The popularity of the simulation hypothesis suggests aspects of modern experience are inspiring increasing doubts about our ability to attain such knowledge of the truth of things — and raising the contrary possibility that avoiding deception about the nature of reality is impossible. Indeed, Chalmers appears to join Mark Zuckerberg and other tech futurists in going further, encouraging us to dive even deeper into simulacra by embracing an extended exploration of computer-generated virtual worlds.

It’s hard to imagine this leading to anything other than greater psychic misery, with our digitally stimulated minds playing aimlessly in an endlessly manipulable facsimile of the world while growing increasingly alienated from both the bodies in which minds are instantiated and the necessities that govern the physical reality in which those bodies actually live out their days. Already rates of loneliness, depression, alcoholism, drug abuse, and suicide are rising sharply, pointing to a spiritual crisis in American life. Those trends seem destined to worsen in an inverted world in which reality is treated as fake and the metaverse tempts us with the false promise of better world we know to be a sham.