Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - “Virtual Reality Is GENUINE Reality" | David Chalmers Mindfest Lecture

Episode Date: January 2, 2024

In this thought-provoking lecture at MindFest, held at Florida Atlantic State University, philosopher and cognitive scientist David Chalmers explores virtual reality and its implication for our understanding of existence. Chalmers examines the simulation hypothesis, challenging conventional views of reality and suggesting that virtual worlds might be as real and meaningful as the physical world. This insightful talk, bridging technology and philosophy, invites a reevaluation of our perception of reality in a digitally evolving era.   TIMESTAMPS:00:00 - Intro01:34 - Overview11:55 - David’s Central Thesis15:55 - Biosim vs. Pure Sim18:11 - Imperfect vs. Perfect Simulation26:38 - Are Simulations Illusions?31:29 - It-From-Bit Hypothesis36:06 - What Is The Metaverse?43:58 - Meaning In A Virtual World  51:49 - Q&A01:06:43 - Outro NOTE: The perspectives expressed by guests don't necessarily mirror my own. There's a versicolored arrangement of people on TOE, each harboring distinct viewpoints, as part of my endeavor to understand the perspectives that exist.THANK YOU: To Mike Duffey for your insight, help, and recommendations on this channel.  Support TOE: - Patreon: https://patreon.com/curtjaimungal (early access to ad-free audio episodes!) - Crypto: https://tinyurl.com/cryptoTOE- PayPal: https://tinyurl.com/paypalTOE- TOE Merch: https://tinyurl.com/TOEmerchFollow TOE: - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theoriesofe...- TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@theoriesofeve...- Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt- Discord Invite: https://discord.com/invite/kBcnfNVwqs- iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast...- Pandora: https://pdora.co/33b9lfP- Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b9...- Subreddit r/TheoriesOfEverything: https://reddit.com/r/theoriesofeveryt...Join this channel to get access to perks: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdWI...

What is real? How do you define real? Give it a few decades, we'll have technology that may be indistinguishable from the physical world. How do you in fact know that's not happening to you right now? David Chalmers is a philosopher and a cognitive scientist specializing in the areas of philosophy of mind and philosophy of language, known for formulating the hard problem of consciousness and for his arguments regarding the possibility that we might be living in a simulation. Reality Plus is his latest book, and today we have a talk brought to you by MindFest at the Florida Atlantic State University, organized by Susan Schneider and presented by David Chalmers.

Chalmers argues that even if we're in a simulation, virtual worlds are just as real as physical worlds. This isn't merely a semantic debate, but touches on the core of metaphysical inquiry. What is the fundamental nature of existence? My name is Kurt Jaimungal, and on this channel, it's usually podcasts where I interview a guest one-on-one, or sometimes a theolocution, which is a couple of guests plus myself. And the topics range from theoretical physics and mathematics, which is a couple of guests plus myself and the topics range from theoretical physics and mathematics which is my background analyzing theories of everything from that perspective but as well as attempting to understand what the heck is consciousness we place attention on

ensuring that it's of high technical depth and if that sounds interesting to you then feel free to subscribe to get notified of future podcasts as well as to get recommended some of the existing ones you can also just browse the channel theories of everything and see if there's anything to your liking enjoy this talk with david chalmers on reality plus the link to his book with the same name is in the description thanks so much great well uh thank you so much. Great. Well, thank you so much, Jerry. It's a great honor and privilege to be introduced by Jerry.

You know, I actually think of us kind of like kindred spirits, like me. He started out in math, long distinguished careers, a PhD and career as a mathematician. Now he's actually something of a philosopher, thinking about parmenides and a lot of issues about reality. I can't say I have Jerry's political skills. He certainly raised the average IQ of Congress the years he was there, and I hate to think what's happened to it now that it's not.

But yeah, and thanks so much to Susan for putting for this whole event, MindFest here the last couple of days. For those of you who haven't been around, it's just been an exploration of consciousness, of AI, of technology, of the mind, from just a whole lot of different angles, from philosophy, from computer science, from neuroscience. And that's been fascinating. This whole center for the future mind here at FAU is obviously going to be a really distinctive

and productive place. It's just been a pleasure over the last couple of days to meet so many people who are thinking about the mind from so many different angles. My talk today is actually going to be about some philosophical issues about reality. I mean, I got into philosophy to think about the mind and consciousness, as Jerry said. But, you know, philosophy is really about kind of a lot of it is about the polarity between the mind and the world, between consciousness and reality. I started at one pole, you know, thinking about consciousness. But, you know, it's hard to think about consciousness without thinking about reality. So over the years, I've come to think about that other pole a whole lot as well. And thinking about all that got kind of enriched by thinking about technology. Here is the clicker. That actually, I think about this as being in a genre that I like to call techno-philosophy. Before I get on to that, my subtitle is that these ideas, they interface with, they come from philosophy.

They interface with technology, but they're also vividly illustrated by so many themes from science fiction. I mean, there's great science fiction about consciousness, great science fiction about reality. And so I'm going to use the matrix and the metaverse as kind of my two tentpoles for this talk in illustrating issues about reality. These are ideas which are put forward in my book Reality Plus that just came out about a year ago. This was the cover of the hardback version that I was just signing a few copies of outside the paperback. Just came out recently illustrating our universe being created by a teenage hacker in the next universe up. But yeah, so here I'm going to kind of give a tour of some of the central themes and arguments from that book. The genre is something I call techno-philosophy,

which is really a two-way interaction between technology and philosophy. Using philosophy to shed light on technology and using technology to shed light on philosophy. I'm actually inspired here by the philosopher Patricia Churchland, who back in the 1980s talked about neurophilosophy, which was a similar two-way interaction between philosophy and neuroscience. Thinking philosophically about neuroscience, but using neuroscience to think about philosophy. In this book, I want to think philosophically about technology, but also use technology to shed light on some very traditional philosophical questions. My choice of technology here today is actually, we've been talking a lot about AI, artificial intelligence, at this conference.

My focus will actually be more on virtual reality technology. But you find a very similar, I think the techno-philosophical approach is already well pioneered when it comes to thinking about artificial intelligence. Already well pioneered when it comes to thinking about artificial intelligence. Philosophers have thought about AI in its own right, raising questions like, are artificial minds real minds? Can an AI system be conscious? Some of the issues we've been talking about at this event. But one thing you find is that thinking philosophically about artificial minds actually ends up shedding much light on minds in general. Thinking about artificial minds sheds light on the traditional mind-body problem,

on the nature of the human mind. And something similar, I think, goes for virtual reality technology. Virtual reality technology is basically the technology of artificial worlds or artificial realities. And I think that repays philosophical attention by thinking, first thinking philosophically about this technology in its own right, but then thinking about artificial realities can shed much light on reality in general. So today, I'm going to be asking questions like, yeah, are virtual realities genuine realities? And I think reflecting on these questions can teach us something about the nature of reality.

So just to define some of my terms, a virtual world, one of the central terms in the subtitle of my book, is an interactive computer-generated world. And I take it virtual worlds are very familiar to most people today. Anyone who's played a standard video game has hung out in a virtual world. These are computer-generated worlds which are interactive. This is the world of Warcraft, a rich world with lots of avatars and monsters and treasures. The user comes in here and controls an avatar and interacts with the world. That's a video game world, but not every virtual

world is a video game world. Here's the world of Second Life, which is a social world that people enter and interact with other people and sometimes is a video game world. Here's the world of Second Life, which is a social world that people enter and interact with other people and sometimes build relationships. Some people work, they have occupations, they sell things inside VR. By the way, I just saw today that it was announced that Second Life is about to be available on mobile,

on mobile platforms, which is gonna be a nice, cool step forward. These are just virtual worlds. These are not yet virtual realities. Why not? Because these are just, so far, environments that one experiences on something like a two-dimensional screen, maybe on a desktop or a game console, not yet immersively in the style of virtual reality. A virtual reality is an immersive, interactive, computer-generated world, where the extra condition, immersiveness, requires that you experience the world as if you were within it, present at the center. And typically these days,

virtual reality is experienced through a virtual reality headset. Here the MetaQuest 2, which is certainly the most popular virtual reality headset to date. You put it on and suddenly you're surrounded in a immersive world. All indications are that Apple is about

to release their own VR headset. Maybe it'll be announced sometime in the next few months. And so, you know, there's a lot of competition for building these headsets. Here's the game Beat Saber, which just to illustrate, yeah, immersive virtual reality. You go inside there and suddenly you've got a lightsaber you use to slice these cubes coming towards you. And it's as if you're totally immersed in this virtual world.

There are also social virtual worlds. Here's probably the most popular, the world of VR chat. People get to try on all kinds of crazy avatars and build new relationships. There's actually a really good movie came out last year called We Met in Virtual Reality, wholly filmed inside VRChat about a couple who met in VRChat

and then actually ended up getting married outside in the physical world. It's worth mentioning the whole technology of Magic Leap. I was talking to someone the other day who worked at Magic Leap for a period. Magic Leap was a company, still is, that pioneered augmented reality technology where digital, virtual objects get projected into the physical world. Instead of being cut off from the physical world, as in standard VR, this is a mixed or augmented reality where you experience both the digital and the virtual. Many people think that this is the long-term trajectory of VR.

This is where extended reality technology is going. The best, ultimately, we're looking for a form factor where you're wearing glasses, hopefully somewhat less clunky than these glasses that present you with the physical world and digital objects. Ultimately, this could end up replacing desktop and mobile computing with a new kind of extended computing through these glasses. The technology is not there yet, but it looks like that's what Apple, Meta, and so on are working towards. So I'm mostly not going to think specifically about the technology as a technology or as it exists right now in its current form, I'm going to be thinking about virtual reality in general and thinking about it philosophically. And I have a central thesis. My central thesis is that virtual reality is genuine reality. I hope that sounds at least

somewhat counterintuitive. It's a long tradition of people thinking of virtual reality as fake or fictional reality involving some kind of illusions or unreality. I actually want to argue that in many respects, virtual reality is in principle on a par with physical reality. I actually break that down into three sub-theses. One of them is, in some ways, the most way out, is the idea that actually we could be, for all we know, in a virtual reality already. That's the so-called simulation hypothesis. I don't argue that we are in a virtual reality, but I argue that we could be, and that would

be consistent with all our evidence. Second, I argue that virtual reality is not an illusion or a fiction, despite that many people very commonly think that VR is a massive illusion or delusion inside those VR headsets. You're experiencing unreality. I'm going to say that's wrong. And third, I want to argue that in principle, one could lead a meaningful life in virtual reality. I'm not saying everyone should suddenly migrate to virtual reality, but in the long term, one can in principle live just about as meaningful a life in VR as in physical reality. So one of these is really a thesis about what we know about the world. For all we know, we could be in VR. That's what

philosophers call an epistemological thesis. One is a metaphysical thesis about reality itself. I want to say virtual reality is real, not an illusion or a fiction. And the third is a thesis about value, about what's valuable and meaningful in our lives. And in what follows, I'll try and go over each of these three theses. The book is kind of organized around this slogan and these theses. There's also a fourth thesis that plays some central role. This is a thesis about the mind and consciousness, where I try to argue in some chapters of the book that virtual minds or genuine minds, in principle, an AI system could be conscious. If you had an AI system that perfectly simulated our brain,

for example, that it would be conscious. And furthermore, that technology can be used to extend our minds in a way which still augmented minds are genuine minds too. I won't be focusing so much on this one in the talk, but I'm happy to talk about it. And as I said, my two tentpoles are going to be these two very famous virtual worlds deriving from science fiction.

The Matrix from the Wachowski sisters movie of 1999, now with three sequels, instantly familiar to almost anybody as an illustration of the idea that we could be living in a virtual world right now. And the metaverse from Neil Stevenson's novel Snow Crash in 1992, which has come to serve as kind of to symbolize the virtual worlds that we are now building with companies like Facebook renamed itself Meta after the metaverse to symbolize its ambition of building virtual worlds for people to live in and interact with. And really the first half of my talk will be keyed to the matrix as an illustration of the idea that we might be in a virtual world already. The second half on the somewhat more practical issue of the metaverse,

the virtual worlds that we may well, that we will be building in the decades to come. But yeah, so the first half is a key to the matrix. And here the core idea is the so-called simulation hypothesis, the idea that we could be living in a computer simulation. Here's my statement of it. We're in a lifelong computer simulation, or equivalently, pretty close to equivalently, we're living right now in a virtual world. And while I don't actually argue directly that we are living in a computer simulation, or that we are living in a virtual world, I do think it's a possibility we can't exclude, and that it's consistent with all our evidence that we're in a simulation.

Furthermore, I think it's a hypothesis we should take seriously. I mean, here's matrix resurrections in which the whole idea is illustrated. Here's like a digital version of it. Yeah, we're living in the world seems like a regular physical world. Actually, it turns out it may be a digital world. Oh, here's an illustration. By the way, in my book Reality Plus, I got a wonderful illustrator, Tim Peacock, to come up with 57 illustrations of a whole bunch of different philosophical ideas. Here he is illustrating a scene from one of the sequels to The Matrix involving Trinity,

one of the heroes, and the Oracle, who's one of the machines in the movie. What they actually illustrate is two different ways that a being could be inhabiting a virtual reality situation like the Matrix. Trinity is a biological creature with a brain who's hooked up to the Matrix. The Oracle is actually an AI creature all along, no separate biological body. She's just a pure creature of the machine. I call these biosims for the biological creatures and puresims for the purely simulated creatures. Those are both ways of being in a simulation, according to me. You

could be a brain hooked up to one, or you could be fully simulated. I'll count both of those as versions of the simulation hypothesis. So biosim, biological creature connected to a simulation. Puresim, a simulated creature in a simulation. Both of those are covered by the simulation hypothesis. It's also worth making another distinction between perfect and imperfect simulations. An imperfect simulation has glitches and approximations, you know, like in the Matrix, I guess, when the cat crosses your path twice,

it's a sign of a glitch in the matrix. They have red pills that allow you to escape the matrix. A perfect simulation, on the other hand, rules out all of those. It so perfectly mirrors the world that it's simulating that it's indistinguishable from the world it simulates. I think of that as kind of the pure ideal case of a simulation useful for philosophical purposes. Although, it may well be that when simulations

are constructed, they're quite often imperfect simulations. And one classic philosophical question about simulations is how do you know that you're not in a perfect simulation right now? Couldn't this itself be a simulation? Here we are in this auditorium. It's got that artificial lighting. It's kind of a little bit suggestive of a simulation.

Maybe they decided to simulate a bunch of us inside this room today. And when you go out those doors you will who's to say exit the simulation into unreality I would argue that you can't have any sure what evidence could you have that you're not in a simulation I would argue you can't have any conclusive evidence you're not in a simulation as any evidence could be simulated and this is wonderful for a philosopher because it really illustrates an idea from one of the great modern philosophers, René Descartes, who around 1641 published his Meditations on First Philosophy, where he tried to give a foundation to knowledge, to the knowledge being delivered by the contemporary science of the time, by first tearing down all the knowledge he had to a point where he could build up knowledge on a new foundation.

Descartes, he put his challenge for knowledge in many different ways. He asked, how do you know you're not having an illusion right now? How do you know you're not dreaming right now? But perhaps his most famous and distinctive challenge is, how do you know that an evil demon isn't deceiving you by producing sensations of an external world when none of this is in fact real? And here's an illustration of a, I guess, a high-tech evil demon doing its thing. This evil demon has decided to offload its work into a computer simulation. And it's just running the simulation. And we are all just something like this.

We are brains in a vat. And we might ourselves wonder, well, could we be living in a computer simulation constructed by an evil demon? In fact, we are. But Descartes pointed out, well, still there's one thing we can be certain of. We can still be certain, even if we're being manipulated by an evil demon, I still exist. I am still thinking. I still exist. So here we have the brain in the vat triumphantly thinking, I think, therefore I am, establishing its own existence, although not yet establishing anything about the world. And the thought is, you know, for the brain and the vat, this situation is indistinguishable

for ordinary physical reality. So these days we put Descartes' question by asking, how do you know you're not in a computer simulation? How could you know? Here we've put Descartes himself into a simulation. Descartes writes at one point in the meditation, surely I couldn't have an illusion that I'm sitting here in my gown by the fire with a writing paper in my hand. He didn't actually mention the dog at his feet, but Descartes did actually have a dog, I'm assured, called

Monsieur Grat, Mr. Scratch. So I thought we'd put the dog at least into the virtual reality as well. And yeah, Descartes maybe thinking all of that is real, but there he is actually outside in VR, no fire, no paper, no dog. That's all part of the virtual world. So the simulation hypothesis is in many ways the descendants of Descartes' evil demon hypothesis, or even the original hypothesis that we're dreaming, entertained in ancient Chinese philosophy by the, for example, by the ancient philosopher Drangja, who said, yeah, how do I know that I'm Drangja dreaming he was a butterfly rather than a butterfly dreaming that he's Drangja? In one way, the simulation hypothesis improves on the evil demon hypothesis in that as VR develops, this is becoming more and more of a serious possibility.

We will actually have technology. We don't yet have technology that simulates the physical world faithfully, but we know it's coming. Give it a few decades, we'll have technology that may be indistinguishable from the physical world. Once it is, it will then become a very live possibility that that could be happening to us. And how do you in fact know that's not happening to you right now? There's also a statistical argument that we should take the simulation hypothesis very seriously that comes from Nick Bostrom and others who argue that simulated worlds may greatly outnumber unsimulated worlds. Just on statistical grounds, we should think we may be in a simulation. So here's Bostrom having an argument with Bertrand Russell.

Bertrand Russell said, we should believe we're in ordinary reality, physical reality, because it's the simplest explanation of everything we experience. But then Bostrom counters, well, but maybe that doesn't work because we actually have reason to believe there may be many more simulations, simulated worlds out there than unsimulated world. Every unsimulated population may create many simulated populations that create, those may create simulations within simulations in turn, so six simulated world, 36 simulations within simulations, 216 next level down, only one original unsimulated world, then you start to say, what are the odds I'm one of the lucky ones

at base reality? Level zero may seem like very, very small. So I take the upshot of all this, of this first set of considerations to be, not that we're definitely in a simulation. I don't think that we can establish that with anything like our current evidence. But I'd say the upshot is, at the very least, that we can't know we're not in a simulation. We can't exclude the possibility that we're in a simulation. I actually take that to be a serious hypothesis. I mean, you can imagine various evidence that we're in a simulation. I actually take that to be a serious hypothesis. I mean, you can imagine various evidence that we could get that we're in a simulation, at least if it's an imperfect one. The creators could choose to communicate with us and leave us evidence. If we're in a perfect

simulation, they may never give us that evidence, but we can still speculate about the possibility. Now that you might think, philosophically, you might think this is kind of worrying. If we can't know we're not in a simulation, how can we actually know anything about reality? And this kind of parallels a kind of skeptical reasoning that has come down to us from many people attribute to Descartes and so on. Something like this. We just seem to have established premise one, we can't know we're not in a simulation. If you combine that with the second premise, very widely accepted, it says, if we're in

a simulation, nothing is real, it seems to follow that we can't know that anything is real. And that, you might think, is a very, very bad epistemological position to be in. We want to have knowledge of the world. We want to know that what the world. We want to know that what we're experiencing is real. It starts to look like we can't know anything about external reality. And you might think the simulation hypothesis just takes us further on that trail towards skepticism. This is where I want to bring in the second

consideration, really the core of the view that virtual reality is genuine reality, because I actually want to end up arguing against the former view, the view that if we're in a simulation, nothing is real. The question is, are simulations illusions, or are they real? Common view, simulations are illusions. Virtual reality is illusory reality. Here's that view being expressed by the philosopher Cornel West, who actually appears in the Matrix movies as Counselor West of Zion here, leaving the Matrix for Zion. He actually also, as Cornel West, has a commentary track on one of the matrix DVD box sets where he expresses the philosophical opinion that it could be illusions all the way down.

Yeah, simulations within simulations, they're all illusions. And it turns out even the world that we're in may turn out to be a simulation still. So here he's expressing the view that simulations are illusions. So my view, by contrast, is that simulations need not be illusions. If we're in a perfect simulation, the world around us is still perfectly real. Now around here, again, this may sound counterintuitive, but around here I think a lot depends on what it is we mean by real. And here we have this whole issue illustrated by Neo and Morpheus

inside the virtual world of the construct, inside the matrix. And Neo says, this isn't real. Morpheus says, well, what is real? How do you define real? And he then goes on to say, if by real you mean what you can see and taste and smell, reality is something inside your brain. But here the key question for us is, how do you define real? There's not really one meaning of the word real. It's a word with multiple meanings, multiple strands in our concept of reality. But I think central to our concept of reality are at least the following three strands. We say something is real if it makes a difference, that is if it has causal powers in the world. Something is real if it makes a difference, that is, if it has causal powers in the world. Something is real

if it isn't all in the mind. If something is all in the mind, like a dream, then to that extent, it's not real. If something is independent of the mind, then it's real. Perhaps most importantly, we say something is real if it isn't an illusion, if things are the way they seem to be. If things are too much unlike the way things seem to be, we say, you know, what we're experiencing at least is not real. I want to argue that virtual reality can be real in all those senses. Let's take on board, let's take, let's return to the simulation hypothesis. What should we say about the world around us if we're in a simulation?

I want to say, well, the objects around us if we're in a simulation? I want to say, well, the objects around us are perfectly real. They're real digital objects. They make a difference in the world. They're not all in the mind, and they're not an illusion. I mean, if we're in the matrix, for example, then we're interacting with real digital processes on a real computer, which actually affect each other. They affect our perceptions. They're not all in the mind. We can leave a virtual world in a video game, go off and do something else, come back the next day, it will still be there. The digital processes go on without us. Most importantly, I would argue,

the world, if we're in something like the matrix, if we're in a simulation, you know, I have the experience of seeing some chairs down there, some people, and so on, a projector screen, a building. I want to argue all that is real. It's digital. But being digital is not a way of being unreal. I mean, around here, that famous slogan, you all know the acronym IRL, for in real life, which is used to contrast the digital with the real. Introduced back in the 1990s, where somehow being digital was still kind of novel and had a whiff of unreality to it. And we would contrast the real world with the digital world.

By now, I think in the 2020s, where basically everyone spends such an enormous amount of their time in the digital world, that acronym really no longer rings true. Right. Say what happens in digital reality is not real. If a kid's bullied on Instagram, it's real. If you lose money in Bitcoin, it's real. If you have falling out with friends and family online, it's real. All this is real.

It may be digital, but being digital is no worse. It's not a way of being unreal any more than being quantum mechanical is a way of being unreal. So what I want to say is that really I think a better way to think about the simulation hypothesis, I argue in the book, is that it should be seen as a version of the physicist John Wheeler's it from bit hypothesis. That was the hypothesis that everything in the physical world may be made of bits. Here's an illustration. Wheeler himself meant many complicated things by this. He talked about the participatory universe. It seems to imply some ideas that the mind may play some role in reality,

but what I take from it, what many people have taken from it, is the idea there may be some level of reality which is digital. I saw that on a screen earlier today we had someone was illustrating Konrad Zuse's ideas. Zuse was one of the German physicists, who was one of the inventors of the computer. In the 40s, later on in the 60s, he wrote a treatise on digital physics, one of the earliest expositions of the idea that physics itself could be digital. Here, illustrated by, you've got a world of trees and rocks and so on, all realized by, say, some atoms. But underneath the atoms, here is going to be a level of bits bits. Here illustrated by John Conway's Game of Life, where there's a whole bunch of every cell in the world

has a binary state, can be on, it can be off, there are some basic worlds governing them, that's basically a digital physics. For all we know, the physics of our world could have a level of digital physics underneath it. That's the it fromfrom-bit idea. I mean, the bit level could be the last level. That would be the pure it-from-bit idea.

But it's also entirely possible that there's a level beneath the bit level. That, you know, underneath the bits are like circuits in the next world up or something like that. Then you get to what I call the it-from-bit-from-it hypothesis, where there's a further level beneath the bits. And of course, in principle, this can go on. It can go on. up or something like that, then you get to what I call the it-from-bit-from-it hypothesis, where there's a further level beneath the bits. And of course, in principle, this can go on and it can

go on. Just say we're in a simulation inside a simulation inside a simulation, then we'll be it-from-bit-from-it-from-bit-from-it-from-bit-from-it. Yeah, which came first, the it or the bit? That's one of the defining philosophical questions of our time. But if we're in a simulation, I would argue, we're basically in a version in a situation like this. In fact, in a way, I want to say what you can think of the simulation hypothesis is combining the it-from-bit idea that our world is digital with the theological idea that there is a creator of our world. The simulation hypothesis, by its nature,

builds in the idea that there is a simulator. There is someone or something who set the simulation up. So I like to call this the it-from-bit creation hypothesis, that we live in a digital world which is itself created. It could be a traditional God who just, you know, creates objects by creating bits, just like that. Or it could be a very non-traditional God. Here's our teenage hacker in the next universe up, creating all those bits on a computer, thereby creating the digital physics from which all of reality emerges. I want to argue these two situations are basically on a par with each other. I mean there's a whole theology of simulation you can get into if you like. We start to speculate about the possible, you know, just so we

are in a simulation, what's the character of our simulator? Is she omniscient, all-knowing, all-powerful? Probably very knowledgeable and very powerful, at least about our virtual world. Is she all good? Not necessarily. Is this a being we should worship, a director of religion around? Religion around? No, probably not. But so this simulator creator could have some of the characteristics of a traditional god, and some not. But what I want to basically use all that to argue, and I argue it really at great length in the book, is that the simulation hypothesis is equivalent to a hypothesis about the nature of reality,

that reality is made of bits. That's not a hypothesis where none of this exists. It's just a hypothesis about the nature of reality, that reality is made of bits. That's not a hypothesis where none of this exists. It's just a hypothesis about the nature of reality. So my conclusions are, yes, we could be in a simulation. But if we're in a simulation, things are perfectly real. So there's no inference from the idea that we could be in a simulation to we can't know anything about reality. So that gets us halfway to virtual reality is genuine reality.

Now I want to switch gears for the rest of the talk. This has been on kind of the way out, really science fiction-y part of the talk, the idea that we could be in a simulation. Now I want to move to the somewhat more practical, near-term relevant part of the talk about this whole idea of the metaverse, which stands here as a symbol of the virtual world we may in fact be creating in the coming decades. Because I think some of this philosophical analysis

applies equally to the metaverse as to the matrix. I mean, the metaverse got its start, as I said, in Neal Stephenson's novel, Snow Crash, in the early 90s, where the metaverse was in fact a single, massive, social, virtual world that people entered into, spent time, hung out with people inside the metaverse. It was kind of like a more sophisticated version of Second Life experienced immersively through virtual reality. Second Life is still almost always experienced on a screen because it's

proved very difficult to port to virtual reality, though there are other social worlds that people are developing, such as the corporation formerly known as Facebook, renamed a bit over a year ago to Meta, in honor of their ambitions of building a metaverse-style virtual world. These days, I think the term metaverse has changed its meaning a little from standing for a single virtual world to standing for something like a global and interconnected system of virtual worlds.

What's sometimes called the immersive internet. Like the internet, it's a whole system of sites online but experienced immersively in 3D from the inside. And that's the idea that certainly the tech companies like Meta have tried to promulgate. That can be illustrated, that can be construed as a very dystopian picture. Here's the idea that the metaverse could be a descendant of Plato's cave. You know Plato's cave where we're all prisoners sitting inside a cave staring at shadows on the cave wall. You might think of the metaverse as a version of that. Here we all are, prisoners inside Mark Zuckerberg's cave experiencing shadows on our VR consoles.

That's a dystopian way of illustrating the metaverse. I guess I want to argue that, yeah, certainly this could go in dystopian directions, but I want to argue for a somewhat more positive, at least metaphysical construal of what's going on inside the metaverse. I mean, the metaverse is not exactly the same as the matrix. The matrix is like this lifelong hypothesis.

We've always been in the matrix. The metaverse is just somewhere you go for a while and then you return. You know you're using VR. The epistemological question of are you using VR doesn't really arise most of the time when you're using VR. You can, you know, there's a headset, you can feel it.

It's also far simpler for now than a universe simulation, although the metaverse worlds are going to get more and more sophisticated. But our key question, the question that arose for the matrix, is the matrix a world of illusions or is it real, also arises for the more realistic worlds of the metaverse. And I want to give the same answer, that it needn't be a world of illusions. The idea that it's an illusion has been very popular even among fans of VR. Here's William Gibson introducing the idea of cyberspace in Neuromancer in the 80s. And by cyberspace at the time, he meant something like VR. It's come to mean something more like the internet. He meant something like VR.

It's come to mean something more like the Internet. But in Neuromancer, he meant something like the space of virtual reality. He said it's a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of people. So he claims it's a hallucination. Here's the film Ready Player One. In some ways, very VR positive. It's mostly set in VR, and virtual reality is in some ways more attractive than physical reality. And this film, still late in the film, you have a key character saying, reality is the only thing that's real, meaning physical reality is the only thing that's real.

Virtual reality is not real. So still you get this ideology of VR is not quite real, some kind of illusion. That's what I want to combat. The standard view then, virtual objects are unreal. They're illusions, hallucinations, or fictions. My view, virtual objects are real. They're non-illusory digital objects existing typically on a computer somewhere, but no less real for that. If we're in a full-scale simulation like the Matrix, the objects we're interacting with are real digital objects running on a computer.

Just think about, yeah, the Matrix, the idea this is a simulation. All this is on a computer somewhere doesn't make it less real. Even in ordinary VR, the objects we're interacting with are real digital objects running on a computer. Yeah, it turns out those cubes I'm slicing in Beat Saber are ultimately data structures. Why does that make them less real? If it turns out that this lectern that we live in an it-from-bit world and this lectern is made of bits, that doesn't make it less real. Again, being digital

is not a way of being unreal. Here's one illustration of the idea with a we've got a physical kitten, we've got a robot kitten, you know, like a made of physical stuff in the non-digital stuff in the in the physical world. Maybe was backed by some digital processes, and a virtual kitten. I don't wanna say that the robot kitten is not exactly a real kitten. We wouldn't say it's a real kitten.

Real kitten is a word for certain members of certain biological species, but it's still a real object. It's an object with all kinds of causal powers. You wouldn't say exactly it's an illusion unless you misclassified it as a biological kitten, which you needn't do. Same for a virtual kitten. I want to say the virtual kitten is not a real kitten, but it's still a real object with causal powers. I want to say the virtual kitten is just as real as the robot kitten. Neither of them are biological kittens, but they're still real objects with real causal

powers that can enter into reality. So you might think there's one question, is our virtual objects real? It's also a further question, is VR an illusion? You might think, well, we at least, even if those virtual objects are real, we're still undergoing an illusion because things seem to be out there in physical space where they're not. So we have the illusion that VR is going on in a physical world around us when in fact it's going on in a digital world. I want to argue maybe novice users of VR experience objects as being in physical space around them, which is an illusion.

But an expert user of VR needn't be undergoing this illusion. An expert user of VR will usually know instantly that they're in a virtual world, and they will basically experience the world around them as a virtual world. I call this the phenomenology of virtuality. An expert user of VR experiences the world as virtual. They have non illusory perception of a virtual world. I think this is quite important to thinking about how we experience the virtual worlds we're developing. Okay, so finally I want to get to those issues about value and meaning.

Can one have a meaningful life in a virtual world? Can life in VR be as good or better than life in non-virtual reality? I guess my answer is going to be it's not strictly better or strictly worse, but differing on multiple dimensions. But in many respects, life in VR can at least be on a par with life in physical reality. Again, there's a long tradition of people thinking about situations like this and thinking about VR negatively.

Here's Robert Nozick's thought experiment of the experience machine put forward in his book, Anarchy, State, and Utopia in the 1970s. He said, could it be that you're actually, just say you had the option of stepping into an experience machine, which is a kind of virtual reality that pre-programs all your experiences, which is going to be wonderful experiences. Maybe you get to be a leading philosopher. Maybe you get to write all kinds of successful books. Part of the concept, by the way, of this depiction is that Nozick himself should have thought that he was in

the experience machine, because look at the wonderful life he's having, just the kind of life that people in the experience machine would have. And Nozick asked the question, should you enter the experience machine pre-programming wonderful experiences for life? And Nozick's answer was no, you shouldn't. And there's basic reasons, there are a few different reasons here, but he said the basic reasons were, first, the experience machine is pre-programmed, so you have no real autonomy there, no real choice, no real free will. Second, the experience machine is illusory. There's no genuine reality to it. Third, the experience machine is artificial.

You only experience human-made reality, not genuine nature. We could talk a lot about each of these things and whether they're good reasons not to enter the experience machine But what I want to say is at least these are not good reasons not to enter VR VR standard VR is not likely is unlike the experience machine in various ways most obviously It's not pre-programmed and pre-scripted you sit when you're going to say even into second life you get to build your own life Make your own choices. You're still just as free as you are in physical reality. So VR is not pre-programmed. It's interactive. You get to make choices. You get to build your life. VR, I have also argued, is not illusory. So that objection doesn't apply. VR may be artificial. But you know, many of us choose to spend much of our

life in cities, which are extremely artificial environments, not much nature. Yeah, you may be losing some things of value there, but you're gaining other things of value. It certainly seems you can have a meaningful life there. I'd say the same for VR. So in my view, why do our lives have meaning and value? Many reasons, but to a large extent because of the experiences we have, because of the relationships we build, because of the communities we're part of, because of our projects and our achievements. I want to argue that all of those values can be present in VR, at least in principle. VR may be missing some sources of value for some people. Yeah, less nature. There are interesting questions about birth and death in VR, at least for

any near-term VR. There's not genuine birth or genuine death. Some people may value sheer physicality of a physical world. That's at least, you know, I'm not saying it's a totally unreasonable thing to value. At the same time, VR has new sources of value, new bodies, new forms of experience, near unlimited space, abundance of goods, potentially instant travel. I think in the long term, it's perfectly rational, I think, for some people to prefer physical reality. Different people have different value systems, different desires, different goals, but also perfectly rational for others to prefer VR. Here's an illustration of this idea.

Two people given the choice of going to a new world. One choice is to go to a terraformed reality. I don't know, maybe Elon Musk has terraformed Mars, and you can go join a new society on Mars, and it lacks much of the history and much of the nature, but it'll still be a new and exciting society. Someone else has got a similar option of entering a brand new virtual world that's been set up with all kinds of new things and new capacities. I want to argue that either.

These two choices are roughly on a par. Either could be a reasonable choice. So I want to say you can live a meaningful life in VR. Not to say it's going to be wonderful. Life may be good or it may be awful, but the full scale of human experience is at least available. And there's this final question that people always want to ask about VR.

Is the prospect of life in VR utopian or dystopian? Is it all good? Is it all bad? I think basically you can find, as with almost any technology, you can find strands, potential strands of each. Some utopian strands of VR. I already mentioned the new bodies that you get to try on and express yourself and express your identity in all kinds of new ways. You can have new forms of experience. Impossible in ordinary reality. You can fly in VR. There's near unlimited space. There's the abundance of goods.

Building a house is very difficult and expensive in physical reality. In VR, once you build one house, near trivial to duplicate it, that brings with it potential forms of abundance and perhaps potential forms of rectifying distributive injustices. At the same time, there are obvious dystopian elements. You know, right now, the virtual worlds that we deal with are mostly controlled by corporations. It's a form of, you know, government by corporation, corporatocracy. Or if you like, we already looked at the illustrators of virtual worlds, sorry, the controllers of virtual worlds as being a bit like gods. Right now, you know, the god of a virtual world, like, you know, the god of Meta's Horizon program is the corporation.

Meta and the controllers of a virtual world we've already seen are very powerful, very knowledgeable, near omniscient, near omnipotent, which spring with it privacy issues. You know, the omniscient springs with it privacy issues. The omnipotent springs with it manipulation issues. Issues which are big enough already in social media. Once we're immersed, wait till a corporation is controlling the whole virtual world around you. Those issues become all the more serious. There's also issues of unequal access, neglect of the physical world. So yeah, all kinds of potential upsides, also all kinds of potential downsides.

If I had to guess, I'd say the metaverse, you know, this immersive version of the internet, will be much like the original internet. Is the internet being good or bad? Well, it's brought great things, it's brought terrible things. I guess I'd like to think that by and large the internet has been positive. Likewise we can hope that the net value of the metaverse will be positive. But anyway, that leads to my conclusion. Virtual reality is genuine reality.

I'd say the rest is up to us. Thank you. Questions? Let's see. Anand. Hi, Dave. I just wanted to read an intermix position that we don't know that we're not living in a simulation and ask, is there a position you have about a related proposition? And that proposition is, can we know that something is unsimulated? It's hard to know that because in principle, if you can't know that the whole reality is unsimulated, you can't know that any individual object within it is unsimulated.

Maybe I could come to know that an object was not simulated by something within my current reality. Like, for example, I could come to know that a given object wasn't actually created by any of you guys. That's like local unsimulatedness, maybe I could know that. Even that's non-trivial. But if I can't know that this whole environment that I'm in is unsimulated, then I couldn't know that any given object within it is unsimulated. As far as I can tell, there's always the available hypotheses that there are simulations all the

way down. I don't know if God comes to me and tells me, no, you're actually in base reality and all this is unsimulated. I guess there's still going to be an issue of trust. Why should I trust God in saying that? So I guess I'm inclined to think no. While obviously unethical, would we hypothetically be able to become the evil human in our science and use cerebral organoids in order to test this evolution in policies?

It's interesting. In principle, yeah, we will have the capacity to hook people up to simulations. I mean, I mentioned the biosims, which are biological creatures and pure sims. Probably, well, I mean, in some ways, more straightforward. I don't know which is more straightforward. But one way it could go is we just create pure simulations with simulated beings and simulated brains within them. And yeah, so that's like the pure simulated world. And the second version is the bio-SIM world. You

mentioned cerebral organoids or, yeah, we could take people, we could take infants, newborn infants, and what do they do in the matrix when infants get born? I don't know. But at some point, they get hooked up to the matrix. In principle, we could do that as well. And an interesting question, would that be like being Descartes' evil demon? I mean, I don't think it needs to be. Look, I would not treat it as a deception. I mean, maybe the purest case is easier. We create a physical world with simulated brains and so on. Look, if you do that and create a world of suffering, then this could be terrible. But if you create a world where, by and large, people live lives of positive experience and value, relationships, community, and so on, then this is not something we should do lightly because it would be playing God and it

would be an enormous thing to do. To create a life like that is an enormous thing to do. But I don't think it would necessarily be an evil thing to do because I'm on my view That's not gonna if it's not going to be deceiving people It's not going to be make them suffer. So if on the whole This is actually, you know creating beings with positive lives. I don't see why in the end It's not something that could be a reasonable thing to do One thing that seems to be a fundamental difference between digital realities

and what we believe about the so-called physical realities is the difference has to do with randomness. No digital process can produce real randomness. There's so-called pseudo-random number generators that are used to produce a sort of sematical randomness. Whereas we think that quantum level, the world that we live in, is intrinsically, unpredictably and fundamentally random, not pseudo-random. But I wonder if there's a crack there in the argument that physical realities and virtual realities are. Is there clearly a gap?

Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, I don't think the very idea of it from bit is inconsistent with there being fundamental probabilistic randomness. I mean, you know, Conway's laws are deterministic, but there's a near relative of Conway's laws that are probabilistic. Well, that seems to me to be quite consistent with the it from bit idea. Furthermore, I mean, although I said it from bit, you know, once you really do this within a quantum mechanical context, it becomes obvious that the better way to build a semi-digital world like ours is going to be it from qubit using quantum mechanical digital processes at the base. And that will, of course, have probabilities built into it.

It does depend on which interpretation you take of quantum mechanics. But at the very least, I think these ideas can easily be combined with randomness. There's also a further question. with randomness. There's also a further question. If not, by what kind of practical methods are we ever going to distinguish randomness from non-randomness?

That's itself a huge issue. Yeah, so great talk, by the way. Appreciate it. I wonder if you'd interact with quadrennums like proposed transcendental argument against freedom of math, skepticism, and socialists.

You've used contact externalism in external mind type theses. It seems like you might not be able to find out that you live in a computer simulation because your concept of computer and simulation

don't refer to base reality ones. I wonder how would you react to that? Yeah, chapter 20 of the book is all about this. Actually, I've got a wonderful illustration, which I don't think I have easily available in this file to show, of Hilary Putnam with the brain in the vat next to him saying, I know I'm not one of those. And of course, it turns out he is.

It looks a lot like a brain in the vat in the next universe up. I mean, Putnam's idea was basically that because of this kind of... Our words refer to things in our environment, so our word brain refers to the brains around us. And if I'm in a simulation, then the brains I'm referring to are digital brains, not non-digital brains. So if Putnam says, I'm a brain in the vat,

then he's actually saying something. Even if he's in a vat in the next universe hub. He's not one of those digital things. He's a biological thing, at least in this version of it. So Putnam argues he can know that he's not a brain in the vat. This way, he could be, you know, it's very tempting to say, well, you could be a lot like a brain in the vat.

You could be a quasi-brain in the vat, even though you'd be made of something else. But I argue this comes down to some delicate philosophical issues about the nature of meaning. But I think it's widely accepted that some words, like, say, brain, Putnam's original example was water, get anchored to things, specific things in reality. Other words, much less so. I would argue, for example, the word computer or the word simulation doesn't get anchored to specific systems in reality in the same way. I'd also argue the same for words like consciousness and causation and maybe even philosophy. If you go that way, what I try to argue is, although your partner might use a brain in a vat, could never truly say I am a brain in a vat. But I do want to say the reverse about computer simulations. Someone in a computer simulation would, if they said I'm in a computer simulation, they would be speaking truly.

But this does come down to some rather delicate issues in the philosophy of language, which is why this is in chapter 20 near the end of the book. Yes, so you may not be convinced in argument to virtual reality being real. However, I would argue that virtual reality currently doesn't exist, like the only virtual reality that we have right now affords only very limited interaction, visual for the most part right now. So we will probably go tactile next, but I don't see us anytime soon eating virtual food. And also currently we always have this interaction between the virtual or the intersection

between the virtual and what we perceive as the physical world. And the whole notion of this virtual reality, being virtual, is actually this notion that we exist or part of us exists in another part as well. This brain in the vat is obviously a part of us in the picture, which does not seem to have like this sensory perception. But in the current virtual reality, we actually have a mixture between the physical perception of the actual or of the physical world we're living in and whatever the virtual world forces to happen. Yeah, that's really interesting. I mean, it's true that current virtual world's perception starts to interact. Yeah, that's really interesting. I mean it's true that current virtual worlds perception is rather primitive. We've got vision, we've got hearing,

but anything involving the body is not very impressive. Certainly touch, certainly bodily perception and so on. And yeah, people are working on haptic this and that to get touch and bodily things better. I suspect that for it to work really well, we're going to have to wait until the period when we have really good brain-computer interfaces where the virtual world will be able to interface directly with the parts of the brain responsible for our experience of the body, our experience of touch, and so on.

But that's probably decades away. and so on. But that's probably decades away. That said, I think whether we go with simple perception or full human-like perception, the other issue you mentioned about the brain, when we right now go into VR, yeah, there is a separate brain outside the VR. I think at that point, we are basically dualistic creatures. We have an avatar inside the VR, which is our body inside VR, which is digital. But we have a brain outside the VR, which is controlling this. I mean, you know, so there's a, the mental, yeah, the body is inside VR and the mind is outside VR. I have another illustration in the book. This actually illustrates Rene Descartes' view of the mind,

where Descartes says, yeah, my mind is not part of my body. But the trick is he actually grew up inside Minecraft. So inside Minecraft, he has a body, which is a Minecraft body, but he's got a mind, which is entirely outside the body. So current VR is, fact dualistic and that's, like I said, that could be good for Descartes but it brings with us all kinds of dualism. If we eventually went to the pure sim world where everything is simulated including the brain then that's going to be less obviously Cartesian.

But this mind-body divide does really bring back some elements of that old Cartesian picture. Thanks. That was a great presentation. At the beginning, you said that the technophilosophy is going to give us insights into epistemology and other branches of philosophy. And I think that's one of the greatest strengths of this kind of analysis. So could you follow up with that and say how this is helping us with epistemology? Yeah, actually, I wrote this book. You know, I mean, it was nice to illustrate the technology and to think philosophically about the VR and so on. But actually, I wrote this book in very large part to help think about issues, epistemological issues about our knowledge of reality and

metaphysical issues about the nature of reality. Maybe the central strand running through this book is actually about the problem of how can we know anything about the external world and this Cartesian argument that, you know, put in the key of simulation. We can't know we're not in a simulation, therefore we can't know anything about reality. Most philosophers responding to that have traditionally wanted to respect, deny the first premise. Descartes himself argued, yeah, I can know that I'm not actually in one of these evil demon situations because God wouldn't allow me to be deceived. Okay, that didn't convince too many people, but that was his argument.

Many other people have tried to argue that that first premise is wrong. What I end up doing is actually I accept the first premise. We can't know we're not in a simulation. But I deny the second premise. It's as if we're in a simulation. None of this is real. And I use that to try and argue that actually, Descartes' argument that we can't know anything about the external world doesn't work. It's a very, very central argument in the history of philosophy.

I'm giving my own diagnosis for why it fails. Now, to be fair, many people before have tried to diagnose why it fails, and they've always — no one's ever been too convincing about this. So will my diagnosis convince everybody? Probably not. But really it is. It's also true that merely rebutting Descartes' challenge to our knowledge of the external world doesn't yet establish that we do have knowledge of the external world. There's lots of other challenges.

So I see this as maybe just opening up room for knowledge of the external world. The rough idea is that although we don't have knowledge of the nature of the external world, it could be made of bits, it could be made of atoms, we have knowledge of the structure of the external world. As a mathematician, you might appreciate the idea that physics can maybe give us knowledge of the mathematical structure of reality. And my idea is even if we're in a simulation, where the world is made of something different, but it still has the same kind of

mathematical structure. So I call this the structuralist reply to skepticism. We can at least know about the structure of reality, if not what it's made of. And that's one thing, I mean, I would like to think of that as an insight into, you know into one of the deep issues about knowledge and reality. In principle, I think you can also use virtual reality as a test case for ideas about value and meaning in our lives and what the sources are. My thinking about that is not nearly as developed, I think, as my thinking about these other things. So I wouldn't claim to have deep original insights there, but I'd encourage anyone who wants to think about, you know, meaning

and value through the lens of virtual reality. I think there's really a lot to be gained from reflecting on that. Great. I hope you enjoyed that talk with David Chalmers. We had a tremendous amount of fun filming it, and we're going back to MindFest February 2024. There'll be other talks there, and I hope to bring you some of them. Given that you've enjoyed this talk, another podcast that I recommend from this channel is the one with Michael Levin. Michael Levin talks about what constitutes the self, what is collective intelligence, how is it that you're conscious, how are you separate from the world,

what is a goal, what is agency, and breakthroughs that indicate that memories aren't tied to neuronal firings or neuronal structure. It's fascinating, fascinating, and it's one of the most popular podcasts on the Theories of Everything channel. The link to Michael Evan's talk is in the description. The podcast is now concluded.

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