Are virtual reality objects real? I have a new paper out in the Disputatio journal, titled Virtual Reality: Fictional all the Way Down (and that’s OK) .
The paper came about as a response to David Chalmer’s 2017 paper The Virtual and the Real, about which Pawel Grabarczyk organized a seminar in Copenhagen in the summer of 2018.
TL;DR: Chalmers uses virtual reality to argue that there are structures (such as calculators) that exist regardless of their physical or non-physical implementation, and as such virtual reality objects can be perfectly real.
I argue, orthogonally, that virtual reality is not becoming “just-like-the-real-thing” based on any fidelity to the physical world. VR is not just technology, but art; a human act of communication and selective implementation. I also argue that VR is half-real: we are not magically transported to another world, as VR is only selectively implemented (it rarely has the photons that make up light, for example), and as users we we are conscious of how the world is a limited implementation made for the purpose of a particular experience.