Reality+ by David Chalmers book review
In 1912, Bertrand Russell published what he called his "shilling shocker": brief, lucid, affordable, The Problems of Philosophy remains a go-to introduction to the discipline, routinely recommended to the curious. Allowing for inflation – it costs more than a shilling, but it's longer and more shocking – David Chalmers's new book, Reality+, could play a similar role. Like Russell, Chalmers is an influential philosopher, known for ambitious, technically proficient work. Like Russell, he writes with plausible fluency, drawing the reader effortlessly with him. And like Russell, he enjoys a good surprise. "The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating", Russell wrote, "and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it." That would be a decent motto for this book.
Chalmers is most famous for naming, and formulating, the "hard problem" of consciousness. Why do certain physical structures in human beings and other animals, interacting with physical environments, turn the lights of consciousness on? It's one thing to account for intelligent behaviour in purely physical terms – quite another to make sense of conscious experience. For Chalmers, it can't be done. There's more in heaven and Earth than is dreamt of in our physics.
In Reality+, he turns from mind to matter, asking how we know what's real. In 1641, René Descartes imagined himself deceived by an evil demon, the whole course of his experience a fraud. And then he tried to prove it wasn't so. Chalmers gives Descartes's predicament a technological spin. According to the "simulation hypothesis", we are the inhabitants of an immersive, interactive, computer-generated space – a virtual or simulated world, not unlike the one depicted in The Matrix (1999). Chalmers makes three radical claims about such worlds. First: it's impossible for us to know that we're not in one; we could be living in a simulation now. Second: this wouldn't stop the objects we encounter from being real. Even if our world is simulated, that simulation may contain real rocks, real trees and real people. Third: life in a simulation may be just as meaningful as life in a non-virtual world...(Kieran Setiya, continues)
In 1912, Bertrand Russell published what he called his "shilling shocker": brief, lucid, affordable, The Problems of Philosophy remains a go-to introduction to the discipline, routinely recommended to the curious. Allowing for inflation – it costs more than a shilling, but it's longer and more shocking – David Chalmers's new book, Reality+, could play a similar role. Like Russell, Chalmers is an influential philosopher, known for ambitious, technically proficient work. Like Russell, he writes with plausible fluency, drawing the reader effortlessly with him. And like Russell, he enjoys a good surprise. "The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating", Russell wrote, "and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it." That would be a decent motto for this book.
Chalmers is most famous for naming, and formulating, the "hard problem" of consciousness. Why do certain physical structures in human beings and other animals, interacting with physical environments, turn the lights of consciousness on? It's one thing to account for intelligent behaviour in purely physical terms – quite another to make sense of conscious experience. For Chalmers, it can't be done. There's more in heaven and Earth than is dreamt of in our physics.
In Reality+, he turns from mind to matter, asking how we know what's real. In 1641, René Descartes imagined himself deceived by an evil demon, the whole course of his experience a fraud. And then he tried to prove it wasn't so. Chalmers gives Descartes's predicament a technological spin. According to the "simulation hypothesis", we are the inhabitants of an immersive, interactive, computer-generated space – a virtual or simulated world, not unlike the one depicted in The Matrix (1999). Chalmers makes three radical claims about such worlds. First: it's impossible for us to know that we're not in one; we could be living in a simulation now. Second: this wouldn't stop the objects we encounter from being real. Even if our world is simulated, that simulation may contain real rocks, real trees and real people. Third: life in a simulation may be just as meaningful as life in a non-virtual world...(Kieran Setiya, continues)
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ALSO NOTE: Kieran Setiya has an excellent philosophy podcast called Five Questions...
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