It poses many dangers and challenges, including the challenge of a corporation-dominated metaverse where corporations serve as the all-powerful and all-knowing gods who create the virtual worlds. I’m not predicting that VR will be a utopia. People already lead complex and meaningful lives in virtual worlds such as Second Life, and VR will make this commonplace. These worlds needn’t be illusions, hallucinations, or fictions. I argue that in principle we can lead meaningful lives inside metaverse-style virtual worlds. This idea helps us to address Descartes’ puzzle of how we can know anything about the external world. If I’m right, a simulation is an “it-from-bit” world where real objects are made of digital processes. There are still tables and chairs, planets and people. But I argue that even if we’re in a simulation like the Matrix, the world around us is perfectly real.
These ideas have led some philosophers to say that we can’t know anything in the world around us is real. This is a modern-day version of Rene Descartes’s idea that we might be in the grip of an evil demon producing sensations of an external world. I first argue that we can’t know we’re not in a simulation like the Matrix. This applies both to full-scale simulated universes, such as the Matrix, and to the more realistic virtual worlds of the coming metaverse. The central thesis of the book is virtual reality is genuine reality. You can think of Reality+ as physical reality combined with the metaverse of augmented and virtual realities, perhaps along with a multiverse of alternative realities, simulated and otherwise. Reality+ is my name for the universe of virtual and nonvirtual worlds.
Norton (US) and Allen Lane (UK) on January 25, 2022. Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy was published by W.
0 kommentar(er)
