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The man rethinking reality

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Across his career, the philosopher David Chalmers has challenged what we hold to be true about consciousness and the mind. As Tom Chatfield discovers, now he is questioning reality itself. If you woke up one day and discovered that you were living in a virtual world – that everything you'd ever known was, like the Matrix, a form of hyper-realistic simulation – what would this imply for your hopes, dreams and experiences? Would it reveal them all to be lies: deceptions devoid of authenticity? For most people, the intuitive answer to all these questions is "yes". After all, the Matrix movies depict a dystopian nightmare in which humanity has been enslaved by sinister machines. How else to think about the revelation that "reality" is nothing like it seems? For the philosopher David Chalmers, however, none of this necessarily follows. No matter what the status of your reality, he suggests, your thoughts and experiences remain as real as it gets. And the value and purpose of your life are s

The man rethinking the definition of reality 18 February 2022 Share Save Add as preferred on Google Tom Chatfield Features correspondent Getty Images Would you take the red pill or the blue pill? (Credit: Getty Images) Across his career, the philosopher David Chalmers has challenged what we hold to be true about consciousness and the mind. As Tom Chatfield discovers, now he is questioning reality itself. If you woke up one day and discovered that you were living in a virtual world – that everything you'd ever known was, like the Matrix, a form of hyper-realistic simulation – what would this im

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