Chalmers on Virtual Reality: Realism on the Cheap?
Steffen Koch · Analysis · 2022
You sit in your office and put on the latest pair of virtual reality (VR) goggles. Suddenly, you stand in the middle of the Time Square. A car almost hits you. You move away from the street and find a 7-Eleven. You enter the store, greet the shop owner and buy a Coke. Outside the store, you open the can and start drinking. Episodes like this are likely to become a normal way of spending one’s time in the not too-distant future. VR technology will enable us to visit all kinds of places and do all kinds of things while sitting comfortably in our office chair. But are the things and the events we experience in VR real? In the above scenario: are you really having a Coke at Time Square? Or is that a mere fiction, akin to a kind of video game? In his recent book Reality+. Virtual worlds and the problems of philosophy (Chalmers 2022), David Chalmers advocates for virtual realism: ‘the thesis that virtual reality is genuine reality’ (p. 106). A key step in Chalmers’ case for virtual realism consists in showing that virtual objects and events meet the marks of reality identified by philosophers of the present and the past: they really exist, they have causal powers, they are mind-independent, they are non-illusory and they can sometimes be counted as genuine instances of their kinds. Although interesting in its own right, Chalmers argues that virtual realism also has important upshots for a whole range of moral and epistemological questions concerning VR.