Skip to main content

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.

Hardback: 
Bookshop.org

  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mathematics with Love – Mary Stopes-Roe *****

Admittedly it’s early days (this review is written in January), but this, for me, is the surprise hit of the year so far! I approached this book with trepidation, but found it absolutely delightful. It is described on the cover as the “courtship correspondence of Barnes Wallis, inventor of the bouncing bomb”, and contains a series of letters between Wallis and his cousin and eventual wife Molly Bloxham, along with some useful annotation by their daughter, Mary. The courtship itself is not without difficulties, as Wallis was 18 years older than the 17-year-old Molly at the start of the correspondence, and her father, not surprisingly, wasn’t too pleased about the interest of such an elderly suitor, but that isn’t the only reason the letters are interesting – it’s also because of maths, and Wallis’s position in the UK as the engineering hero of the Second World War. (Incidentally, it seemed very strange to see letters addressed to “Barnes” – I had always assumed Barnes Wallis was a ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...
Post a Comment
Read more

On Time - Jim Al-Khalili *****

By a small margin Jim Al-Khalili's The World According to Physics is my favourite of his books, both because the 'three pillars' concept at its heart works so well - but also because it's short. On Time is somewhat heavier, but thankfully not a wrist-buster. It might seem at first sight odd that a book on a subset of physics is considerably longer than one covering the whole thing, but time is one of those subjects that inevitably involves considerable complexities and needs depth. As Al-Khalili establishes, it's hard to think of any other scientific concept where our perception of it - what he refers to as manifest time or psychological time - is so different from the view from physics. Some physicists go so far as to suggest that time doesn't exist at all. In the book, Al-Khalili sets out (to my mind quite successfully) both to explain why they think this is the case, but also why it's not the best interpretation of time. I'd certainly note that I...
Post a Comment
Read more