If we're in a virtual reality, everything out there is still real, it's digital. Many people feel that when you live, when you interact in a virtual world, somehow it's an illusion, it's not real. I want to argue that the objects you experience inside VR are perfectly real. When you play a game like Beat Saber, where you slice digital cubes with your digital lightsaber, you're interacting with real digital objects,. They're genuine reality, they're merely digital reality. Now digital reality is different from physical reality, don't get me wrong, the digital is different from the non-digital, but they're still both real.
Throughout the year, AI development has taken significant strides. We are living in a society that is becoming increasingly reliant on digital technology, which soon could be flooded with computer-generated content. As technology advances, it will become harder to distinguish between the virtual and the real, eventually almost impossible. Is this a cause for concern?
In part one of this partnership with the Swedish publishing house and ideas forum Fri Tanke we hear from keynote speaker David Chalmers, Professor of Philosophy at New York University.
We’d love to hear your feedback and what you think we should talk about next, who we should have on and what our future debates should be.
This event took place in May 2023 in Stockholm.
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