Design for the Real World ᵥ
Philosopher David Chalmers in his New York apartment (photo: Dean Kaufman).
“In effect, philosophy is an incubator for other disciplines,” writes David Chalmers, professor of philosophy at New York University, as well as co-director of the institution’s Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness. “When philosophers figure out a method for rigorously addressing a philosophical question, we spin that method off and call it a new field.”
In his latest book, Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy, Chalmers sets to work mapping out the beginnings of one such field: the emergence of virtual and augmented realities. “Today’s VR and AR systems are primitive,” Chalmers writes. “The headsets and glasses are bulky. The visual resolution for virtual objects is grainy. Virtual environments offer immersive vision and sound, but you can’t touch a virtual surface, smell a virtual flower, or taste a virtual glass of wine when you drink it.” Yet technological progress is rapid and “these temporary limitations will pass.” Even while our virtual worlds remain crude, there is no reason to assume, Chalmers argues, that they do not represent genuine realities. “Each virtual world is a new reality.”
Over the course of his book, Chalmers explores how we can conceive of Reality+: the universe formed by various virtual and non-virtual worlds. Through methodical argumentation, fables, relatable scenarios and illustrations by Tim Peacock, Chalmers opens a portal into the reality that is soon to emerge from behind the screen. It is a field with clear implications for design, not least in terms of how we should go about designing virtual worlds and objects.
In this space, few design practices have been as progressive or rigorous as Space Popular, a studio founded in 2013 by Lara Lesmes and Fredrik Hellberg. Space Popular has designed physical buildings and installations, but this work is allied to a series of designs and projects focused on virtual architecture and the sociopolitical implications of digital spatial experience. “As digital media gains a third dimension through immersive technology, our cultural, political and experiential understanding of how we access and navigate spaces is challenged,” the pair wrote in their 2021 manifesto ‘8 Propositions for a Civic Portal Infrastructure for the Virtual Environment’. “The coming 15 years will see the weaving of physical and virtual environments become denser as our scrolls turn into strolls, and our cursor grows into our fullbody avatar.”
To explore these issues further, Disegno invited Lesmes and Hellberg to meet with Chalmers over Zoom and reflect on the theoretical and practical implications of the metaverse and digital realities. An edited version of their conversation follows below.
Fredrik Hellberg The core premise of the book, as we understand it, is the idea of virtual realism. Could you elaborate on what means?
David Chalmers The central thesis of the book is that virtual reality is genuine reality. There is a long tradition of people treating virtual reality and virtual worlds as some kind of second-class reality, as fictional or as an illusion or hallucination. I want to argue that virtual reality is very much continuous with physical reality. Virtual reality may be distinct from physical reality, but it’s ontologically on a par. This breaks down into a few different theses. Firstly, that virtual entities really exist and virtual events really happen – they’re not just illusions or hallucinations. Secondly, experiences in a virtual world can be as meaningful as experiences in the physical world. That’s not to say they’re necessarily going to be wonderful, because they could be everything from wonderful to awful: the whole range of human experience applies. The third and most speculative thesis is that it’s not out of the question that our own physical reality is already a virtual reality. This is the idea of the universe as a simulation, which is another way of thinking about continuity between physical reality and virtual reality.
Lara Lesmes What do you think enables these types of ideas? Personally, we feel like we can trace our curiosity about the notion of simulation to the use of VR technology. Do you think devices have played a role in enabling these ideas?
David The current VR devices have made a lot of this come alive and turned some of the philosophical problems into practical ones. For me, however, I don’t know whether it was the devices that got me into it. In the book I talk about discovering an adventure game called Colossal Cave Adventure on the computers at my father’s workplace when I was 10-years-old. That was quite influential for me in thinking about digital worlds and I’ve played a fair number of video games, which surely played a role in shaping my interest too. But I also read and watched a lot of science fiction, and science fiction was just as influential for me as any actual technology. Likewise, a lot of this plays into so many ideas in the philosophical tradition. As a philosopher, you can’t help but think about Descartes. What can we know about the external world? Could all this be an illusion? It becomes natural to phrase these questions in terms of technology. Could all this be a simulation? Could I be in virtual reality? Maybe it’s a convergence of all of these avenues – philosophy, science fiction and technology – meeting in the middle. Fredrik You’ve mentioned in interviews that you socialise and play in VR. How big a role does that play in your life?
David I’m not a huge user of VR, but when its resurgence started around 10 years ago and I heard about the Oculus Rift, I immediately ordered a developer kit. At that time it was fairly primitive, but you could still get that full-blown VR experience. It has only been since the pandemic started that I’ve been using VR more regularly. In March or April 2020, when everything was locked down, a couple of philosophers who were interested in VR agreed that we should meet up in VR, explore some platforms, and spend some time with each other. A few other people heard about it and this eventually grew to a group of seven or eight of us who have continued to meet as the pandemic has stretched out. That’s been very good, firstly as a means of socialisation and keeping up human contact during the pandemic. Secondly, we’ve found that being in a group means that you can explore these platforms in a much more natural way. It seems that a lot of VR is very much made to be social. It made me think about the potential that virtual worlds have and how so much of it is going to involve communities.
“An e-book is a genuine book. I think we’ve lost those implications that a virtual X is not a real X.”
Lara A big part of what we have been working on, especially since 2020, is developing architecture for social VR spaces. When we attempted to describe what the virtual is in the past, we used to say that something virtual is that which is something in essence, but not in its entirety. So it was a relief to see a proper definition in your book, where you define a virtual X as being something that has the strength or powers of X and, most importantly, the effects of X. But does that mean that whenever we talk about something virtual, we imply that there is an original that precedes it?
David I don’t think it has to. It’s true that there’s this very common use of the word that presents a virtual X as an “as if X”: it has the powers of an X and the effects of an X, without really being an X. But I think over time, the word has evolved in such a way that a virtual X can now be better understood as a computer generated X, which might or might not be a real X. So we can have a virtual book and there is no implication that that is not a real book. An e-book is a genuine book. I think we’ve lost those implications that a virtual X is not a real X. It’s true that in the case of books there may be a non-virtual original. On the other hand, we also have virtual computer programmes, virtual languages, and virtual data structures, which don’t imply that there is some non-digital original. As architects, you could design an amazing new virtual building that has no original. What’s amazing about VR is that you can construct wholly new forms that don’t correspond to any original.
Lara That steps into a challenge we often face. As designers, we have this issue of whether it’s possible to design anything completely new. We’ve seen architectural styles such as postmodernism that have championed historical allusions, but the 20th century was largely determined by the modernist idea that you’re always innovating or creating something new – that you’re detached from anything that came before. In the digital, because there are no constraints, it may seem as if we could do something completely new. But is that even possible?
Lara That steps into a challenge we often face. As designers, we have this issue of whether it’s possible to design anything completely new. We’ve seen architectural styles such as postmodernism that have championed historical allusions, but the 20th century was largely determined by the modernist idea that you’re always innovating or creating something new – that you’re detached from anything that came before. In the digital, because there are no constraints, it may seem as if we could do something completely new. But is that even possible?
David At some level, all creativity involves recombining existing elements. I mean, the most original novel in the world may still come down to letters in a sequence. Are the letters new? Well, they don’t need to be because the book can still be new because of the way of putting them together. That may suggest there’s a continuum of creativity, depending on how big those chunks you recombine are. When you massively recombine small chunks, maybe that’s more creative than just taking two big existing chunks and recombining them. Even an AI that generates new spaces and virtual entities in ways unlike what any human would design is, ultimately, still recombining certain things – although it may recombine them in a new way. My advisor Doug Hofstadter used to talk about how variations on a theme are the crux of creativity. Fredrik I also wanted to go back to your definition of virtual and ask how it has changed throughout your career. Within architecture in the 80s and 90s there was a lot of discussion about the virtual in architecture. But people didn’t mean computational simulations at all – they spoke about it purely as a thought experiment. That really defined a lot of the profession, but almost overnight it was replaced by this idea of a computational virtual.
David When many people hear “virtual reality”, they think of something that has the effects of something real, without itself being real, whereas when I first heard of virtual reality I thought about it by analogy with artificial intelligence. A virtual reality is an artificial computer-based reality. I come from a background with computers, so it’s second nature to me to think that way. Artificial intelligence is an intelligence that you construct, typically on a computer, so for me it has never had that implication that it’s not real. The same goes for being virtual. Was the use in architecture tied to Deleuze’s sense of virtual as potential [Deleuze argued that the virtual are those things which are real, but not actualised, ed.]?
Fredrik Absolutely. That French philosophical tradition was very influential and defined a whole generation of architects.
Lara When we were students, we had no VR headsets and any understanding of the virtual in the field was very much used in the Deleuzian sense. But as we started practising, the first headsets came out and the virtual became a very immediate problem. It was a space in which you could actually design and implement design methods.
David As an analytic philosopher [working in a different tradition], I managed to almost miss the Deleuzian notion entirely. I rediscovered it after the fact and I’m now interested as to whether there is a connection between his notion and all of these other discussions of virtual reality. But even Charles Sanders Peirce [an influential 19th-century US philosopher who contributed numerous entries to The Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, ed.], writing in a dictionary entry about the virtual back in 1902, pointed out that there are two different uses of the word “virtual”. He didn’t have the use of the word in terms of computers, but he did note that “virtual” means something like having the effects of a thing without being the real thing, as well as this other meaning that a virtual X is a potential X. He said that these are two different notions, because the potential X doesn’t yet have the effects of X, even if it may eventually. Deleuze traces his notion of potential from Henri-Louis Bergson, so maybe there’s one strand of the virtual that goes through Bergson and Deleuze, and then this other strand that starts with the medievals and eventually intersects with computer technology. The first people who used virtual in a computer context probably had that “as if” sense in mind, rather than the Deleuzian sense. But the term has rapidly became so closely tied to computers that there are now at least three notions out there: computer-based, potential and as if. The terminology has become very complicated.
Lara This is a vocabulary question, but when we create a virtual public square, is that a metaphor of a public square? Is it an analogy? Or is it a simile; something that just looks like a public square? Or is it something like an allegory? Or is it something that brings the narrative of that space into our heads, and we then start filling in all the implications that this thing looking like a public square brings forward? Or maybe it’s all of these things at the same time for different people?
“When we create a virtual public square, is that a metaphor of a public square? It is an analogy? Or is it a simile?”
David I’m tempted to say that a virtual public square really is a public square – there can be genuine public squares in virtual worlds. It’s particularly easy, I think, for social concepts to be realised in virtual worlds, because social concepts basically come down to the interaction of people and their understandings, and it’s very easy to have those things in a virtual world. But there are also cases where we don’t want to say that a virtual X is an X. In the book I talk about the case of a virtual kitten. It may be a very sophisticated virtual kitten, but nobody right now would say that it’s a real kitten. Maybe it’s an analogue of a kitten – that is, a digital kitten with many of the properties of a kitten – but ultimately it’s not a real kitten. But biological cases are very complicated, so how about a virtual football instead? When you’re playing a game of football in VR, we’re initially going to say it’s not really a football, even if – at least in principle – it’s playing all of the roles of a football. So we might say that it’s an analogue of football, it’s an “as if” football. But language can change and, over time, maybe half the football in the world will start to be played virtually. Then we’ll likely just call a VR football a football. It’ll no longer be an analogy – it’ll be an instance of the real thing.
Lara Or we’ll come up with another word to define the virtual football. It almost feels that there may be a problem of language in that we’re using the same word for two things that have a slight difference.
David Maybe we’ll develop a natural prefix, which is going to be useful to show what you’re talking about. At the moment, people use “real” and “virtual”, which I don’t like, but we could use “physical” and “virtual”, or “physical” and “digital”. Or maybe, if this becomes very common, we’ll just have a simple way to indicate the difference, like subscript P or subscript V. It’s important to recognise the differences between the physical and the virtual, but I’d like to think we can recognise that in a way that acknowledges that they are, nonetheless, very closely related forms of reality.
Fredrik Is this idea of coming up with a grammar or new linguistic system something you’re interested in actually proposing in your work?
David If I had the right ideas I would , but I don’t know that I’ve yet come up with the perfect language for virtual worlds. But to some extent this has been happening for years already in cultures around video games. With the oncoming ubiquity of VR, it’s probably going to develop in all kinds of unpredictable directions. I can make some proposals, but whether they would catch on is a different matter. Maybe we need a linguistic summit to get people to sit around and try and come up with the right languages for usefully describing virtual worlds in a way that does them justice – that would be a cool enterprise.
Lara During the pandemic, we became concerned that once it was over and you could have physical events again, we’d return to the problem where you can’t attend if you’re not in the place they’re happening. So we kept on borrowing a term from Rick and Morty, which is “holophobia” – discrimination against holograms. It sounds funny, but if you don’t make your event available through the internet, that might be quite holophobic. If you don’t create a gateway,or a way of attending as a hologram, you’re actually being holophobic.
David There’s also “simphobia” for fear of simulations or non-player characters. Right now that is perhaps justified, because NPCs [non-playable characters in video games, ed.] are probably not conscious individuals, but as they develop that may become more of a problem: discrimination in favour of biological intelligences and against simulated intelligences. Do you find virtualphobia with respect to virtual architecture?
Fredrik Yes, indeed, and I think this connects to a question we have about how the notion of the virtual is posing a threat to the discipline of architecture, because architects have been trained largely to create physical buildings.
Lara When we mentioned the virtual public square, you said that it seems to be a public square, but it feels like that also comes with a lot of nuance. You’re implying that it’s a civic space and that comes with a lot of politics attached to it – issues of ownership, for instance. Who does it belong to? It’s actually a very difficult thing to say that anything can be civic on the internet if, by definition, all of those spaces are owned by someone. Even if I create a virtual world on my own, and try and make it really open-source and super inclusive, I’m still hosting that space. So we often face the question of whether we can talk about civic virtual space. Is that even possible?
David Ah, I see now. You mean “public” or “civic” in the sense of it being owned by nobody. In the physical world, civic spaces are still controlled by, say, a state or something, but that feels consistent with being “It’s important to recognise the differences between the physical and virtual, but also acknowledge that they’re closely related forms of reality.” —David Chalmers 124 Interview civic. But if you’re controlled by a corporation, you’re not civic. I don’t know what kind of virtual spaces there are out there that are controlled by states, and that’s very interesting to think about. States could set up their own virtual spaces and call them civic, but you’re right that if a corporation sets up a space and says, “We have no control over this,” that’s an issue, because ultimately they do. That’s a dilemma. There’s a sense in which it can’t be genuinely public.
“It’s important to recognise the differences between the physical and virtual, but also acknowledge that they’re closely related forms of reality”
Fredrik This connects to a lot of the fears that many architects have around this. Often when physical architecture is created, it exists in the context of a city that is controlled by certain laws. You can create a discrete object like a building, but it still connects to public utilities and many other things. In virtual environments, the whole thing is turned on its head, and the logic of how the thing you create connects to everything around it is completely different.
Lara Another aspect we have been thinking about is the speed at which architecture can be created in virtual worlds from the point of view of construction. We are used to architecture being this very stable thing. It lasts for a long time because it takes so long to make. But, suddenly, we are creating environments in places where the timeframe is a lot shorter. We could imagine that it could soon be almost immediate: I might say a few words or put together a few images and a world is created. This brought us to this idea of whether we will have something like architecture at the speed of the spoken word, or architect at the speed of thought.
David Just this morning Mark Zuckerberg gave a presentation about AI in the metaverse. One of his examples was to say, “I want to be at the beach, I want to have some palm trees, I want to have an island, I want to have a table,” and as soon as he had said it the AI, which was called Builder Bot, went to work constructing a palm tree and a table in a way that fits the constraints. Presumably, there’s going to be a version of this where you say, “I want a building with roughly this shape and these floors that will do this,” and the AI will take your words and thoughts and produce something that meets its constraints. And there you have it – instant architecture.
Lara Architecture has been one of the pioneers for this use of technology, but what always strikes me about these ideas of the future is that constantly coming up with places you want to be would be exhausting. It’s already hard enough to choose what you want to watch on TV, so imagine having to come up with all the environments you want to be in all the time. I wonder if there would still be a role for someone dedicated to orchestrating your sequence of spaces.
David That is one reading of the term “Reality+” or “Reality Plus”. When I was thinking about calling the book that, someone said, “That sounds like a streaming service: Disney+, Paramount+.” That wasn’t the original meaning I had in mind, but if you want to hear it as a streaming service, that’s not the worst thing in the world. In the future, just as we have Netflix, we will also have a streaming service for virtual worlds; you’ll be able to choose which reality you want to hang out in. Maybe AI will play a role in that. People are going to want to inhabit common realities a lot, so in order for people to have common realities, presumably we’re not going to create new realities every single time. Perhaps in certain moods you may want a new reality and then you work with a designer or an AI system to create it, but I think the forces of community are going to mean that much of the time we’ll hang out in common realities. A lot of virtual worlds right now seem to give creation a very central role. Even Roblox, which is so popular among kids, is a platform where a huge part of the experience is designing games yourself. Likewise, Meta has made designing worlds very central in its Horizon Worlds system. It’s an interesting question whether that will continue to remain the case, or whether that’s more of an early adopter thing. In the long term, perhaps there will be the special class of designers and a much larger class of users.
Fredrik We wanted to touch upon something in relation to language, which we’re trying to find ways to work with within our practice. This is the idea of linguistic relativity or the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, which says that the structure of language affects the speaker’s worldview or cognition. In our work, we extend this hypothesis to visual language and the semiotics of virtual environments. Do you think it’s a useful way to think about virtual environments, where everything may have been placed intentionally, to consider them as a form of language?
David I don’t find myself inclined to say it’s language. I mean, in some very broad sense of language, is a chair language? Somebody had intentions when they created that chair and maybe it’s a symbol of various things, but I’m not especially inclined to say that that’s language. If a physical chair isn’t language, I’m not inclined to think a virtual chair is language, either. It’s a geometric object in space, which we can interact with in all kinds of spatial ways, whereas I think of language as being a bit more constrained – more deeply symbolic. It’s true that there are complex intermediate cases, such as gesture, which is perhaps a form of language, but it’s still very deeply motoric. What I’d want to say is that there’s the narrow class of language and there’s also the broad class of representations. Maybe everything in the world can be treated as a representation because we’re very representational creatures, but I’d hesitate to call that language.
Lara We’ve seen that the rise of new software, as well as platforms such as Pinterest, have enabled people to say things that they don’t have words for. As an architect, when you’re designing a space for somebody you often run out of words, because there is no word for a particular style that they may want. So, if you have a series of visuals you can put together, then we may get a sense of, “Aha! OK, that’s what we want.” We can understand what that may be together, even if we don’t have a name for it. This starts to enable language to go beyond words.
David It seems like an amazing form of communication and other forms of communication certainly go beyond language. What is it that people say: a picture’s worth a thousand words? But that’s not to say the picture is itself a word, although it is sometimes a better way of communicating. I think that what is coming out here is that for many purposes, the construction of objects and virtual worlds can be used for very powerful new forms of communication and representation, whether or not we call them linguistic.
Lara I guess the issue for us is what we should call this communication. I love that you brought up the chair, because the chair as an object is something we obsess over. We’re seeing so many virtual worlds with loads of chairs, but no one has the haptics to actually be able to sit on them. The chair is removed from its purpose, so why are so many people still putting chairs in digital spaces? We started to observe that making your avatar sit in a particular place, or perhaps just the act of sitting, is being used as a form of communication. If I go to your virtual lecture, and I really want to support you, then I’m going sit on the front row in the virtual space.
“Physical architecture exists in the context of a city that is controlled by certain laws. In virtual environments, the whole thing is turned on its head.”
David We have so many meanings and, in this case, we’ve got meanings inherited from the physical world. Chairs were originally for some functional role, but they’ve been invested with so much social meaning in so many different contexts that it turns out you can transfer all of that into a virtual world, even if they don’t have the original functional meaning in the same way. The social meaning carries across, because much of what we have in the physical world is just that.
Lara That brings up two concepts that are quite commonly used in design. One is the notion of an affordance, which is used a lot within game design – something that carries a symbolic meaning which enables us, without being guided, to make certain decisions. The other is the notion of the skeuomorph. A lot of the things that we have been talking about are skeuomorphs of some kind.
David I’ve got zero expertise on matters of design, but affordances are things we also know about in philosophy and cognitive science. We naturally perceive and interact with objects as if they afford certain actions. I see this glass of water, for example, as something to be grasped and drunk. The virtual world is a weird combination of importing some of the affordances from the the physical world – like a door is still something you can walk through – and creating wholly new affordances. So you can teleport in virtual worlds, for example, and there are signals for places where you can teleport. In mixed realities too, virtual objects and physical objects can afford very different actions, so it’s important to us as agents that we be able to perceive those differences and grasp the real affordances of the objects around us, otherwise things will go wrong. That’s one reason why it’s important that virtual objects be marked for us in some way to make their affordances clear.
Fredrik Do you think it’s important those markers are consistent? We recently wrote a manifesto of virtual environments, specifically around teleportation and moving around virtual environments, and one of the points within that is about being constant.
David I think people like having expectations that are fulfilled. We like surprises too, but only within limits. So perhaps you could have occasional surprising affordances, but too much of that and it’s going to be chaos. Maybe that’s going to be one element of the language of virtual worlds. There are already ways of doing this in video games. Objects are marked as something you can pick up versus something you can’t, and that seems important. When there are new kinds of actions you can take in VR, we’ll need new ways of marking those affordances. But a lot of this depends on background knowledge. One of my themes is that once you’re a sophisticated user of VR – and you’re familiar with how things work in a virtual world, standard configurations and standard affordances – you perceive that world differently. You have what I call a cognitive orientation towards seeing things as virtual, and you realise that the standards by which you evaluate virtual objects may often be different from the standards by which you evaluate physical objects.
Fredrik Do you think it would be important for an architect or designer creating virtual environments to consider this as a function within the design to help people reach a point where they can have that cognitive reorientation?
David Certainly when it comes to the affordances. You may even have cognitive orientation that is specific to different platforms. You’ll know that when you’re going into Meta’s virtual world you should expect one thing, and when you go into Apple’s you should expect another. The more complex stuff like the social meaning is going to be important too. There’s the direct social meaning of who you can interact with, but the more subtle social meaning that connotes class or culture or gender or nationality. Just as we have certain systems for doing that in the physical world – clothing communicates all those things, as does hair or housing or whatever – we’ll have to find new ways of communicating these things in virtual worlds via avatars, buildings, and more.
Lara One topic that we were curious about is the idea of games and roleplay versus reality – or how games could broadly be understood as simulations. We often talk about simulation as something all-encompassing, in which we could be fully immersed and perhaps unaware of its nature. But we’re running simulations every day to test out scenarios in everyday life. When we’re kids, we’re playing games to try things out all the time and, more generally, we’ve seen processes in which games and game worlds have eventually become realities. Think about the way in which social media started as this funny thing to play around with, and then eventually people came to really care about it. What do you think causes this shift of a simulation becoming a reality? Is it when we start making money from it? Or when it feels like it is connected to our identity and therefore things are at stake?
David There are so many different kinds of games, but normally we think that they somehow have a point that is distinct from most of our ordinary purposes in reality – that’s what makes them merely games. But actions within a game can be continuous to actions in the physical world. There are all these video game worlds that are half game worlds and half social worlds, for instance. Something like Minecraft is a little like this, or World of Warcraft. People have all these quests which seem to be part of the game world, but they’re also used as a way of developing community, making friends and having relationships. This is also true for games in the physical world.
Lara It seems there’s two routes: either you start making money in it or else you start developing relationships that you really care for. And therefore there’s this fluidity as to whether it’s really a game. David Once it’s fully social, those social elements are real. Once there are financial implications, those are real. The social in virtual worlds and physical worlds is basically continuous, and finance within virtual worlds has implications for finance in the physical world. It’s funny because people sometimes say, “That shows that this actually has some reality! You can cash out the money for real money in the physical world!” But even if you couldn’t, it would still be real. If you have someone conservative who thinks that only the the physical world is fully real, then the fact that these virtual worlds have effects in the physical world is a way for them to have at least derivative reality. But if you adopt the more enlightened view that virtual worlds and entities are real in their own right, what happens in virtual worlds matters in its own right, then you don’t have to be able to affect the physical world to be real. But maybe the conservative view can be a stepping stone towards the more enlightened view.
Fredrik How has the core argument of the book and these issues of virtual realism generally been received? Because your audience for this book is very broad: the world of philosophy, but also people like us from across many other fields.
David So far I’ve found massive variation, which may be a little bit generational. People my age and older often tend to be more conservative about this and less willing to acknowledge that virtual realities are genuine realities, whereas for kids who grew up in digital environments it’s obvious. It’s like, “Why did you even need to tell us this?” I’m hoping that over time it will become more and more obvious to more people, because there are many people out there who find it counterintuitive and maybe even repulsive. There are some very emotional reactions to the digital world: that it’s just not real and if you even mention the digital, it makes you a pawn of the tech companies who are trying to send us away from physical reality. But I do find, at least philosophically, a lot more openness towards this idea – far more than there was 20 years ago, when it was pretty counterintuitive. The analogue here is the idea of the extended mind, in which objects in your world can become part of your mind – the classic example of which is the smartphone. When Andy Clark [a professor of cognitive philosophy at the University of Sussex, ed.] and I put this idea forward in the mid 90s, it was generally regarded as rather extreme and implausible, but I think by now most people find it to be kind of obviously true.
Fredrik Apart from getting this book out into the world, what is your next area of exploration?
David In Reality+ I was exploring the ideal theory of virtual worlds – what they could be, in principle. Now, I’m trying to think a bit more about the nonideal theory about how things may actually be in practice. I’m starting to think about some of the shorter term issues that may arise: the way it’s going to be in the next 10 or 20 years, where it may be largely controlled by tech companies and imperfect in various respects. Philosophical issues arise here too, such as free will. If your world is constantly under the control of a tech company, and you’re the subject of manipulation, do you really have free will and autonomy in a virtual world? Or identity – the way people are using virtual worlds right now to express personal identity, gender identity and cultural identity in all kinds of ways, sometimes adopting identities in virtual worlds distinct from those they have in the physical world. This goes to the heart of many important philosophical issues about identity. The non-ideal theory of virtual worlds is as rich and interesting as the ideal one.
Interview Space Popular (Lara Lesmes and Fredrik Hellberg)
Photographs Dean Kaufman
This article was originally published in Disegno #32. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.