← WHY? Philosophical Discussions About Everyday Life
WHY? Philosophical Discussions About Everyday Life
Is Virtual Reality Real?
01:10:03
Jack sits down with David Chalmers, renowned philosopher of mind, to explore…
Loading summary
Transcript65 lines
- [00:00]
A
Why Philosophical Discussions About Everyday Life is produced by the Institute for Philosophy and Public Life, a division of the University of North Dakota's College of Arts and Sciences. Visit us online@yradioshow.org.
- [00:20]
B
Hi, I'm Jack Russell Weinstein, host of why Philosophical Discussions About Everyday Life. Today we are asking whether virtual reality is real with our guest David Chalmers. I want to begin by talking about God. I may have done this before on the show, but I think it's important to explain it again and to set up today's discussion. People like to think that there are two positions someone can hold on the existence of God. Either God exists or God doesn't. That's it. Just one or the other. This is wrong. There are actually four. God exists and we know it. God exists and we don't know it. God doesn't exist and we know it. And God doesn't exist and we don't know it. The difference here is between reality and our knowledge of it. I'm distinguishing here between metaphysics and epistemology. Metaphysics is the study of what's real. It tries to describe which things actually exist and what their characteristics are. In addition to asking whether there's a God, metaphysics also explores the nature of truth, of time, of being, of causation. Really abstract stuff. Does the world disappear when you close your eyes? Does this is a metaphysical question. Epistemology, in contrast, explores what people can know and how we learn it. It asks about the possibility of human certainty, whether unreliable senses like sense like sight and hearing can truly inform us about the world and how the mind grasps difficult ideas like justice or infinity. Is what we see when our eyes are open an accurate representation of how the world really is? This is an epistemological question. So there's a difference between the metaphysical claim that God exists and the epistemological assertion that we can know the answer. I want you to keep this in mind as I ask a different Are we living in a simulation? Or to ask this another Is the world real? Or are we some sort of artificial characters that exist in a game created by someone else? This is what we're going to talk about today. I don't think the question will be foreign to most of you. Many of us have seen the Matrix or Inception. We've read stories about people confusing their dreams with reality. We all, every one of us, get lost in our thoughts and react emotionally to our imagination. Whether we are remembering something embarrassing that happened to us when we were younger, or getting angry because we're convinced that somehow Somewhere our colleagues are gossiping about us. In each case, we're being triggered by something that doesn't exist. This is an important point, and I want to illustrate it in another way. Almost all of what we experience is in our mind. The past doesn't exist. We just remember it. The future isn't here yet. We just anticipate it. The only element of our experience that is not a product of our imagination is the instantaneous moment that we call now. And everything else, even the beginning of the sentence that you are hearing right now does not actually exist. It's all just stored data in your brain that you can access and reflect on. So since this is true, since almost all of our lifetimes aren't actually real, why is it so hard to imagine that the universe we think we inhabit might never have been real in the first place? Maybe right now some creature we don't understand is playing a game called Virtual Philosopher, and they're controlling their character, Professor Jack Russell Weinstein, with their joystick. And maybe right now, some other player has chosen the character radio and podcast listener, and that person is controlling you. It's possible. It might not be likely, but it's possible. Except, of course, that when you do the math, as we shall see, it is likely. It's actually highly probable. On today's episode, we're going to explore the claims that it is almost certainly true that you and I are living in a simulation, and there is no reliable way to prove otherwise. It's going to be a fun show. The thing is, philosophy is complicated, and philosophers like to examine every facet of a theory. So as we explore the simulation thesis, as it's called, we'll also ask what it means to be real in the first place. We'll delve into the nature of our mind and consciousness and question our values. Would living in a simulation actually be bad? Is a physical reality inherently better than a digital one? What's so important about being real? As we prepare for this discussion, then I want us to take a moment and go back to the question of God's existence. And to remind us that no one has ever provided irrefutable proof or, frankly, even one piece of undoubtable evidence that God is real. We're used to living our lives contemplating the idea that there is a creature so much bigger, different and more powerful than us that we could never begin to truly grasp its nature. If there might be a God that created us, there might also be a game from which we spawned. Maybe God is the game designer, or just another character or maybe God is just a false belief the simulation programmer inserted into our belief system on a whim. Whatever the case, it's time to take seriously the possibility that everything we think we know might really be an illusion. And now our guest, David Chalmers is a university professor of philosophy and natural science and co director of the center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness at New York University. He's the author and editor of numerous books, most recently Reality, Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy. Dave, welcome to why thanks Jack.
- [05:37]
C
It's a real pleasure to be here on your show to our listeners.
- [05:41]
B
If you'd like to participate, please share your favorite moments from the show and tag us on social networks. Our handle is always yradioshow Radio Show. Rate us on itunes, Spotify, or your preferred podcast platform so that others can find the show and listen to all 17 seasons worth of episodes for free, as well as our sister show Philosophical Currents at our website we byradioshow.org and as always, the show can only happen with your support. We exist solely on listener contributions, so click donate in the upper right hand corner of our website to make your tax deductible donation through the University of North Dakota Alumni foundation portal. So Dave, I actually want to start a little far afield. Your book Reality plus is a work in public philosophy. It's clearly for general audiences and presumes very little advanced philosophical knowledge. Or why might something about virtual worlds and simulations be a good first philosophy book?
- [06:37]
C
I think of the genre of this book as something I call technophilosophy, thinking about philosophy through the lens of technology. And I think so much philosophy is not necessarily traditionally about technology, but technology is an amazing way in to philosophical questions. For example, much of my life I've thought about the human mind and human consciousness, and there the initial questions are about the minds that we have. But then rapidly with the development of technology, we now have AI, artificial intelligence. We're on our way to artificial minds. And then you can look at an AI system and say, does this AI system genuinely think? Is it conscious? And that's just a way into the philosophical questions about consciousness and the mind. And for much of my career I'd been thinking about human and artificial minds this way. This book I kind of see as an expanding of the horizon to philosophical questions of all sorts, including maybe most deeply philosophical questions about reality. So much of what we think about, so many of the deepest traditional philosophical questions are questions about reality. How do we know that anything around us is real? Could we be in a dream right now? What is it to live an authentic life. These are all questions about reality. Now, I think technology is giving us just a new lens on those questions because we now have the ability to build more than one reality. We had the natural reality that we started with, but now we have virtual realities, artificial realities, simulated realities. And so many of the great questions of philosophy arise again in thinking about this technology. So, for example, Plato asked, you know, would it be okay to be a prisoner in a cave looking at shadows on a cave wall? Or would that just be a second class derivative reality? Today we can ask, would it be okay to live our life inside a virtual reality? Or would that just be a second class way of living? Rene Descartes said, could this all be illusions produced by an evil demon trying to fool us? Well, today we ask the question, could we now be living in a simulation? So I think of technology here as a way of just raising and addressing some of the great questions of philosophy in a way which is very relevant to our present moment.
- [09:28]
B
The book really reflects that choice because at the same time as you're offering a very precise and detailed exploration of each step of the arguments about simulations, you're also touching upon the history of philosophy. You're explaining core ideas, you're guiding the reader along. When I think about technology, though, I'm reminded that we use the term technology to think about really electronics and things like that. But the pencil is technology, the wheel is technology. Has technology altered always been a lens that forces us to reconsider our philosophical commitments? Does technology historically challenge us to think about the world in a different way?
- [10:23]
C
I think technologies of all kinds raise and have raised philosophical issues right since the beginning, certainly. And in Plato's dialogues you can find extensive discussion of the new technology of writing. And I think maybe Socrates was railing against all the people who now wrote things down. And the old ways we talked about things and we remembered the great ballads and so on with our ordinary human memory. And now people wrote things down. And Socrates raised, do people really know this stuff anymore? Do they understand it, or are they just parroting what they read? And that was his critique of writing. It parallels in various ways the kind of critiques you get of current digital technology. Now that we look everything up on the Internet or on ChatGPT and so on. Are people genuinely thinking. But similar issues right there. I don't know if there was a philosophical discussion when people first invented the wheel or invented. But yeah, I mean, one of the first metaphysical views of reality on record is Heraclitus, who thought everything was Basically everything was fire. So there's, if you like, a philosophical view inspired by, at least in part by some kind of technology.
- [11:50]
B
One of the experiences that Generation Xers like myself have, and I know you would have had as well, is that experience of being with friends and having an argument about who starred in what movie or some fact about sports and not being able to find out the answer and spending a month arguing about it, or six months arguing about it. And then one day one of you discovers the answer in a newspaper article or an encyclopedia article. People younger than us don't have that experience. Anytime they have an uncertainty, they can look it up. As you're mentioning on Google, when I live in a state of doubt like that, and I don't mean doubting the reality of the world, but just when uncertainty and doubt play a bigger part in my day to day life, does that affect our reality or does that just affect sort of our emotions? How much does our, I don't know, stance in the world define what we consider to be real as opposed to simply just what we happen to know?
- [13:06]
C
Yeah, well, I guess there's always been this kind of, this trade off or maybe a shifting border between knowledge and uncertainty. And as we come to know more, we become certain of more and we become, we have doubts about lists and yeah, I'm one of those annoying people who just the moment that arises in a conversation, I used to open Google, Now I open ChatGPT and there's the answer. But doesn't take away all doubt. Maybe it changes the realms. I mean, for example, that conversation about, hey, what we were doing on a certain day five or 10 years ago and hey, well, maybe there's no record on the web, okay, we might still open up our Photos app and so on, but there's a lot still to argue and to be doubtful about. And even on grander historical or geographical questions, if anyone knows the answer, then now I can know the answer by basically looking it up. But there's still a lot of questions for which none of us know the answer. You know, what happened before or shortly after the Big Bang? What happened in certain phases of, of evolution? What is there out there in the distant cosmos? So we still have uncertainty. But you're right, part of the progress of science and of everything else is that that realm of uncertainty is gradually shrinking until and unless we ask the really big questions. What if all this is an illusion? In which case doubt suddenly becomes global once more?
- [14:41]
B
In getting to that second question, I want to ask, and this is probably more of A psychological than a philosophical question, but it connects to how I'm thinking about this. As we get more advanced technology and as our understanding of the world is more complex and computers can do things that human beings themselves can't, does the human stance become one of less confidence? Are we more insecure now because we don't have the same kind of power over our discovery, over our analyses, over our pictures of the world? How much does this advanced technology change what it means to be a. A human in the world?
- [15:39]
C
Yeah, I mean, there's kind of this underlying question, does technology enhance us or does it diminish us? There was a cover story in, I think it was the Atlantic about 20 years ago now, is Google making us stupid or is it making us smart? I'd like to think that at least until now, technology has done a lot to enhance and to empower us. It's put all this knowledge into the hands of so many people who might not have had it before. And yeah, of course, there are all kinds of downsides of modern digital technologies, too. They can potentially alienate us from other people and from the world around us. But I think there's the potential there for enhancement. I do worry, though, about the coming technology and AI, artificial intelligence in particular. Once we get to the point where suddenly technological systems, AI systems are better than us at almost everything, then suddenly, what is humanity's purpose in the universe once AI is doing most of what matters? I don't think we figured out the answer to that question yet, and I don't think we're yet at that point. But that point may well be coming sometime soon, pretty soon, in the next few years. And I don't think humanity is ready for it.
- [16:59]
B
Humanity has never been particularly good with massive technological change, whether it was the printing press or electricity or as we talked about before with Plato, the invention of writing. There's always a crisis. There's always this sense that, oh, no, it's all over, and that hasn't happened yet. I'm going to transition, and I want to ask the question I said we would talk about in the monologue. And then I want to pose a question about it in the most basic of ways, in a way that I think that many of our listeners will intuitively react. And so the question is, are we living in a simulation? Might we be living in some sort of artificial world and we ourselves or our characters? And I think a lot of people hear that question and say, come on, that's a silly question, right? Are you kidding me? Of course it's real. Why is this a good question? And why is this an important question?
- [18:08]
C
I actually wonder about most people's reaction to this question. I've got a suspicion that it's partly generational. People, you know, your age and my age and the second half of their lives, let's say, grew up in a less technological world. And some of these questions can seem like implausible technological fantasy. For my students these days and my classes at NYU in their, you know, maybe in their late teens, I think all of this is suddenly, hypotheses like this are a lot closer to home. They grew up in a digital world, interacting with other people in largely digital ways. And the hypothesis that reality out there is somehow fundamentally digital is not so far fetched. You spend a whole lot of time hanging out in video game worlds, and the thought that this is a video game world is not so far fetched. We don't yet have video games which are at the level of being indistinguishable from physical reality. But the technology is moving very fast. You know, we wouldn't be surprised if in a few decades we have technologies that make artificial worlds indistinguishable from our own. And once we have that, the question is suddenly going to be very real. Hey, isn't this actually happening to us already? After all we can put up, we could then at that point put on a headset and find ourselves in a wholly new world that we can't distinguish from ordinary reality. And that will make the question suddenly a very live one. Could that be our situation right now? So in effect, the technology is taking a hypothesis that was a bit of far out science fiction and turning it potentially into a question of science or technological fact that I think makes these traditional philosophical questions could everything be an illusion, once mere fantasy, but now much harder to dismiss?
- [20:04]
B
I think there's an idea, sometimes it's referred to the uncanny or the uncanny valley. And it's this idea that sometimes we'll see things that look almost perfectly real, but there's something off, and it makes us uncomfortable in a variety of ways. And it speaks to an intuition that human beings have that wants us to be committed to the reality we're in. Is there any innate sense in us that will direct us to the distinction between and we'll figure out what this means in a minute. But the real real versus the virtual real, or is that just a limitation of our technology? And you envision very soon we really aren't going to be able to tell the difference?
- [20:57]
C
Early in the technological cycle it's usually very easy to tell the difference between the digital and, let's say, the physical, because the digital is, at least at the beginning, it's cartoonish. Video games started out just lines and lines and dots, and then they gradually became more properly animated and 3D and so on, but still there's this distinctive cartoonish quality to them. But as things get more and more sophisticated now with AI generated worlds of all kinds, then you move into this area of the uncanny valley, where things get very close, at least to the original physical reality, but you can still see something's wrong. But I think then you move past the uncanny valley, and there are certainly technologies now, you know, deep fakes and so on, which have become more or less impossible to distinguish from ordinary physical reality. I don't know if anyone's developed yet a video game which is. But I think that moment is coming. It just depends where we are in that technological cycle. And this idea that we have some, you know, in the old days, I mean, 20 years ago, with like a deep fake photo, yeah, you could always tell that something was wrong. There were signs, if you looked at them closely, people had the wrong number of fingers or something, and. And you can tell. But it's now at the point where if an image is generated, much of the time I can't tell. I think probably no one but the most expert expert could tell. So we need some other form of authentication. Now that's just with images, but you do it for images, then next you do it for videos. I don't think we're yet at the point where videos are completely indistinguishable, but we're getting closer. And of course, moving beyond videos to doing this for whole virtual worlds we can interact with. That's a much more difficult project because you can't just have a recording. You're going to need a world which is set up to deal with any response you come up with. But I think the technology is. I think maybe we're in an uncanny valley now, but I think technology has told us that uncanny valleys are followed by what is the opposite of an uncanny valley, a canny mountain.
- [23:06]
B
So we have to take a break. When we come back, we'll continue these conversations. I'm going to ask you about the phrase virtual reality and the various different nuances of what it means to be virtual. I'll ask you whether that's real or not. And then we'll dive into this question of how do we start asking about whether or not we live in a simulation until Then you're listening to David Chalmers and Jack Russell Weinstein on why philosophical discussions about everyday life. We'll be back right after this.
- [23:49]
A
The Institute for Philosophy in Public Life bridges the gap between academic philosophy and the general public. Its mission is to cultivate discussion between philosophy professionals and others who have an interest in the subject, regardless of experience or credentials. Visit us on the web@the philosophyanpubliclife.org the Institute for Philosophy and Public Life. Because there is no ivory tower.
- [24:25]
B
You're back with why philosophical discussions about everyday life. I'm your host, Jack Russell Weinstein. I'm talking about with David Chalmers from nyu, about virtual reality, simulations, technology, and all of the different ways in which our mind can be tricked. And more importantly, we're asking about the nature of the universe that we perceive. Is it real? Is it not? Might we be living in a simulation? Might we be living in a world that is somehow unreal? So, Dave, I want to ask you, what does it mean to be unreal?
- [25:07]
C
Yeah. The word real is one of those difficult and complicated philosophical terms that has a number of different meanings. I don't think there's one thing we mean by real. Sometimes we just mean sort of authentic as opposed to fake. Say, you know, is this a. Somebody wants to sell you a watch on the street. You say, is that a real Rolex, or is it merely a fake Rolex? You can say, is it a real watch? Maybe it's still a real watch. It's a working watch, but it's not an authentic Rolex. You can ask, sometimes something is real if it makes a difference in our lives. Whereas if something unreal, you know, Santa isn't real, maybe. Sorry, spoiler alert. It doesn't make any difference in our lives. Sometimes we say things are real when they're just part of our mind. But for me, the sense in which I'm the most deeply concerned with, I guess, is something real or is it an illusion? If things are roughly the way they seem, then we say all this is real. If things seem to be one way and they're actually another way, we say all this is an illusion, and it's true. The traditional view of virtual reality is that virtual reality was one giant illusion and is therefore unreal. Some people hear that term virtual reality as building in. Virtuality has a connotation of being unreal or fake. So they hear it as a contradiction. Unreal reality. Incidentally, there was a similar reaction, I think, to the term artificial intelligence, at least initially. The thought was, well, if it's artificial, it's not real, it's not a real mind, so it's not really intelligence. So some people hear artificial intelligence as having a similar contradictory nature. But I think over time, AI no longer sounds like a contradiction to us. Artificial just means made by people, and digital, that's consistent with it being genuine intelligence. In a similar way, I think in the term virtual reality, virtual has basically come to mean something like digital or computer based. And the question now is, okay, we had physical reality, now can there be digital realities? So the fact that I think that's no longer a contradiction, but it's now a substantive philosophical question. A lot of people think if it's digital, then it's going to be illusion. They think that the world that's brought on, say, by wearing a video game headset is fundamentally an illusion. Or I want to actually. And in my book Reality Plus, I argue against this by saying digital worlds needn't be illusions. And even the realities we experience through a virtual reality headset right now, or perhaps in a video game, we needn't think of those as illusions. They can be perfectly genuine realities. They're digital realities, but digital realities are realities all the same.
- [28:02]
B
This is something that we have to unpack because this is something that I myself have trouble grappling with. When you say digital realities are real, but different realities, are they realities? Because I have a real reaction to my character dying in a game, or I develop real physical attraction to someone whom I'm communicating online, or maybe even a character in a game, I really spend my time, minutes, hours, days really pass. Is the digital reality real because I'm having real reactions and experiences? Or is the digital reality real in and of itself? And we have to therefore rethink or be more precise about what the word reality means.
- [29:00]
C
I think that's the beginning of it. I mean, yes, it's. Experiences in these realities are real just because of what happens to you. So you might say at the very least, that virtual experience, that video game, that VR social interaction, at the very least it was real. For me, that's just the beginning. And I think if that was where we were, we'd still be in the situation of, you know, Rene Descartes, evil demon. It's like, yeah, the person who's fooled by the evil demon, they have genuine emotional and perceptual reactions to the world. But we still want to say, Descartes still wanted to say, nonetheless, the world they were engaging with was not real. So I want to say more than that about virtual realities. I think Also, the world outside one's mind is real. Here, maybe this is most obvious, say if you're in a multiplayer video game or multiplayer social virtual world where you're actually interacting with other people, then those other people you're interacting with, they are real too. You're genuinely having a conversation with another person. Hell, there was a movie, a documentary came out a year or two ago called We Got Married in Virtual Reality where a couple met in VR and actually ended up getting married in VR and ended up being together in real life too. Okay, for now, the validation of real life kind of helps. But I want to say that when you interact, say, in a, you know, say, with virtual tools in a. In a virtual world, the objects you're interacting with are also real. They may be digital objects. Maybe there's a digital treasure you're after. Maybe there's digital currency. As long as they interact with each other in the right way and they've got the right impact on you, then they are genuinely real. So on this view, it's not just your own consciousness that's real, but it's the digital reality outside one's consciousness. I think that's a genuine form of reality. The mere fact that it's digital doesn't make it any less real than physical reality.
- [31:05]
B
This is still. I consider it preparatory question, and I'll ask this as a philosopher, and then I'll explain the terms that I'm using. Is your claim that something's real a metaphysical claim, or is it a value claim? Are you suggesting that digital worlds are real in some analogous way that we say trees are real, real, or water is real? Or are you saying that when we mean it's real, we mean it's valuable? We mean that its existence has some sort of importance? Is this metaphysical? Is this a claim about reality, or is this about what we think is important, what we think is valuable, what we think is legitimate in some sense?
- [31:56]
C
I think we can distinguish metaphysical and epistemological and value claims as you're doing now. I once wrote an article called the Virtual and the Real, where I said, well, we've got a metaphysical, We've got an epistemological question. Can we know whether we're in virtual reality? We have a metaphysical question which is, if we are in a virtual reality, is it real? And we have a valuable question, is life or experiences in a virtual reality, is that a meaningful, or can that be a meaningful and a good life? And I think we have to distinguish them. In the first instance, the question is it real? I think I take to be the metaphysical question, are these digital realities genuine realities? But they're very close to. They very naturally raise questions about value as well as questions about epistemology. So there's a very nearby question, can you live a good life in a virtual world? Are the experiences we have in virtual worlds potentially on a par in meaningfulness with the kinds of experiences we have in non digital worlds? I think there are many people who now spend a whole lot of time in digital realities who would like to hold that in principle, these experiences in digital realities can be just as meaningful as corresponding experiences in non digital realities. At the same time, there are some people who find that. I know there are some people who find that horrifying and implausible. And come on, it's all fake. Can't you just see that? And this is going to lead to the total destruction. This will lose all the value of human existence if we retreat into our digital world. So it's a very difficult question to work through, but I think we have. Yeah, philosophically we've got to distinguish these questions. On the real question, I want to say, yes, it's real. But on the value question, I want to say, yes, life in digital realms can in principle be meaningful and valuable.
- [33:58]
B
Okay, so another technical question, which, again, I'll explain when we talk about reality here. Is it more correspondence or is it more coherence? And what I mean by that is, is something real because it's somehow independent of our experience of it, and it resembles, as you said earlier, how we experience it, that there's a similarity there, or is something real because you have a digital hammer and it hits a digital rock and the digital hammer digitally affects the rock and you have a digital person, a sim, and the SIM kicks the rock and the SIM loses health points, feels pain in the SIM world, is it real because there is something independent that stands on its own, or is it real because when you're in the digital world, what real means is that there is some sort of causal interaction and that we're using the same standard of real throughout the simulation.
- [35:09]
C
Yeah, certainly part of what it is for something to be real is for it to have causal impact on yourself and on other parts of reality. So I would like to argue that digital objects can have genuine causal impact on you. When you interact with another being that has an impact on you. When you swing a baseball bat in VR and hit a virtual ball, then you're actually having some causal impact on this digital realm. So that's certainly part of it. I would actually want to argue that is our standard for reality even in the physical world having an impact. I don't know that virtual worlds have to be similar. Maybe this is kind of the initial case. Take a virtual world which is very similar to a physical world, and allow that if one is real, then the other one is real. But I think we ought to be open to virtual worlds which are nothing like the physical world and work in fundamentally different ways and so on. And then we'd say that would then be very, very different from human reality. But I think even that that could still be real. We shouldn't restrict the real to the familiar.
- [36:17]
B
I think this is a really interesting and important point and a thread worth pulling because everything I've said so far has been assuming a mirror of nature has been assuming that we derive these illusions from what we're used to. But there's so many different ways of creating a reality. A reality where we can see infrared, a reality where there's no gravity, but also an abstract reality. I'm thinking of the end of the movie 2001 if our listeners know that games where there are diamonds being eaten by circles and things like that. How liberating do you think it would be if we accepted A, that these are real and B, that we now have the ability to choose our own realities? Is that a liberating experience? Is it an overwhelming experience? Is it? What does that do for human freedom?
- [37:16]
C
Actually, the very title of my book, Reality plus, was meant to have a connotation of there are multiple realities. We could be in a multiverse of multiple realities. We may even be able to some degree to choose between them. Actually, I originally thought about calling the book Reality 2.0. Here is our successor to our original reality. And then someone said, well, come on, that sounds like 1990s and you've got mail. And 2.0 is very, very outmoded. I thought reality plus, okay, now putting a plus on the end may be a cliche these days, but at least it's a 2000 and twenties cliche. It's like every streaming service is Paramount and Apple TV and so on. I thought, well, actually, maybe that's appropriate. Reality Plus. Maybe we'll eventually have a streaming service of virtual worlds that we can interact with. I mean, already we have this with video games. But you can imagine once virtual worlds and VR is much better developed, then we'll have many different choices of virtual universes to interact with. And if somebody wants one that's very deeply, say, science focused, you can do that. If someone wants one that's very deeply pleasure focused, then they can probably do that. You'll get to inhabit wholly new bodies, perhaps maybe new realms with new dimensions. And I think this is probably part of the excitement, I think, of virtual reality. Reality enables us to explore not just this one world, but the vast space of what philosophers call possible worlds. You know, there's one actual universe, but even Leibniz thought there's any number of possible universes. I mean, he went on to say, somewhat implausibly, that we live in the best of all of them. But in any case, it's like you might see VR as making real this idea that there are all those worlds out there and tons of them from places that we could merely imagine to universes we can actually explore.
- [39:17]
B
So let me pose the main question I keep hinting at and ask you, how do we start answering it? Someone says to you, are we living in a simulation? How do I figure this out? Actually, is, how do I figure this out? The first question is answering the query the first thing you do. Or do we have to do anything before when someone poses the question, are we living in a simulation? Is there preparatory work that we have to do? Is there a certain way that we have to conceptualize the question? Or can we dive right in? And if so, what does that look like?
- [39:55]
C
I mean, you probably, as a philosopher, we all like making distinctions. And I'd say, well, when you talk about the simulation hypothesis, what do you actually mean? Is it merely the idea that reality is digital? For example, some physicists think reality is digital. Or maybe is it essential also that there's a simulator, someone who set up the simulation? I think standardly, when people talk about the simulation hypothesis, it's actually quite important that the simulation is set up by somebody, maybe another being in, if you like, the next universe up. Where the simulation got created in the Matrix, I guess the simulation was created by machines in the next universe up. So I normally think of the simulation hypothesis as at least having those two components. There's a digital reality that was actually set up by somebody to simulate a world.
- [41:01]
B
Can there be a simulation that evolved by accident? Right. One of the claims of the current universe we're in is that there is no designer, that evolution over time and accident and all these things has led us to this unique experience. And we have tried to figure that out via survival of the fittest and things like that. Can simulations appear the way that the Grand Canyon appears through accident and time in the Colorado River? Or does there have to be a Simulator.
- [41:40]
C
I mean, I think in principle there could be a simulation without a simulator. You could imagine the physicist Lee Smolin put forward a hypothesis where somehow different universes evolve by some process of evolution, by natural selection, where black holes produce baby universes. Maybe that could somehow happen with simulation. Someone could set up a world, a process by which simulations evolve, and any given simulation at least, would just be brought into existence quasi randomly. I don't want to exclude that hypothesis. I guess I'd say that's just not the core case of the simulation hypothesis that I'm working with. I think of the core case as there's a simulator who sets up a digital world. And then we can think about some of these more extreme cases. Of course, this makes a difference to how we think about the questions about God that you started with. If there's a simulator, then we start who actually created all this? That at least raises the question, is that being somehow like a God, Whereas if the simulation itself only arrived through a process of evolution, then maybe we're somehow back into a world that less obviously require a God.
- [42:55]
B
And you have this very interesting side conversation, which I don't want to spend too much time on as to. Just because we have this larger, powerful creature doesn't mean we have to worship them. Right. And that there's this value relationship that we can apply to a God creature or a creator creature. But I'm very interested in the creation side rather than the ritualistic or attitudinal side. So, okay, someone asks, do we live in a simulation? What's the first step? How do you try to figure this out?
- [43:30]
C
Well, I suppose we can look for evidence. In fact, there are people out there right now who are maybe looking for positive evidence that we're in a simulation. Some people find inspiration, say, the current political moment, if they think, you know, surprising things have happened. I Remember after the 2016 presidential election, and then there was this whole thing at the Oscars. They announced the wrong movie. The New Yorker had an article, Were the Oscars evidence that somehow we're living in a simulation? They thought the Oscars may be combined with Trump, maybe combined with all kinds of new, outrageous things happening with technology.
- [44:07]
B
Only in a simulation could anyone think that Keanu Reeves is a good actor.
- [44:12]
C
I think of the Matrix as a masterful performance by Keanu. He defined his own reality. But, yeah, so you could look for positive evidence that we're in a simulation. And maybe if we were in a simulation, the simulators could somehow demonstrate it to us. They could take the Empire State building and turn it upside down and show us the source codes. We could, in principle, I think, get strong evidence we are in a simulation, but just say we don't get evidence of that sort. The evidence we get seems kind of neutral between simulations and not. Then the question is, is there any way to know? And I think maybe in that situation we'll never be. It's possible we'll never be certain that we are in a simulation, never be certain that we're not. But there are at least probabilistic or statistical considerations to work through here. And one idea which goes back to the philosopher Nick Bostrom and the futurist Hans Moravec, suggested that in the history of the universe, if simulation technology is possible and if people actually use it, then we should expect that most beings of a relevant level of sophistication will actually be in simulations, because simulations are eventually going to be very easy to make. Then we should expect that, yeah, simulations will outnumber non simulations. And at that point when the universe is a whole, there's a certain limited number of people at level 0, non simulated. Then there'll be people at level 1, simulated, created by them, people at level 2, simulated by the people at level 1, and so on. It starts to look like a small population at level zero, large population at level one, level two, level three. And then you start to say, what are the odds that people, we are actually one of the lucky ones at level zero? And statistically it might start to seem quite improbable that we're at level zero. So that's Bostrom's argument that actually we should take very seriously the hypothesis that we're in a simulation, because statistically that may be the normal case.
- [46:18]
B
So let's stick with that for a second, in part because math is very hard to do on the radio. But one of the arguments that people use when they're asking whether or not there's extra, extraterrestrial life, they say that the universe is so large that the fact that we have no evidence of it doesn't mean anything. It's more likely that there is and that beings can't communicate than it isn't. And then there's counter arguments and all that kind of stuff. And so you're suggesting something analogous, which is. And tell me if I get this right, once you can make a simulation, you can make many simulations, and once you can make a simulation or many simulations, you can make many beings. So in my simulation, I can have 10 Sims, or I can have a million sims. There are always going to be more sims than creators. And because there are always going to be more sims than creators, the odds of you being a simultaneous are higher than the odds of you being a creator. So just mathematically, we are more likely to be in a simulation than not.
- [47:31]
C
That's basically got it right. And furthermore, even if you're a creator, that doesn't rule out the hypothesis that you're a sim.
- [47:37]
B
Right, Right.
- [47:37]
C
Of course, we can create our own simulations, and people inside simulations may be able to create their own simulations in turn. So, yeah, the number of people at level zero may be quite small compared to all the vast numbers of simulations that they create and that the people they create create and so on.
- [47:54]
B
There's a great moment in the sitcom community where they're playing a video game, and one of the players, Abed, creates a thousand Abids whose job they are to create more Abids. And right. All of a sudden, then there's an exponential number of Abeds, and how does
- [48:12]
C
he know that he's the original Abed,
- [48:13]
B
and how does he know. So, okay, this is a question about you, more than a question about philosophy. But when you hear that, would it bother you if you were a sim, can you sign your name to these things other than intellectually? As a philosopher doing research?
- [48:35]
C
It is true that it's hard to believe these things in ordinary life, and it's probably true that I take them more seriously when I'm in philosopher mode or in intellectual mode than when I'm in ordinary life mode. I don't mostly spend my time planning for what happens if we discover the simulators or what impact this might have on us. That's true for a lot of philosophy. It may have impact for ordinary life, but nonetheless, we take the hypotheses more seriously when in the intellectual mode. But still, when I think about the impact, do I want to be in a simulation? Do I want not to be in a simulation? I mean, there's part of us thinks somehow we'd be more important and our lives would be more meaningful if we're at level zero, just being at the center of it all. On the other hand, I think we've kind of gotten used to the idea that maybe we're just living in one tiny little corner of the universe, on the distant edge of one galaxy among many, one star, one planet. I'd kind of gotten used to the idea that I didn't have to be exactly at the center of things for my life to be meaningful. So I think that discovering we're in A simulation? Well, maybe it's like discovering I grew up in Australia and Australia is not really at the center of the action, it's off to one side. But I got used to the idea, okay, well I'm from Australia and. And furthermore it was exciting because it meant there was a whole lot of the rest of the world to explore, as later I did. So maybe the simulation idea, somehow my life seems a little less important. On the other hand, if we're now part of this giant system of realities, reality plus, then maybe the fact that there's so much more reality out there, which maybe even one day we could get to explore, that's exciting. So I think part of me actually is hopes that maybe we could turn out to be in a simulation and that in principle maybe we could eventually figure out ways to move between these different levels of reality because that would make the universe even already so much richer than we thought.
- [50:45]
B
The Internet likes to talk about people being what they call NPCs, non player characters. And when people are self deprecating, they'll often identify themselves as NPCs. And often I'm not important, I'm not doing anything monumental in the world. I'm not having an impact. I'm just living my life. If it turned out that my simulation was the Truman show and everyone was watching me and gossiping about me and making fun of me or whatever, I would find that horrifying. If my simulation were the Matrix, as horrible as that that scenario is, and I was just living my life in the simulation, that feels like it would be easier to live in because I'm not the target of attention and ridicule and all of that sort of stuff. So to what extent does individual importance vary or relate to one another when we start thinking about ourselves in the simulation?
- [51:49]
C
Yeah, I think there are certainly going to be simulations and simulations and a lot is going to depend on how the simulation is set up. One targeted at me. Well, in some ways it might serve my megalomaniacal background views that reality exists just for me. But yeah, at the same time, if everyone's watching this and laughing, it's kind of humiliating. It may well be that actually in the Matrix there are both ordinary people who are biological people hooked up to the simulation, and then there are the agents who are different entirely. And you might think, well, there's a real question. There are the agents. Are they first class beings like the biological beings, or are the agents more like NPCs? This partly comes down, I think, to a question in the Philosophy of mind, which is, are all the beings in the simulation conscious? One way of thinking about the NPCs here is that these non player characters are what we call in the philosophy of mind. We call them philosophical zombies, creatures who act like they're conscious and so on, but actually nothing's going on on the inside. And in an ordinary video game, there are a small number of player characters who typically correspond to conscious humans, and there's a large number of NPCs who are typically simple algorithms and we think they're not conscious. So you might say, well, the very fact that I'm here now conscious means at least that I'm not an NPC in that sense. I'm not a philosophical zombie because I'm at least conscious. But yeah, even among the conscious creatures. I mean, the very fact that we're simulated, you might think, shows that, well, we're not having much effect on the rest of the universe. So that already decreases our importance. But is that so different from living on one planet in a giant universe? People have argued that makes us insignificant. So maybe the simulation hypothesis would extend our insignificance of that kind, but maybe that's a kind of insignificance that we were already getting used to.
- [53:58]
B
When philosophers of mind talk about consciousness, does it change its nature in. I'll just call it reality versus a simulation. In some sense we've got the idealist tradition where this idea that mind is somehow abstract and that our consciousness is something more than our physicality. But the modern point of view, certainly from neuroscience and pharmacology and things like that, is that the brain is this piece of meat that has synapses and neurons and electrical currents. And there's off and on. And a lot of neuroscientists and neurophilosophers treat the brain as somehow much more like a computer than like a mind. So when we talk about the mind in a simulation, when we talk about consciousness, are we rejecting the idealist tradition of an abstract consciousness for a much more materialist perspective? Or are there more similarities in what consciousness means between, again, reality, whatever that means, and the simulation?
- [55:18]
C
Yeah, consciousness remains very mysterious and there's an awful lot about it we don't understand. And I think that some of these issues about simulation hypotheses can be neutral about the exact metaphysics of the mind. But there are places where it does make a difference. For example, some people think minds are essentially biological and that, for example, an AI system could never have a mind. I'm not so sure about that myself. But just say that was true, then it makes some versions of the simulation hypothesis harder to maintain. For example, the hypothesis that the entire world is simulated, including my mind, I call this a pure simulation. If we lived in a pure simulation with nothing biological in it at root, and if consciousness required something biological, then it looks like our consciousness potentially rules out the pure simulation hypothesis. But I would say even that would leave open another hypothesis, which is what I call a biosimilar, a biological creature. And interacting with the simulation. In the Matrix, the agents were pure sims, they were simulated AI creatures. But Neo and Trinity, they were bio sims. They were biological creatures in a pod interacting with the simulation. And if that's the case, then that's totally consistent with Neo and Trinity being conscious and consciousness being biological. So we just have to. Then if it turned out that you think consciousness is essentially biological, then there may be some versions of the simulation hypothesis you'll reject, but there may be other ones you can be open to. And in general, I think we don't know right now exactly what the basis of consciousness is. Is it computational, is it biological, Is it something else entirely? I think if it's something computational or informational, we would expect it to be present in a simulation. One basic question, does it require a very specific substrate? If it requires a very specific substrate, like biology, then we're going to have to make sure our simulation is made out of that substrate for this to work at all. But yeah, you get many permutations.
- [57:26]
B
By substrate you mean some kind of material?
- [57:28]
C
Yeah, what it's made of, does the material matter or is it just the information that matters? That's a long standing debate in the philosophy of mind, which is still going on today. I just read an article by a well known neuroscientist, Anil Seth, arguing for what he calls biological naturalism. Consciousness actually requires biology. So that's still a very serious view, probably a minority view, but still a very serious view in the neuroscience.
- [57:55]
B
So we've had an empiricist argument trying to discover whether we're a simulation or not. And that's looking for evidence, looking for glitches in the matrix, looking for unlikely events. Maybe this is the wrong term, but purely deductive argument, the mathematical arguments statistically that it's more likely to be a simulation than not. Are there other core arguments that people debate about to answer the question, are there other big ones that we should know about?
- [58:28]
C
So yeah, there's the statistical argument that maybe we are in a simulation. There is potentially this consciousness argument that we're not, we're conscious and we're not in a simulation. Some people. There's this whole realm of arguments that maybe the universe couldn't be a simulation because computers could never do it. The physicist Roger Penrose, for example, has argued that human beings have capacities that go beyond the capacity of any computer. As witnessed by our powers of mathematical reasoning. We can solve problems that no computer could ever solve. And he's actually used this to argue that the laws of physics may be non algorithmic and uncomputable. If the laws of physics are non algorithmic and uncomputable, then at least a classical computer will never be able to simulate our physical world. I think that might still leave open the possibility, though, that maybe a non classical computer, maybe the right kind of quantum computer, could potentially simulate our physical reality. But this is a point where some of the details of physics might actually begin to interact with the simulation hypothesis. And in recent years, quite a number of physicists have written about the connection between those domains.
- [59:45]
B
So the argument isn't just that it's now technologically impossible, but that structurally, the very nature of technology, it would not never be possible to have that kind of computational.
- [59:58]
C
At least on a classical computer, maybe the right kind of non classical computer could do it.
- [60:03]
B
Okay, so as we start to wrap up, you argue in the book that we will never know, did I read that correctly? That we'll never know for sure if we are in a simulation?
- [60:17]
C
I said we may never know. Maybe if we are in a simulation, we could get evidence for it and the simulators could invite us to upload our minds and take a trip into other parts of reality. I don't rule that out, but I think we may well never know.
- [60:34]
B
You want to keep your options open.
- [60:35]
C
Yeah, I'm still hoping that maybe they'll reveal themselves one of these days.
- [60:39]
B
So the last question. This is a larger disciplinary question. It is often the case that that. And in fact, it is most often the case that philosophy doesn't come up with definitive answers. Bertrand Russell has argued that it only looks that way because when philosophers come up with answers, we start to call it a different discipline. Right. So we didn't understand the stars. Once we understand the stars, we call it astronomy, not philosophy anymore. Putting that kind of thing aside, the great questions of philosophy seem almost always up to debate. That's where we are now with this discussion. So the question is, what makes it worthwhile? Why should we have this conversation? And why, other than the fact that you're just personally interested in it? Is this a valuable conversation to have?
- [61:38]
C
I think philosophy is valuable in all kinds of ways, over and above just discovering the answers to questions. If you've got a kind of a model of philosophy where it's modeled on science, well, science raises questions and sometimes answers them and sometimes uses them to build technology and so on. When philosophy goes really well, that can happen. This is the idea from Rasol that Newton considered himself a philosopher, solved a few philosophical questions, put them to work, and we called it physics. Something similar happened, at least with psychology and maybe with economics and parts of linguistics. They originated in philosophy. And then we carve off some part of the question that we can actually address and potentially solve and gain knowledge. That's one thing that can happen. But even short of that, I think just say we the part of philosophy that hasn't at least yet discovered the answer to these questions, like how do we know everything is real? Or could all this be a simulation? I think thinking about those questions can lead us to certain forms of understanding. I guess the traditional definition of philosophy, the literal definition of philosophy, is love of wisdom. Wisdom is important, but maybe even a little deeper here is understanding. So love of understanding, we can come to have a certain understanding of questions about, about reality, knowledge and value. We can kind of use these questions to address what is it that we really value, what is it that we seek when we seek understanding, what is it about reality that would enable us, that could potentially enable us to know it without answering, without actually delivering us answers once and for all? I think philosophy can deliver understanding, and that's a lot of way I'm why I'm interested in philosophy. At the same time, I've got to say, I am also interested in answers. I would like one day to find answers to some of these questions. And if it turns out that one part of me is psychology didn't answer all the questions of the mind, but it carved off a few questions that could be understood scientifically. Part of me hopes that maybe in a few decades we'll have a field of virtual reality studies and so on that's at least carved off some of these questions into a rigorous science or some other discipline that actually was then making rigorous progress and delivering us knowledge, maybe not of every one of the giant philosophical questions that doesn't usually happen, but carves off a few more questions that we can answer. Philosophy's done it before, and hey, maybe we can do it again.
- [64:21]
B
It's a conversation that I would enjoy being a part of. Dave, thank you so much for joining us on why this has been a fascinating conversation and really something that touches upon the central questions of today. So thank you for joining us on why.
- [64:35]
C
Thanks. It was great talking to you.
- [64:36]
B
You have been listening to Dave Chalmers and Jack Russell Weinstein on why philosophical discussions about everyday life. I'll be back with a few more thoughts right after.
- [64:51]
A
Visit IPPL's blog PQED philosophical questions every day for more philosophical discussions of everyday life. Comment on the entries and share your points of view with an ever growing community of professional and amateur philosophers. You can access the blog and view more information on our schedule, our broadcasts, and the Y radio store at www. Philosophyanpubliclife.org.
- [65:28]
B
You're back with Jack Russell Weinstein on why philosophical discussions about everyday life I was talking with David Chalmers about virtual reality simulations trying to figure out what the world really looks like and whether or not we are simulations in a larger game. Obviously we're always interested in the main question, whether or not we live in a simulation or not. But there's so much more along the way that can interest us. And there are a lot of details to focus on in today's discussion. But I think that there are some major takeaways that are worth thinking about. The first is that what we call virtual reality is meaningful in itself, and it's meaningful in itself in a couple different ways. The first is we can't just dismiss things because they're a game. We can't just wave our hands at our friends or our kids emotions based on what happens on the Internet or what happens in their Oculus or something because it's not real. It is real because it has real effects and people have real emotions. But also it's real because it is a component of their world. It's a component of how they understand things. It's a component of how we situate ourselves. And so the term virtual reality doesn't quite do the experience justice. The second thing is that reality is bigger and more variable than we give it credit for. That one of the reasons why we can think about the possibility of being a simulation is that we're constantly discovering new ideas. We're constantly discovering new aspects of the universe. We're constantly being able to reimagine things in a way that no one has taken seriously before. And that also reminds us that reality is a place of experimentation. We could create a reality where justice is the most important thing, or a reality where pleasure is the most important thing, or reality where togetherness is the most important thing, or reality where meditation is the most important thing, we can use the multiplicity of realities to really fundamentally understand what's important to us and what the fundamental substrata of the world really is. But there's one other thing, and that is the following. When we open the door to the possibility that we live in a simulation, we open the door to the possibility of wonder. We opened the door to the possibility that there is always more for us to think about, to meditate, to find beautiful and horrible, and to see ourselves in the mirror through the more variable reality is, the more simulations there are, the more layers there might be, the more we can explore. And that means that the human experience is is profoundly infinite. And that means we'll never get tired and we'll never get bored. And I suspect we'll never get obsolete. With all of that said, if you've been listening to this episode on Sunday evening on Prairie Public, please know that a longer version with almost 30 more minutes of discussion is available online and as a podcast. Visit yradioshow.org to listen or subscribe for free. For everyone else, rate us on itunes and Spotify to help spread the word about the show, follow us on all the usual social networks. Our handle is always Yradio Radio Show. And please help us continue broadcasting by making your tax deductible donation@yradioshow.org Click donate in the upper right hand corner to go to UND Alumni's donation portal. We exist solely on the money you provide. Thank you again to my guest David Chalmers, the folks at Prairie Public, especially our engineer, Tay Calloway. I'm Jack Russell Weinstein signing off for Y Radio. Thanks for listening. As always, it's an honor to be with you.
- [69:33]
A
Y is funded by the Institute for Philosophy and Public Life, Prairie Public Broadcasting, and the University of North Dakota's College of Arts and Sciences and Division of Research and Economic Development. The music is written and performed by Mark Weinstein and can be found on his album Lua E Soul. For more of his music, visit jazz flutewinstein.com or MySpace.com MarkWeinstein Philosophy is everywhere. You make it, and we hope we've inspired you with our discussion today. Remember, as we say at the Institute, there is no ivory tower.