48 | New Scientist | 29 January 2022
Features Interview
“Virtual reality is
as real as physical
reality, but just
different”
What can virtual reality tell us about
real reality and the nature of existence?
David Chalmers reveals all
to Richard Webb
T
HE Australian-born philosopher David
Chalmers has long made waves in the
world of consciousness. In 1994, at the
age of just 28, he coined the phrase “the hard
problem of consciousness” to describe the
seemingly intractable problem of subjective
felt experience – why there is something it is
like to be you. Two years later, he developed the
concept of “zombie” thought experiments –
using theoretical agents identical to us in
behaviour and outward experience but with
no inner life – in an attempt to tease out the
nature of conscious experience.
In 1998, Chalmers struck a famous bet with
neuroscientist Christof Koch that we wouldn’t
discover a distinctive signature, or “neural
correlate” of consciousness, within 25 years.
Although we now understand a lot more
about the links between brain activity and
consciousness, with little more than a yearto go, Chalmers is quietly confident he
will win that bet. He thinks consciousness
can’t be reduced to a brain process. He has
speculated that it is a fundamental attribute
of the universe like space-time or mass,
perhaps tied to quantum mechanics.
Now co-director of the Center for Mind,
Brain and Consciousness at New York
University, Chalmers has turned his attention
from our mind’s relationship with the world
to our relationship with worlds created by
human minds. His new book, Reality+: Virtual
worlds and the problems of philosophy,
explores existential puzzles, including
what reality is, whether we are living in a
simulation and how we would know. And,
as Meta (formerly Facebook) and other tech
companies look to create digital “metaverses”
in which we can live our lives, he asks what
that will mean for humanity.Richard Webb: You describe your book as
a work of “technophilosophy” – what do
you mean by that?
David Chalmers: The name technophilosophy
is inspired by the philosopher Patricia
Churchland, who coined “neurophilosophy”
back in the 1980s for a two-way interaction
of neuroscience and philosophy.
Technophilosophy is something similar
for technology. On the one hand, it involves
thinking philosophically about technology –
about computers, the internet, artificial
intelligence, smartphones, virtual reality and
so on: is virtual reality genuine reality?, can
AI creatures have minds?, and questions like
that. But the second half is using technology
to think about philosophy: using AI to shed
light on philosophical questions about the
human mind and human consciousness, or
virtual reality to shed light on big traditional