Tom Chatfield writes:

If you woke up one day and discovered that you were living in a virtual world – that everything you’d ever known was, like the Matrix, a form of hyper-realistic simulation – what would this imply for your hopes, dreams and experiences? Would it reveal them all to be lies: deceptions devoid of authenticity?

For most people, the intuitive answer to all these questions is “yes”. After all, the Matrix movies depict a dystopian nightmare in which humanity has been enslaved by sinister machines. How else to think about the revelation that “reality” is nothing like it seems? For the philosopher David Chalmers, however, none of this necessarily follows. No matter what the status of your reality, he suggests, your thoughts and experiences remain as real as it gets. And the value and purpose of your life are similarly untouched. In fact, as Chalmers bluntly puts it in his new book, Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy: “Simulations are not illusions. Virtual worlds are real. Virtual objects really exist.” And the sooner we get used to these ideas, the sooner we’ll be able to grasp some of the digital age’s deepest tensions.

Chalmers didn’t start out wanting to be a philosopher. When he was growing up in Australia in the 1970s, he identified with maths more than philosophy. He also read a great deal of science fiction and, by the time he’d finished a maths degree and spent six months travelling around Europe, found himself thinking obsessively about the science of the mind. How could something as remarkable as consciousness be part of the physical world? What might it mean to study consciousness scientifically? [Continue reading…]