interesting work

this is a very interesting book about some of the upcoming questions humanity will face with new VR technologies and virtual worlds. These can be expected to become very realistic within the next decade and this book puts most of the known thought experiments and issues from contemporary philosophy and its epistomological branch together plus examples from (pop) culture like movies, SciFi-novels or Computer Games in order to analyze artificial worlds in its main characteristics.
The book is accessible to all interested readers up until it comes to the chapter about "dust theory" (as part of the theory that our world is mathematical) which is very far out and the mere thinking about this theory becomes very difficult, where maybe a leading hand and a way more thorough explanation of this idea as well as some of its implications would have helped.
The main theme of the book is that the reality inside virtual worlds count just as much as reality our "physical" worlds. This is not just "counter intuitive" (which has become a code word esp. in physics for an especially valid assumption), at most parts - well, I think - it is mere nonsense. The main argument of the book remains throughout quite sketchy and not very persuasive at all. It gets pounded in by dozens of repetitions of the argument, but not so much by any kind of persuasive reasoning.
The idea that we lead complete lives within such VR environments as they become more photorealistic stops at our own physicality, our bodies. We still need to sleep, to eat, to drink, we may want to use the bathroom at some point, we will feel cold, even though we might may be in a VR tropical island etc etc. Yes, we can lead "meaningful" lives in VR, easily even in our today's VR environments, we can virtually meet people there, make donations, give "meaningful" speeches, make money, meat a partner for life, whatever, but our base reality will be our "physical" reality, as long as we do not become "brains in a vat" like in Hilary Putnam's famous thought experiment or in the Matrix movie.
And yes the question, if our "physical ground reality" exists at all, if we are part of big simulation or simply part of a mathematical universe and as such simply calculated, is a very interesting, yet unanswerable question. But I really liked the way this uncertainty has been brought up in the book, underpinned by many examples from philosophy, sciences and culture.

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1 Person fand das hilfreich

Poor reading performance, sad.

Great book gets butchered by the narrator. Thought these guys were professionals. Pronouncing „Descartes‘“ with an additional possessive „s“ drives me crazy. Has he ever been in touch with a philosophical text before? Cogito ergo sum is Latin, at least make an effort to pronounce it not as if it’s actually an English sentence. Could really be better

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