The Future of Humanity in Virtual Worlds

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As technology develops, we may well have the choice of inhabiting lots of different virtual worlds. We can imagine a smorgasbord of virtual realities to choose from - and I think it's good in some ways. In the long run, I would hope that these virtual worlds aren't just sort of escapist avenues for new forms of experience. Many most of the things that we do in the physical world just now happening within virtual worlds. For example, serious political activism and building a society where people's lives are better.

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What does philosophy have to say about virtual reality (VR)? Under what conditions is "normal" reality preferable to VR? To what extent are VR experiences "real"? How likely is it that we're living in a simulation? What implications would the discovery that we're living in a simulation have for our beliefs about reality? How common is Bayesian thinking among philosophers? How should we think about identity over time if selves can be split or duplicated? What might it look like for our conception of identity to undergo a "fall from Eden"? What do people mean when they say that consciousness is an illusion? Finding a grand unified theory of physics seems at least in principle the sort of thing that science can do, even if we haven't done it yet; but can science even in principle solve the hard problem of consciousness? Might consciousness just be a fundamental law of the universe, an axiom which we must accept but for which there might be no explanation? Is consciousness needed in order to attain certain levels of biological evolution? How conscious (or not) are our current AI models? Statistically speaking, what are the most prevalent views held by philosophers?

David Chalmers is University Professor of Philosophy and Neural Science and co-director of the Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness at New York University. He is the author of The Conscious Mind (1996) and Reality+ (2022). He is known for formulating the "hard problem" of consciousness, which inspired Tom Stoppard's play The Hard Problem, and for the idea of the "extended mind," which says that the tools we use can become parts of our minds. Learn more about him at consc.net.

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