It is hard to imagine people spending their lives in virtual reality (VR) when the experience amounts to waving your arms about in the middle of the lounge with a device the size of a house brick strapped to your face.
Yet this is where humanity is heading, said philosopher David Chalmers, who believes in embracing the fate.
Advances in technology are likely to deliver virtual worlds that rival and then surpass the physical realm, and with limitless, convincing experiences on tap, the material world might lose its allure, he said.
Illustration: Mountain People
Chalmers, a professor of philosophy and neural science at New York University, makes the case to embrace VR in his new book Reality+.
Renowned for articulating “the hard problem” of consciousness — which inspired Tom Stoppard’s play of the same name — Chalmers sees technology reaching the point where virtual and physical are sensorily the same and people live good lives in VR.
“A common way of thinking about virtual realities is that they’re somehow fake realities, that what you perceive in VR isn’t real. I think that’s wrong,” he said. “The virtual worlds we’re interacting with can be as real as our ordinary physical world. Virtual reality is genuine reality.”
It all started with French philosopher Rene Descartes. Chalmers was pondering his question of how we can know anything about the external world. Modern philosophy often reframes this as a Matrix-style poser: How can we know we are not in a simulation?
To cut to the chase, we cannot, Chalmers said.
All of which leads to VR.
In the decades ahead, Chalmers said we could ditch the clunky headsets for brain-computer interfaces that allow us to experience virtual worlds with our full suite of senses.
With advances in computing — in the next century, perhaps — those worlds might seem as real as the physical world around us.
On the point of philosophy, Chalmers said that even today’s virtual worlds are “real.”
A conversation in VR is a real conversation, he said.
The objects in the virtual worlds are real, too, just made of bits instead of quarks and electrons, he added.
As virtual worlds become rich and convincing we could build virtual societies, take on virtual jobs, and have motivations, desires and goals that play out in those environments.
“Most of the factors that make life meaningful are going to be there in virtual worlds,” he said. “There’s no good reason to think that life in VR will be meaningless or valueless.”
Yet where does this leave the physical world?
“In the short term we’re pretty clearly going to be based in physical reality, and I certainly wouldn’t recommend abandoning it, but in the longer term, it’s possible to imagine people spending most of their lives inside virtual reality,” Chalmers said.
The pursuit of the physical might come to seem a novelty or a fetish, he added.
There are plenty of pitfalls to be wary of, Chalmers said.
As fulfilling as virtual worlds could become, people need real food, drink and exercise, and perhaps even the odd glimpse of daylight, to keep their bodies from withering away.
The risks might be trivial for decades yet, but a gradual trend toward virtual living could eventually cause new health issues, Chalmers said.
In the book he describes numerous draws that could pull people in to VR. These are worlds in which people can enjoy superhuman powers, possess other bodies, experience new sensations and explore environments with different laws of physics.
With almost unlimited space, everyone could have a virtual mansion, or even a virtual planet, and if the physical world becomes dangerously degraded — by environmental collapse, nuclear war or an interminable pandemic — VR could offer a safe haven, he said.
However, the lure of VR might cause neglect on a global scale, Chalmers said.
Would climate change and other crises facing the physical world lose their urgency?
That would be a disaster, as “physical reality is really important. We’ve got to keep a grounding in it and treat it well,” he said.
These are not the only concerns. Virtual worlds are owned by corporations that want a return on their investment. In October last year, Facebook rebranded as Meta, reflecting its ambition to dominate the “metaverse,” the virtual world it wants people to work and play in.
Facebook whistle-blower Frances Haugen has raised serious concerns about more intrusive surveillance and data gathering in the metaverse.
There is also the risk of psychological damage, she said: If we are better looking and have better clothes and a nicer home in the metaverse, how will we feel when we leave?
“If virtual worlds are controlled by corporations, as they seem to be right now, will that lead to potentially dystopian realities where the corporations are controlling everything in our environments? I think there are obvious reasons to worry about that,” Chalmers said.
It is unlikely everyone would turn to VR, and some people would still value sheer physicality, he said.
“There may be a sense of authenticity in interacting in our original biological form, but it’s hard to see why sheer physicality should make the difference between a meaningful life and a meaningless life,” Chalmers wrote in his book.
“In the long term, virtual worlds may have most of what is good about the nonvirtual world. Given all the ways in which virtual worlds may surpass the nonvirtual world, life in virtual worlds will often be the right life to choose,” he said.
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