Reality+ - David Chalmers ***

Thanks to major IT companies putting a lot of time and effort into it (not to mention changing their company names), virtual reality is rarely out of the news at the moment. So it's timely that David Chalmers should attempt an exploration of the nature of virtual reality. What he sets out to persuade us is that 'virtual reality is genuine reality'. That virtual worlds don't have to be illusory, the objects within virtual worlds are real, life can be good and meaningful in a virtual world and that the simulation hypothesis - the idea that what we usually think of as reality could itself be virtual, while not provable could be true.

I became a little wary early on as Chalmers is clearly a virtual reality enthusiast: he tells us he has 'numerous virtual reality systems' in his study. This is not normal. You might think from all the hype that everyone except you is an inhabitant of virtual worlds, but it's still a pretty small minority - around the 1 per cent mark in the UK - and there highly focussed on young gamers. Until the whole business is far less cumbersome and more high quality, I can't see it becoming mass market. (Remember when everyone was supposed to be watching 3D TV within a few years. That went well.)

However, while I don't agree with Chalmers on the idea that VR will soon be ubiquitous, I was still interested to see his arguments. Unfortunately, they turned out to be classic waffly philosophical ones. There was never any convincing evidence, for example, that VR was in any sense real - in the sense, for example, that without necessarily being able to vocalise it, we know what reality is and it should not be capable of being switched off. In a sense this issue reflects the nature of philosophy. I can define an object in a way that requires it to be made of atoms: quite clearly then it is not true that objects in virtual reality are real. That doesn't make me right - but equally it can't be countered.

I'll be honest, I found the constant philosophical noodling tedious - this is real 'how many angels can dance on the head of a pin' territory. (Funnily enough, there is little evidence much time was ever spent discussing angels and pinheads in reality - by which I don't mean virtual reality.) Because of the VR context I had expected more scientific basis for the content, but there was very little that went beyond attempts at proof by argument rather than evidence. The handwaving felt distinctly frustrating, but I suppose it's the nature of philosophy.

Chalmers had an interesting idea to explore virtual reality's relationship with true reality - and the book is worthwhile because of that - but I didn't feel I had learnt much at the end of its 450+ pages.

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Review by Brian Clegg

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