Our Virtual Lives Are Real Lives

Chalmers explains that “a common way of thinking about virtual realities is that they’re somehow fake realities, that what you perceive in VR isn’t real. I think that’s wrong.” “The virtual worlds we’re interacting with,” he adds, “can be as real as our ordinary physical world. Virtual reality is genuine reality.”

What does it mean for something to be real or unreal when so much of digital life operates at the level of symbols?

the point of life is other people. I agree with David Rudnick’s diagnosis that we’ve moved from “digital dualism,“ falsely asserting the Internet was “not real life,” to what he calls “digital prime,” realizing the Internet is perhaps the most space we have. But this means there will be a new insistence that URL serve IRL—not replace it.