. Are there any positions that you've had that have changed in that time as a result of what's happened technologically or anything that has caused you to think differently? Does that make sense? Yeah, it's interesting. Sometimes what happens is I develop a philosophical view and then the technology comes along. In this case, the extended mind. It's like, yeah, the mind can extend beyond the head.

And then I was thinking about that just for philosophy. And then the technology comes along and, hey, it looks like that can really happen. So sometimes the philosophy comes first. I mean, I don't know. I think actually watching the Matrix movie had some influence on me in thinking about virtual worlds. Yeah, what's going on in in the matrix they treat it like it's all an illusion but what about the people out there living genuine lives with their family and friends inside the

matrix that's not meaningless yeah real i can't say that was actual technology doing it to me because that was still science fiction but it was a depiction of actual technology that really made a difference. And then you get to combine that with using real VR technology, the non-ideal case, the actual case, and that can take you in some new direction. So I don't know. I kind of find it's an interaction.

The philosophy and the technology are all very much looping into each other. Yeah. You know, one of my only – I love the Matrix movies. I love all of them. I actually haven't seen the new one yet because I'm waiting for Omicron to get not quite as bad in Los Angeles so I can go see it in a theater. I saw it on a TV screen, but I'd like to see it in a theater one of these days. Was it philosophically rewarding, the new one?

The beginning was great. The beginning had all kinds of possibilities. Oh, you know, the new one? The beginning was great. The beginning had all kinds of possibilities. Oh, you know, some new scenarios and so on. And then it kind of degenerated after a while into something more like the older movies. Got it. Well, one of my disappointments with those movies was that after the first one where Neo wakes up to the Matrix, they never go back to talk to other people who are in the matrix. It's all about everyone who's been woken up and their fights with the various computer programs and things. They never go back to what about all those other people who worked in the office with Neo who are

still in the matrix? Um, and like, what is it like to still be in there? You know? Um, and like interacting with that, that, that was always the philosophically most important piece of it, uh, or most, most interesting piece of it. And, of it. And the piece that I wanted more of. Well, it's, God, we could talk forever. We haven't even gotten to talking about the consciousness and the hard problem of consciousness, which is a concept that you're famous for. And I'd love to know how that interacts with all this, but I think we have to wrap it up. I'd love to have you back another time if you'd be willing to come on. That'd be great. This was a great conversation. Thanks so much.

So the name of the book, once again, is Reality Plus. People can get it, I assume, wherever books are sold. Subtitle is Reality Plus with subtitle Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy. Fantastic. And as always, if you want to pick it up, you can get it at our special bookshop, factuallypod.com slash books.

If you want to support the show and your local bookshop, that's factuallypod.com slash books. David Chalmers, thank you so much for being on the show. This was an incredible conversation. Very cathartic for me to finally speak to you after writing about your work so many decades ago. Thanks for, I felt that I wasn't completely out of my depth. This was great. This was an absolute pleasure. Yeah, so many cool points. If you ever want to get back to that career in philosophy, just drop me a line. Now that is all you can ask for, for an interview.

Thank you so much, David. Well, thank you once again to David Chalmers for coming on the show. If you enjoyed that conversation and you want to check out his book, check it out at factuallypod.com slash books. That's factuallypod.com slash books. And you'll be supporting the show when you do so. I want to thank our producers, Chelsea Jacobson and Sam Roudman, our engineer, Ryan Connor. our engineer, Ryan Connor.

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