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Reality+
Chalmers's 2022 book arguing that virtual realities are genuine realities — a framework that reframes every question about AI, simulation, and the status of digital experience.
Reality+ (2022) is Chalmers's most ambitious application of philosophy of mind to the technologies reshaping human life. The central thesis is that virtual realities are genuine realities: experiences in simulated environments are real experiences, virtual objects are genuine objects, and a life lived substantially in virtual worlds can be a life well lived. The argument has consequences well beyond the VR headset: it bears on how we think about large language models, about digital experience generally, and about the simulation hypothesis.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book develops what Chalmers calls virtual digitalism: the view that virtual objects are digital objects, and digital objects are real. The view rejects the common intuition that the virtual is inferior to, or derivative of, the physical. A virtual tree is not a fake tree; it is a different kind of real tree, made of bits rather than atoms.
The framework's consequences for AI are substantial. If digital processes are real processes, then the processing of a large