Get real! The problems of virtual worlds
S. Hussain Ather reviews David Chalmers’ “Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy,” in which realities, like brains, become more real the more virtual they become.
You’ve heard of reality, the world we live in every day. But what about Reality+, the one that Australian Philosopher David Chalmers discusses in his new book, “Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy” ? Reality+ is a form of reality that includes our own physical reality, augmented (AR) and virtual realities (VR). This “fully immersive virtual world,” Chalmers believes, can actually exist in the Metaverse.
Chalmers argues that, in the coming decades, VR will become nearly indistinguishable from our own physical world. Some promise VR’s potential to make our lives better — whether it’s through instant travel, entertainment, exercise, or therapy. The possibilities could be endless. Meta, formerly known as Facebook, epitomizes this as an integrated form of social media with VR. With equipment like the Oculus Quest headset, it could use a form of AR that’s part virtual and part physical without computer or smartphone screens.
After several hundred pages of examples illustrating his reasoning at every step of the way, Chalmers concludes that we can’t know for sure whether we are in a simulation. His reasoning can be a bit over-explained as it heavily relies on keeping our interest with pop culture references to games like “Minecraft” which may not always be necessary. In spite of that, Chalmers poses and answers the difficult questions as they arise. How might one search for or create meaning and value in the real world? What sort of ethical responsibilities and obligations would we be able to impose on ourselves and on others in such a world? Like a laundry list of existential crises, veering from timely and meaningful ones that may have implications in ethical and legal contexts to more personal, case-by-case bases of how an individual draws meaning in their own life, Chalmers never misses a mark with the relevant material.
Still, the book’s questions might be better posed as ones for meaningful and relevant discussion — not for such precise answers Chalmers provides. Chalmers dances around potential possibilities and speculation on each challenge and issue before he forms conclusions, slaloming through examples of arguments including Plato’s allegory of the cave and Descartes’ demon that wishes to whisper and deceive into the ear of the listener. Delving more and more into the epistemic and metaphysical barriers that prevent one from determining if their own reality is “real,” Chalmers supports his premise that the “real” is that which one may consciously perceive through its relations to other phenomena.
In more traditional psychological contexts, such as psychoanalysis, one may consider how the impossibility of “knowing one’s self” lay in the center of the difficulty of figuring one’s self out. Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek argues that, at the intersection of Marxist and psychoanalytic traditions, there is “something more real in the illusion than in the reality behind it.”
Chalmers also espouses a form of philosophical dualism in which the experience of consciousness itself does not depend upon the experience of physical facts of the universe. Laws must exist that connect the physical and phenomenological. With this, he puts forward a dualism of properties that can be used to explain and describe what goes on in our minds.
Remember, Chalmers is not a physicalist. He believes that, within simulations, we can know as much about the environment as we would in our own physical worlds. To him, the mind is a real, natural phenomenon — different from the physical. With his more idealistic takes, Chalmers might be well described as a Platonist, in contrast to a physicalist, which would imply that only the physical exists and that the mental is just the physical. As cognitive scientist Marvin Minsky claimed, “Minds are simply what brains do.” The mind and what we consider mental are supervenient on the brain, and, as such, the brain’s activity would include all of thought and cognition. We could use explanations of neuroscientific findings for mental phenomena like reasoning, emotions, and memories in the physical systems and processes of neural pathways and, with the advent of fMRI, scientists can decode how our brain circuits give rise to neural correlates of mental phenomena. If we perceive no significant differences between the virtual and physical environments, a simulation can become part of our reality.
Just as the recent revival of The Matrix revisits the metaphysics of the type of virtuality alongside simulation-driven games such as “Minecraft” and World of Warcraft, Chalmers goes on to argue this doesn’t mean the objects we experience in these worlds aren’t real. A reality check would mean asking 5 questions: Does it really exist? Does it have causal powers? Is it independent of our minds? Is it as it seems? Is it a genuine X? Like lines of green code that crawl across the screen, these sims also echo the ideas of one influential French philosopher, Jean Baudrillard. In his 1981 philosophical treatise, “Simulacra and Simulation,” Baudrillard examined popular culture and argued that reality does not exist in the technological world. All the rising forms of communication have made the realness we desire no longer possible to achieve.
Chalmers argues that the objects we experience in the virtual world similar to The Matrix or “Minecraft” worlds could be real to us. A reality check would mean asking 5 questions: Does the object really exist? Does it have causal powers? Is it independent of our minds? Is it as it seems? Is it a genuine X?
Like lines of green code that crawl across the screen, these sims (simulated avatars) also echo the ideas of one influential French philosopher, Jean Baudrillard. In his 1981 philosophical treatise, “Simulacra and Simulation,” Baudrillard examined popular culture and argued that reality does not exist in the technological world. All the rising forms of communication have made the realness we desire no longer possible to achieve.
Further, Chalmers argues that we could already be in virtual reality, like the one from the recent movie The Matrix Resurrections, or the games like The Sims or the “Creative Mode” from the video game Fortnite. As we can’t prove we’re not in a simulation, simulated beings probably already outnumber the “real” ones.
This changing nature of reality has found its influence across disciplines from artificial intelligence to neuroscience. Despite popular claims that neuroscience is grounded in the physical structures and systems of the brain itself, the field has found itself more and more relying on understanding the virtual. In no other area is this more apparent than with common thought experiments of uploading the mind to a computer, like installing a software update on a piece of hardware. Neuroscientists, for instance, are starting to reimagine a new form of the brain: a “virtual” one. Whether it’s the simulated avatars revealing their true form on the big screen or scientists staring at a brain image on an fMRI scanner, the idea of a “virtual brain” is becoming more and more real. These sims would become fully conscious — just like us — with rights and responsibilities, just like the ones we humans have.
In “Virtual Connectomic Datasets in Alzheimer’s Disease and Aging Using Whole-Brain Network Dynamics Modeling” (recently published in eNeuro) the researchers describe how they constructed “virtual” cohorts of Alzheimer’s patient cases with missing or incomplete data. This article illustrates an important trend (or possibly paradigm shift) in neuroscience toward research on a “virtual” brain that can show us more of who we really are, even if it’s only in our own neuroimaging techniques.
Such “virtual” brain research raises a fundamental paradox in brain imaging: the more we reveal the “real,” natural state of the brain (and ourselves) through neuroimaging techniques, the more we rely on these virtual digital constructs of images and visualizations. We delve more into the virtual world to find out what’s real.
As it echoes the European Union’s “The Human Brain Project” (HBP), which sought to design a supercomputer that could make an in silico brain (entirely modeled by computers), these “virtualized” forms of neuroscience research can demonstrate a powerful in silico knowledge of the brain’s “real” nature. Brain images are meant to show us how real and natural we are (the neurophysiological nature of the brain itself), but they don’t. Seen as digital constructs (the images, visualizations, and forms of data we produce), the virtual data draws us deeper into the VR the more we believe we can see the brain for what it is.
Chalmers has also devoted his career to grappling with the more difficult mystery of consciousness and subjective experience. Could we explain these phenomena that exist without their own physical nature? Since the philosopher formulated the “hard problem” of consciousness at age 28, he has sought answers to the question of why these structures in our brains can be conscious at all. Explaining away our behavior through the physical and neurochemical reactions in our brain alone is one thing. Trying to formulate the subjective experience and make meaning of consciousness, Chalmers believes, simply can’t be done.
Now then, Chalmers concludes, would this life be meaningful? Yes, he believes. Whether real or virtual, we can find meaning in life — much like Reynolds did. While Neo has to come to understand there is no spoon, we can have a (meaningful!) digital spoon. Could we live a meaningful life with significant goals and aspirations while being able to reach them in our virtual world? Chalmers acknowledges the limits of moving to a virtual world, though, that a virtual world might not give the values we want in our physical world, and, as such, should be considered a supplement to the physical world — not a replacement for it.
Similarly, in the context of brain research, we do want, on some level, to see ourselves and be captivated and engrossed in a world full of meaning. In a virtual world, does this organ that performs thinking, wanting, and desiring still allow us rational agency, free will, and conscious experience? Does it still have its own place? We could, indeed, see brain-computer interfaces in which our eyes and sensory organs access the same sensory experiences that AR glasses or contact lenses would provide. From there, we may even be able to observe our own selves from a position outside or beyond our own cognition, will, and desire. If the “virtual cohorts” of data (synthetic datasets made from a multitude of virtual connectomics beyond individual subject or patient data completion), ready for machine-learning applications in clinics, could complement actual empirical datasets, they could potentially facilitate learning through “data augmentation.” Such virtual brains could even replace the need for real data.
How strongly does Chalmers believe these simulated brains could parallel biological brains? He claims that simulated brain activity is based on structuralism or the “Principle of Organizational Invariance,” as he introduced it in his first book The Conscious Mind. Human consciousness is the result of a structure that interacts with its own sensations, mental images, and feelings, thus creating complex experiences. If consciousness could be uploaded from one platform to another, more nuanced accounts of understanding models of thought could be developed. This greater understanding and the ability to see the world in more vivid details means perceiving such virtual brains as more real.
The influencer on Twitter or Instagram who prefixes their account name with “real” to let you know their other accounts aren’t disingenuous wants to show a part of themselves that represents more of who or what they really are. They understand our insatiable need for reality, truth, and objectivity in live reporting, the newsflash, the eye-witness report, etc. They know how tightly we want to hold onto the idea that the media is a (if not “the”) source of truth in a sea of misinformation.
We follow them because we love seeing and reading messages that show us more of the true or real nature and feelings of someone else. It’s as though we are all self-aware that we live lives that are fake otherwise. What’s really going on, whether it’s leaked highly classified information from an organization or the private intimate thoughts on a CEO’s Twitter feed, is Baudrillard’s “hyperreal,” just like the pictures of the brain we observe in neuroimaging research. While a mirror might say, “This is what you look like,” these images are more strongly meant to say, “This is you”. These pictures are meant to represent more truthfully and realistically what there is than what we would otherwise be able to see. As we delve deeper into them, especially through more virtual and simulated ways of performing research in neuroimaging, there further blurs the boundary between the reality produced by these images and the simulation of that reality. They’re meant to be taken as they are. Is this sort of hyperrealism of brain images like the indistinguishable simulation theories that Chalmers imagined?
What we see when we take a look at an image produced by fMRI techniques is the simulacrum, the ersatz of something that was always missing, something which is (necessarily) lacking. Consider the images produced by magnetic resonance imaging itself: a simulated, virtual image upon which there can be something real we observe, showing us something that there is we wouldn’t otherwise see. In the anti-hedonistic thought experiment of philosopher Robert Nozick, he asked if we’d be willing to plug our brains into a supercomputer that we could use to give us any experience we could want. With this simulation, the brain’s reality would not be our own reality, and this computer could be used to create experiences and realities from which we, ourselves, would be missing.
Just as Baudrillard posed how our obsession with the real has become a type of realness that leaves us always wanting more and more authenticity and integrity to what we consume and produce, the virtual worlds described by Chalmers are the epitome of this type of realness. Reality+ might be the aptest name for a type of reality that’s more real than real. Perhaps the world is changing alongside reality. But, before we can figure that out, it may be worth wondering what that sort of reality truly is. And, when it comes to brain imaging, is there more than meets the eye?
