66: We Might Be Living in a Simulated Reality

to have my buddy David Chalmers on the podcast. David is a philosopher at New York University and the Australian National University. Officially, he's Professor of Philosophy and co director of the Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness at NYU, and about twenty percent of the time he's Professor of Philosophy at ANU. His work is in the philosophy of mind and in related areas of fullilosophy and cognitive science.

He's especially interested in consciousness, but he's also interested in all sorts of other issues in the phosphy of mind and language, metaphysics and epistemology, and the foundations of cognitive science. Lots of I just had a nerd gasm there with all the all those words. Thanks David so much for Chad with me tonight. Thanks Gott, it's great to be with you in your podcast. Yeah. Well, you know there we you know, we're talking about you know how I

wanted to get you on the podcast in Schuch. You know, I promised you I wouldn't just ask all the standard questions. You know that everyone always asks you over and over you and what is conscious news? What is free? Will? You know? But I think what is really interesting is that you're telling me that you estimate about thirty percent probability that we are living in the matrix. Is that right? Oh? Yeah, I go, I go back and forth anywhere between ten

percent and fifty percent, but definitely greater than zero. Definitely definitely some chance. What do you think those are big numbers? Yeah? I never estimated it as that high. But I think that we need to like really totally define our terms and tell you what what living the matrix would mean to you. Well, the extreme case is that of an entirely simulated universe. So you know, right now we know how to make simulated worlds like virtual reality. You know,

there's sim City or sim life or sim Earth. But the extreme case is simulating the whole universe sim universe if you like. Then there's really two ways this could go. It could be a simulation that we go into that we're interacting with. You know, our brain is outside the simulation. That's how it goes with ordinary virtual reality, and that's how it was for Neo in the movie The Matrix. His brain was outside the simulation. Or it could be that the brain is simulated too, and we are ourselves

entirely creatures of the simulation. And it could be that as technology goes on, people are going to make simulations of universes like this, of both of those forms. That just raises the question, might that be the reality that we're in because we're in. Yeah, there might be no way to tell from the inside. There is no way to tell, but it would It seems like it would be quite an elaborate setup when you think of how many players there are in this world, down to like

the very microscopic ants. You know what I mean, I mean is in this idea is what every I mean, everything has to be simulated. If you can't have like part simulated world in part note right, well you can try, but you're gonna get in trouble. You know, I once saw this movie The Thirteenth Floor. Well, oh, I love that movie. I love that movie. Yeah, we know in that movie that turns out they just simulate southern California. And then the guy gets in the car and starts

driving towards Las Vegas. And at certain point the road says close for repair, go no further, and he keeps going and eventually the mountains turn into faint green lines. Remember that, I remember that. Well, you know what's interesting is that, I mean, a really clever way to do that would be obviously to in plant the memories and not you know, I think that you know, there exists all this big production, you know that someone would have to simulate, when in reality it's much smaller than that.

Just I just have the memories of it, right. Yeah, though, what happens when you try to go there? You know, you get on a plane to Yes, for a while, they just simulated Australia. Then I went to New York for the first time. I flew to New York and it's like, oh shit, now we've got to simulate New York. Well we don't have free will, you know, I mean, if we really I mean, the implication of the fact that we if we live in this kind of world, is that, I mean, we really don't have free will.

Right in that world we could have free will. We could. It's possible. Oh, I don't think it's inconsistent with free will. We could be living in a simulated universe but still be making our own decisions about what to do in that universe. That's a great point, I assume. Almost as I came out of my mouth, I then wanted to take it back because I then thought about, like, you know, what about genetic algorithms that we use with computers and stuff.

You know, they are warning you know, machine learning and stuff. It's not like we, in a way machines have free will when we you know, just program in probabilities and they kind of warn themselves. I mean, you might think that if our brain is part of the simulation, then that's worse. Then somehow, you know, we're going to be computers too, so we won't have free will. But it's not obvious what's worse about a computer here compared to just you know, the kind of computers that our brains are.

You know, either whether our minds are implemented in physical brains or on computers. You know, maybe they're both deterministic, and maybe there's a worry about free will in either case, but it's not clear why it's worse to have a silicon computer for a mind than to have a biological brain for a mind, or are free will is concerned. Yeah,

and you have a very interesting take on consciousness. And you know, they're most people when they say they're a dualist, people kind of laugh at them, you know, or they kind of like kind of say in academia, you know, they're like or especially and I should even be clear, I say, neuroscientists laugh at them. But you're a unique kind of dualist, right, Yeah, Well, dualism means many different things.

I think when many neuroscientists here dualism, they think, you know, something like there's a soul interacting with the brain that will survive your death and so on. I'm a duelist in a much weaker sense, and that I think consciousness is an irreducible property of the brain or of ourselves, one that can't fully be explained in terms of underlying goings on in the brain and ordinary physical processes. But this is something we're used to in the physical sciences.

We take some things as fundamental, like space and time and mass and charge. I think consciousness has to be taken as fundamental too. Now this is very controversial. You know, plenty of people disagree. But at the same time, I don't think there's anything remotely unscientific about this view, and it's totally consistent with all the work going on right

now in the science of consciousness. No, I agree. We had an interesting chat with doctor Single who talked about how the mind is not you know, purely in our skull. He very much is this believer in the mind as being this integrated, full flow of information that is deeply connected to the universe. And this is this is a scientist saying this, So you know, oh yeah, well this is a place actually where a bunch of my different views and interests into sect because yeah, number one, I

think that, you know, the brain could be computational. Number two, I think consciousness may be irreducible. But number three, in another line of work, I'm very much interested in the idea that the mind is partly a product of the environment. This is something that Andy Clark and I called the extended mind, where our interactions with the environment around us.

Often parts of our environment play the role of parts of our mind, as in the case where, for example, you know, phone numbers in my smartphones memory is taking over the role of my biological memory. I now remember phone numbers with my phone rather than with my brain memory. So you know, my environment there here, my smartphone is becoming literally part of my mind. I think that's consistent of this idea of integrating the brain with the environment.

I think so, you know, but just from like a personal perspective, when I have existential dread, it's not comforting to me to know that when my con when my brain stops functioning, and therefore this form of consciousness no longer exists. Even if my iPhone or all the things I've created, or all the extensions of me still continue, I will not there's a part, there's an eye that will never be aware of that is it? So that's

not how comforting is that to me? I think that's right, I mean, at least in so far as the extended mind hypothesis is concerned. There's always you, the conscious biological being at the center, and the claim would not be that the iPhone has a mind itself. The claim would be that it's kind of an extension of your mind that extends your campait. But if your brain was to die, then the iPhone going on, that wouldn't be much comfort

for you. To get something a bit more comforting, we might move to a slightly different scenario and think about

the possibility of uploading your brain onto a computer. We can't do that yet, but just say, eventually we could record all the information in your brain and the connections among all the neurons and their states and activation patterns, and gradually, you know, load them into a computer one at a time, until you know, for a while you were ninety percent brain and ten percent computer, and then

fifty to fifty, then ten ninety ultimately one hundred percent computer. Well, that's a kind of gradual uploading process, and some people, including me, are sympathetic with the idea that you could survive that process and at the end of that you might really be there. That wouldn't so much be extending the mind as uploading the mind. But since our focus here seems to be you know, technology of all sorts, that might be one way to use technologlogy to achieve

some kind of immortality. Well, my gosh, that is, you raise so many interesting questions without that the little thought experiment there, you know, of course, you know, you know the plank by plank, you know, issue about what what extent do we cease being who we are? Right? And I mean I I mean that I would be very interesting to like like self experiment in myself with that and and one and because I feel like, you know,

analogous is like when we start getting dementia. When we start it's almost like when our break starts, when our brain starts breaking down when we get really old. It's kind of a natural experiment of what happens, you know, kind of plank by plank when you lose that. I feel like if I'm when I once I start feeding that into the system, there will be a certain point where I really do no longer feel as though I

am myself, and then I will lose awareness. Eventually I'll lose awareness of myself and and then even though it's fed all to the computer, I'm just critical that that what I'm feeding to the computer there, like the computer kind of is taking over that consciousness. If we stipulate that the computers, the computer chips are playing exactly the same role in your cognitive system that the neurons were playing.

So maybe you wouldn't even notice the difference, and you keep behaving exactly the same way, in that same wonderful old Scoult way that we're all used to. You'll carry on doing your podcast with your computer brain, and the list is not going to be able to tell the difference. You won't be able to tell a difference from the inside. But in that case, might you be prepared to say it's still you. That's so interesting, because I mean, what is the objective truth? I mean, is it a was

that just a is that just an illusion? You know, like I mean, we technically, I'm definitely not this. I'm a completely different person than I was when I was ten from a cellular level, right, So you could make the case that it's an illusion that I'm the same person that I was when I was eleven. Right, Some people thing it's an illusion that we're the same person from moment to moment. Now, that's where it gets interesting,

That's where it gets yeah. Or maybe every night when we go to sleep, you know, we become unconscious and then in the dawn, a new consciousness breaks, you know, a new consciousness breaks open, a new person is born every day. I mean that, Look, that's a very interesting proposition, but it doesn't seem consistent with some facts, like when I wake up in the morning, I have a great

continuity of memories that I had the day before. Okay, memories help, But you know, you could I could create a tele porter duplicate of me who remembers being me the previous day, but isn't me? But who Okay, then who's creating you know, who's creating that? I mean, I'll be back to the simulation idea here again, Like I think we I think we're giving someone too much something, too much credit there, you know, for that it doesn't you know. My point of though, is that doesn't seem

most parsmonious. I mean a lot of these thought experiments. Yeah, so it's a simpler view that we're the same person who continues over time, and most people don't really believe

that we change our identities from day to day. But I think for similar reason reasons most people think the most pasimonious view is that we continue over our lifetime despite the change it matter, and extending that it's then tempting to say the most pessimonious view is if I uploaded my brain gradually and continuously to a computer, then I could continue that way. So I don't know if

I mean, this is so interesting, I don't know. If the best solution is to gradually do it, then I almost feel like for that continuity, I'd want to be one big dump immediately to kind of just jump snap into this new stage. I think once it's gradual, I feel like it just is not going to feel it's going to be very confusing. How do you feel about the case, though, if we do it non gradually? How do you feel about the case where we keep the old brain around, still still functioning, and upload it onto

a computer and there's a new person there too. No, I mean, right, the great great quest. I was actually just going to post, not like the fifty to fifty thing, but you know like that, like I like, I get fifty percent on the computer, and we know that fifty percent is enough all you need for conscious to emerge, and but but I like yours thought experiment better where it's one hundred hundred. Yeah, now that's fascinating, and I I, my gosh, what would what would be the case there?

I mean, it's not like you have a you've duplicated yourself, but you know you've duplicated your consciousness. You know, I we can kind of duplicate. You know. It's funny when you have like marriage, people who are married after a certn amount of years, they start looking the same, they started talking the same, and in a sense, little by little, when you're married, you're like duplicating consciousness with two people are still two people, though he's still two separate people

will think with each other. So likewise, you and your twin would probably you're uploaded twin would probably rapidly become two people. You'd be in different environments, having different experiences. But maybe it would be as if you would suddenly become twins. Saw something, Hey, here's my twin right over there.

Here's uploaded skull. He's just like me. Yeah, I could see as well me, you know, because yeah, clearly this stuff is not operating at a purely genetic level, because we know identical twins are often very different in lots of key ways. They don't have the same and a very different consciousness emerges. So we can't like just plank by plank transfer over genes and expect to get the

same thing. This one is a really, really tricky issue because even from a neuroscience perspective, you can't just completely replicate someone's neuronal structure of their brain and expect to get the same consciousness and memories out of the person. Right, maybe eventually, you know, they are working on this brain

mapping project and not even close yet. But I think one of the aims of the project is to eventually be able to map the activity of older neurons in the brain and all the connections via the Connectome project and so on. So who's to say that maybe eventually we couldn't map the whole state and maybe even further after that get the whole thing up and running on a computer. Yeah, who knows. I'm keeping an open mind. I'm certainly not. Yeah, it's not gonna happen in the

next ten years or the next twenty, but eventually, who knows. Eventually? Yeah, I mean this a lot of this come, you know, raises some fascinating questions about will cryogenics ever be successful. You know, there are people that are freezing themselves in the hopes that someday they will be able to up for exactly that's the hope, right or or the hope is that they'll find some sort of medical way to

solve something that we don't currently have. But I think a lot of people are hoping that you'll be frozen, so that like, even if it takes like twenty thousand years from now, oh you know, cryogenics is a kind of intermediate stop gap. You know, right now the technology is not ready, But just freeze my brain well enough, and maybe eventually the technology will be ready to unfreeze me.

I mean, one worry is that right now the technology is not good enough even to do freezing properly, and probably a lot of information is being lost in the freezing process. But yeah, I suppose people are just hoping that enough information is kept around that in that you know, a thousand years time or whatever. Yeah, some really smart super intelligence of the future will be able to reconstruct us. My advice is always, hey, we'll leave your don't just

leave your brain around. Leave a bunch of books and you know, videos of you and tapes and so on, so they have all the information they possibly can about you, and then they can try and reconstruct you from that. I love that idea. Have you ever thought about getting that done? Yeah? Could you make sure we leave this podcast in the cryogenic chamber with me that way and same for you, and then we'll have these Well, do you want to be in the same chamber Psychologists Reconstructed?

Do you want to be in the same chamber with me? Oh for sure? Oh yeah, Then who are they going to wake up? First? Well, I think that, you know, it certainly is very optimistic that like, well, ever, I mean, it doesn't look like humanity is going in a direction right now where we're gonna like, you know, that that

will be the case. Look, I sound very pessimistic right now, which I know is not good for a positive psychologists, But I don't, you know, I don't with everything's going in the world right now, I think it's much more likely that I don't know, it's twenty year, thousand years from now, are we going to reach a point where there's this great utopia and that it's like, oh yeah, sure, we're going to remember these people from twenty thousand years

ago and restic and and try to resuscitate them. Yeah. Well, there's a whole lot of ways things can go wrong, you know. I mean, I think we're entering a danger period right now at the at the human level, at the international level, but you know, a few years down the line, there's going to be a number of other I mean, short term there's nuclear weapons, longer term there's

climate change. But longer term after that, there's all kinds of existential risks to the whole human race, including the possibility of artificial intelligence and whether we might develop a eyes that somehow take over the world and then lead to lead to bad consequences. You know, there are a lot of people thinking about how we can negotiate all

these things in the right way. So I'm maybe I'm not as pessimistic as you are, but I do think there's plenty of ways things can go wrong, plenty of ways. So that's a triting question. What do you think about the singularity idea that Kurtzwell, he puts a sestemate really in his own lifetime. I like to separate the whole singularity idea of artificial superintelligence. There's the idea of of ais getting to be smarter than humans, and then there's

claims about the time frame. To me, the most interesting claims aren't the ones about the time frame. Yeah, racourse, while and others sometimes say, oh, it's just twenty or thirty years off. My own view is that's very implausible. AI actually moves very slowly. I mean, lately there's been a big bubble of excitement about AI be course of deep learning, but hasn't really corresponded to a fundamental advance.

It's really been more about the technology crossing a certain threshold where it's suddenly become useful, and there's still huge gaps to be crossed of a level of understanding cognition until we get to anything like a human level artificial general intelligence. So maybe it's one hundred years, maybe it's fifty years, maybe it's one hundred years. But for me, the interesting question is what happens next once you go

to a human level AI. Pretty soon after that, just by steady improvements, you're going to get to a better than human level AI that's more capable that we are. Then it's going to be, among other things, better at creating AIS than we are, So it's going to be

able to create an AI smarter than itself. That one will be able to create an AI smarter than itself, And this way we get to what some people call the intelligence explosion, the idea that there'll be a rapid path from human level AI to super intelligent, something way beyond what we can comprehend. And this sounds like science fiction. But a few years ago, twenty ten, I wrote a paper on this, trying to subject it to philosophical analysis, and I came to the conclusion there's actually a pretty

plausible argument here when we should take seriously. So I do think we should take very seriously the idea that we'll eventually get to human level AI, and not long after that there's the possibility of something way beyond us. Yes, I think that that is true. And what I envision is that the first stage of this is that humans will be using machines to kind of augment themselves. So

they'll be used. It won't be such a separation between like, you know, machines taking over yet it's almost like humans who are part machine part human kind of takes well, this is already happening via this kind of extended mind thesis. I talked about our smartphones and Google and so on. Those are already augmenting us and augmenting our intelligence and all kinds of ways, making us much more capable and knowledgeable than we were before. I suspected a few years.

Once we have, for example, once everyone is wearing augmented reality glasses that are recognizing things in our environment with AI and feeding us all kinds of information and AI advice, then we're going to turn There was this great book, science fiction novel by Charles Stross Acceleroando, where he called these things the exospecs. Everyone uses their artificially intelligent exospecs. One guy has his exospec stolen, then he turns into

a gibbering wreck. He just can't function anymore. And to me, that's a realistic that's a realistic future. It will come more and more to rely on these devices, and well, we will ourselves be augmented partially artificial intelligences for some period before we get to fully autonomous AI, for sure. And then what it's going to do for medicine, I

think is going to be huge. I think it's going to increase our life extension in the sense that you know, we'll have artificial hearts, you know, we'll have artificial you know, bit by bit we're going to start because we're already starting to see that now, and you can kind of take that to the degree, right Yeah, artificial eyes, artificial is, artificial nerves, artificial neurons. You know, people worked on neuromorphic retinas and so on. Before long it's going to be

at the level of the neurons. And you know, at some point, I don't know when exactly, at some point people are going to stop seriously thinking about this idea of the you know, the prosthetic implants in the brain. Yeah. No, I think it's going to I think that's inevitable. And you know, I think just going moving moving forward many years history, people will walk back on a certain epic of humanity that was a new form of human evolution.

You know, like we haven't seen a really can't imagine, although I feel like me and you are kind of imagining it right now. There will be this epic of humanity where there is this new form of evolution that just that that Darwin never could have ever even imagined, you know, because it's not organic evolution, it's not purely human evolution, I should say, it's a it's a new kind of evolution where it kind of becomes like this interesting arms race of of who and what countries can

have the greatest augmented technology. Yeah, I do think computer technology here is basically the game changer compared to anything that came before, because computer technology basically enables you to create simulated or artificial versions of almost anything you like. It allows you to create artificial minds, as we're seeing, you know, in this discussion about AIA. It also allows us to create artificial worlds, you know, simulated worlds, virtual

reality worlds. So it's easy to imagine that at some point, you know, a most of the people around are going to be artificial minds and be those people made some very large extent be inhabiting artificial or virtual worlds. After all, Why restrict us to this one world with all of its limits and specificity when there could be an infinite

number of virtual worlds to explore. It's easy to imagine, you know, even if we're not already simulated, then there's going to be a vast future of simulated universes ahead of us. No, I think that's right, you know, if we are I keep going back this idea, if we are assimilate, how did you come arrived to these? You said between ten and fifty percent and you change. I don't know if you're being tongue in cheek there, or do you actually like what's going to this calculus? I

don't know. There's this nice argument by Nick Bostrom that maybe we are in a simulation, and it's a probabilistic argument. The naive way to put it is that, look, we know that any advanced civilization and it's going to have the capacity to create a whole lot of simulated universes, so that ultimately there'll be way more simulated universes than unsimulated universes, and way more simulated people than unsimulated people.

Maybe ninety nine percent of all the people in the universe, all the conscious beings in the universe, will be simulated, and only one percent will be non simulated. And then you turn around and say, well, then what are the odds that I am unsimulated? What are the odds that I'm one of the lucky one percent? And presumably you go, well, maybe only one on one hundred, so it should be ninety nine percent likely that I'm simulated. But then you say, well,

there's a couple of loopholes in that argument. Maybe, for example, it could turn out that almost no super intelligence civilizations will choose to create simulations. They may decide not to, or maybe they'll all kill themselves off they before they get to the ability of creating simulations, or maybe for some reason simulated universes are impossible. So there's a few loopholes here, what I call simulation blockers. Maybe we'll die, maybe we can't do this, maybe we'll choose not to.

But then so maybe the conclusion is disjunctive. Either most beings simulated or one of these other things happened. So following that reasoning, and we say maybe, okay, I don't know which of those possibilities is the most likely, but it still looks to lot, looks like, you know, maybe at least twenty twenty five percent we're in a simulation and twenty twenty five percent for all the others. That's one way to get there. A bit of spurious mathematics

for you. Yeah, no, I really appreciate that answer. Actually, that helped me understand better what is going into that calculus.

So I feel like there's lots of things that is it possible that lots of these things that we do as humans are kind of like kissing off the simulators, Like we're kind of like cheating the system in a way, like you know, like what if, like we were meant to die at age one hundred and and you know we in some way that like the computer goes berserk if we do actually figure out this way of living much longer that we do things with technology where we

start simulating things our own selves and then I mean, it couldn't couldn't. Couldn't, couldn't like we be messing or tempting feet in a way. Yeah, it all depends on the motives and motivations of the simulators, and it's very hard to figure that out. It's almost like a theological position wherein these these simulators are our gods. They created the universe, and now we're trying to figure out their

character to figure out how best to please them. You know, should I be good the rest of my life so I get to so I get uploaded into the after life or or what you're saying. Okay, well, you know, maybe they care about this, maybe they care about that. Well here's another possibility. Maybe they've just created a million

universes overnight. They're running for just a whole bunch of just for scientific experiments, and they're going to the more run and in the morning they're going to gather statistics, and this is something they do as a matter of course in their labs every day. And they couldn't care less what we get up to. We're just we're just part of some giant and personal experiment for them. That all the appeals, we all the praying we like to uh to go it isn't isn't gonna help. We might

as well just live our lives. Well, that's very possible. And you know, what do you what do you make about the universe? And it's its scope is so enormous and and and you think, you know, there was this point where it's all started with a little tiny point, a little dot, right, you know, before it started expanding, And it's just fascinating to just think to yourself, like what was before that? And and and what what like what's the point? Like what like? Why why does that?

Why did that ever exist? You know? And like you know, if if time didn't exist before that, fine, you know that's fair enough, you know, but why you know, you know, I mean, these are like fundamental questions of human magestions. But the simulation hypothesis doesn't answer those questions. It just pushes it back a bit. Why do we exist cause a simulator of creator? That's okay, great, well, now who

created this? Why does the simulator exist? I mean, of course, this is an exact parallel of what you get with traditional questions about God. Some people want to explain the universe. Why do we all exist because God created us? Well? Great, well, that just now pushes back the question to God. How did God ever get there? So, yeah, you know, philosophers don't have really good answers. Anybody does open you at the answer. Let me tell you my pet theory of everything, Scott.

But it's it's still fun to talk to you about this stuff, like and just imagine what the different possibilities are? What are the different possibilities when we die? Right? I mean, is it possible that like this consciousness does wake up in something that's like oh, and I'm told that I was in a simulation? Is that possible? My inclination is to think that our brains are needed for our consciousness,

and as we die, probably our consciousness will die. But if we are in a simulation, and the the possibilities start to get more interesting. If we are in a simulation,

they're our brains are basically a bit of software. Correspond to a bit of software running on a computer, and if someone, if the simulators so choose, they presumably could choose that when people's biological bodies die, then they somehow they upload all that information from the brain, They extract that software, and they put it in some other environment. Maybe for example, they would use it to control some new body up in their own world, and for us

that could be experienced. I suppose it's something like moving to an afterlife, taking part in some kind of different universe, maybe even some kind of heaven. There was actually a Black Mirror episode about this in the recent in the recent New batch that was that was pretty good. I'm not saying that's the way it is going to go. I'm saying that's one one way it could go if we are in a simulated universe. That does raise interesting

quasi theological possibilities. So you know, maybe it just raises a tiny bit of hope for immortality and an afterlife, even from a completely naturalistic perspective. So one of the interesting things that for me, I've always been completely atheistic and not much sympathy for any kind of religion, but this is interesting to see how this idea of simulation technology can start to reinstate some fairly traditional theological questions

and are quite different naturalistic guys. Yeah, no, I I totally see that, you know, as you're as you're describing this, it sounds exactly like these ideas we've created of the afterlife. What what are some other earning questions that you have these days? You've a lot, You have a lot, you know, I mean, I think you a lot about technology in general and it's impact on philosophy, you know, some people, and on life more generally. You know, some people are

very techno negative. They think that it's all kinds of doom and gloom consequences. I tend to be techno positive. I'd love technology, you know, virtual reality, technology, AI technology, the Internet. There's all kinds of wonderful things, although of course it can be I've used as well as used as well as us well. Lately, I've got myself a whole lot of virtual reality tools to play around with in the in my in my office, in my study, I've got an Oculus Rift and an HGC vibe at

a Samsung Gear VR, and I've been playing around. Which one do you like best? You know, I think so far the HGC Vibe, although that's got these very cool room scale virtual reality with motion controllers. Although I just got the new controllers for the Oculus Rift called Oculus Touch, and I still need to set those up. But it's been amazing to play around with all this virtual reality. It raises all kinds of questions about the metaphysics, the

ontology of the world's in virtual reality. For example, how of these just hallucinations? Are they unreal worlds? Or is this some kind of real reality that we're interacting with in VR? You know, I'm actually inclined towards the view where virtual reality is a real reality. It's a reality made of computers, it's digital, but it's still real for all that, which I think goes against the most common

philosophical view, where it's some kind of illusion or fiction. David, I have been thinking, I'm so glad you said that, and I have been saying to people that I think that a human imagination is real in some sense as well. That is interesting. I mean, you can make an interesting

parallel from this. I just read a paper by someone saying, well, maybe dreams, maybe hallucinations or analogous to virtual reality in this respect, and then once you say, you know, if a dream can do this, hallucination can do this, why not imagination. Of course, imagination is to some extent under our control in a way in which what happens in the VR is not, So it's not as independent of us. Some people think mind independence, independence of us is a

strong condition on something being fully real. So maybe the imagination is just somewhere on the spectrum. But I think, you know, maybe still some extent our imagination has a certain autonomy. You know, you said dreaming runs wild. Yeah, you know, you said independent of us. And I mean that's interesting because there is so many selves. I mean, it is there's one sense that there is a simulator

in our body that is, you know, simulating. You know, there's particular brain networks that are doing the simulation of the imagination, and there's another part of us that is metacognitively viewing the simulation. So I not so sure that that is true, that there isn't a we that is not in control of it. That seems especially right in the case of dreams. Right, there's this dream spinner who when you're dreaming, you seem to have no access to

the dreams. Correct, they're just doing their thing. But imagination, I don't know if the two parts feel a bit closer together. When I imagine something, it feels like I can control it more than I can control what happens in a dream. But also it does seem to have some autonomy or day dreams will just evolve without me trying to do anything. My mind will wonder in different directions.

So maybe there's Yeah, there's also an imagination spinner who's at least to some extent, separate from the agent who's experiencing the imagination themselves. Yeah, maybe right. Thank you. You're the first person that call me crazy when I say I think imagination could I think I couldn't make it argument that imagination is real in some sense? So what do you play like when you do the oculostorp? Because I just my parents just bought me like a five

year old, did I? But for Haneka, they just bought me the police station for vr ther that one I don't have so first to hear how that goes. Yeah, and I'm very interested. I haven't tried the others, so I don't know the difference. But what do you play on the ocus? Like? What do you do with it? There's all kinds of video games available, you know, standard video games, space war games and first person shooters and

so on. Now, I am not myself much of a video gamer, so that's not really my thing, so sory I find myself doing doing other things, non gaming apps. Especially there's Google Earth on the HTC vive. That's extremely cool. You can explore the whole Earth, and I can actually go down to my home, get on the balcony of my apartment really and so it's not quite you know,

I can fly through New York. It's pretty amazing at the level of human beings and cars, and soon it gets a bit coarse grained and a bit wonky, but you know, flying over New York and VRS is pretty amazing. And there's all kinds of cool, little cool other little environments you can justin have it. You can see three sixty degree movies. There are environments where you can assemble

little contraptions. There are little lab demo games. Right now, it's you know, people haven't developed really full scale, rich realities, or when they have, they're typically been ported from a pre existing video game. But I think that kind of thing, you know, in the future, it's probably going to be a technology for social networking. Facebook brought out Oculus, and I think that's probably how they see it. In the future. We're going to be doing this podcast, not just the audio,

not even just video. We're going to hang out in VR and all have an avatar, and you'll have an avatar, and it'll be like we're talking to each other, and someone else wants to come in and listen to the podcast, then they'll just come into the VR with us and watch us talk. Hi, guys. I imagine a world where it's all beautiful people in virtual world. But because but because of that fact, people have not spent a time I'm keeping up their looks in the other the real

world though, you know, the other world. So you have a whole world of like really shall be looking people like that are all talking to the looking beautiful. Yeah, and then beauty is not gonna be worth much if everyone can be can be equally beautiful. We're gonna have to find different ways to value people and fitness indicators from like a you know, a Darwinian perspective, right, what are going to be what are going to be the fitness indicators? Yeah, I don't know, Maybe it's just something

something crappy like intelligence. I don't know, maybe everyone's gonna have a super intelligence module too, and after a while, there's gotta be no way to differentiate people except little random quirks of personality and the quirky guy like you, Scott. You know, you just get you're gonna be valued as as a unique and wonderful resource. Oh you just maybe blushed, thanks, David, Well, yeah I was. You know, I send you this article

today right with people who try virtual realities environments. It was it was written by my friend Rebecca Searles, and that article says, you know, shows it like some people experience this associative experience where they start to question whether or not the real world is real. You know, yeah, I think there's something too that I go into the VR and then I come out and things do seem

a little bit somehow shaky. My hypothesis is something like this, Once you hang out in virtual reality enough, you start perceiving things as virtual. You start to you know, have a sense that you're in a virtual world. It's not exactly the same as perceiving the physical world. You actually kind of see the sense things as being virtual in a mixed reality. For example, you might sense some things

as virtual and other things as not. So. I think sometimes when you come out of VR and then go into a non virtual environment, you retain that seeing things as virtual. And even in the physical world, you're seeing some things around you as virtual objects, and your perception is as if you're in a virtual reality even though you're not so. I call this the phenomenology of virtuality. Like there's a whole kind of phenomenal sense, an appearance,

an experience of things around us being virtual. And sometimes that could be allusory. It could be in a non virtual world and still sy things as virtual. And think maybe this virtual derealization that people talk about in the normal world, the post VR sadness, maybe that's an instance of that kind of an illusion of the phenomenology of virtuality. Well, just to circle back to the whole beginning of this conversation, you know, I mean, if it is true that we

live in a simulation, it's possible. It's just very It's like VR that's evolved so great that everything just is this clear as our eyes can see it. But in reality, what I'm in right now, what you're in, you know, is actually is actually just another virtual world, right, just a better and more optically Yeah, I mean, a good enough virtual reality technology is probably going to be indistinguishable, correct, from a non virtual world right now? Of course it's not.

It's pretty right now. Mind you get screen door effects, you get picture. But give it a few years. Yeah, I could see the thought experiment where I could where that. I think it's realistic that someday we will have virtuality that is indistinguishable from what our optics can see right

now and what we are calling the real world. And I think things are going to get really tricky then, because not only tricky, but but but I actually so, I just I want to end this interview by saying I started this interview being I think putting the probability that we live in the matrix at about seven percent.

And actually, now that I'm thinking about this and more and having this conversation with you, and and realizing that what I'm seeing right now could potentially be a very evolved simulation, I'm actually up being my percentage as well. So where are you now? I'm going to put it at twenty six twenty seven percent, Well, twenty six point five,

that's uh, that's that's getting high. I mean, you're right, though, if it's indistinguishable from the from the inside, there's no way for ours to deciensively tell one way or another. So lot's going to rest on your prior probability is that you know, these simulated universes are going to be created or they're not. The more you think about it, the more it could start to seem kind of likely

that you might be created. And then you start, Yeah, at one point, I did a debate recently about this topic, and I put it at at forty. Yeah, so maybe that's a maybe that's a stable stopping fund. What we need to get at some point are about you know, like our margins are there or around these numbers. Yeah, that's why I said ten to fifty. You know, it's it's probably it's hard to do better than you know,

one significant digit on the on these things. Maybe even that's even that's too much, But you know the fact that it's significantly greater than zero is already that's huge where a lot of interest lies. That's huge. Hey, it's always great chatting even I really appreciate you being on the podcast today. Thanks, this was a lot of fun. Thanks for listening. To the Psychology Podcast with doctor Scott Barry Kaufman. I hope you found this episode just to

stop provoking an interesting as I did. If you'd like to read the show notes for this episode or here past episodes, you can visit the Psychology Podcast dot com