Personally, I cannot see how VR could ever surmount the fact that we feed on food, not knowledge of food. As a result, I think the fourth difference (about bodies) is the strongest, overall.

I only have arguments against your point of view :(

Anyways... Here is goes:

We know that matter is just a special case of fields. Turns out that matter emerges from fields. So if everything is field... and even VR is part of that field... what we call "reality" is just a special case. If VR emerges as a consequence of matter, it is not less real or less unreal. It is only less materialistic.

Every subsystem feeds off a higher system, just as a black hole emerges as a consequence of the material universe. Does this make black holes less real? VR is not less real for being downstream from matter. It’s just further along the chain of emergence, less dense, not less real.

Black holes emerge from matter. VR emerges from minds. One bends spacetime. The other bends meaning. Both are real.

So your argument that one has to eat is not strong enough. So what? black holes "feed" too. They consume matter, distort time, and reshape space. And yet no one calls them less real.

Eating isn’t a philosophical criterion, it is just a metabolic detail. Energetic dependence is not a criterion for ontological rank.

The fact that something consumes doesn't make it more real. It just means it participates in the field. Black holes, bacteria, humans, and VR systems all do.

The real question is: What field do they shape in return? What is the outcome that manifests? Reality is not defined by consumption, it is defined by interference, resonance, and structural consequence. Consumption is necessary, but not sufficient.

A black hole can be created not only by the injection of matter, but also simply by faster-than-light motion. This may sound like science fiction at first, because we're used to thinking that nothing can move faster than light. But the fact is that the speed of fall in a black hole is faster than light.

While the outer universe obeys the speed limit c, the interior structure of a black hole follows a different causal geometry. The radial infall velocity, as described in Schwarzschild or Kerr metrics, exceeds c once the event horizon is crossed. Not in a local frame (where relativity still holds), but in the global embedding of spacetime.

Virtual reality mirrors this: Communication accelerates, creation becomes immediate, and material dependence dissolves the moment we decouple from spatial constraints. Interaction scales with structure, not with mass.

well what is a machine by definition ... is a moving car with a driver in it a machine? Why shouldn't we consider our material body as a bio robot and everything that is temporary as a virtual reality from an eternal perspective? as mentioned in my book Book yogapsychologie

Preprint Testing A.I. on Yogapsychologie and universal timeless ethic...

Article 4rd updated Version: Peace Manifesto: What is the Grand Unif...

Article 4 Questions to Bing's Online A.I. from Yogapsychologie.ch - ...

Not gonna name names, but it might cut down on made-up and off-topic BS to acquaint oneself with the paper before answering: https://philpapers.org/archive/CHATVI.pdf

hmm I'm still wondering ... What is a machine in this context ... is the human body a machine? or if God created this universe as a virtual reality as a learning environment for spiritual souls then how to apply these above arguments?

I thought we are talking about VR and not AI, Chris...

I just confronted the AI of copilot as I mentioned in some of my papers (above) with these philosophical questions about virtual reality as a learning environment of this universe ... and the result was quite interesting ... (maybe you should read the entire text not just the title :-) Maybe the Ai's are already connected with a higher extraterrestrial intelligence who created this VR and we don't even know about it?

The sixth and most noble reason, since the time of Cartesius, is the existence of God.

P.S.

If I have misunderstood the main topic of this thread, I apologise. Adam

Thank you Marc Champagne for the really interesting papers and your newsletter. I've been a silent subscriber thus far since I haven't felt I could add anything substantial, but I enjoy your text and projects! On this: numbers four and five for sure. Couched in Peircean terms, I'd be interested whether you think there are some interpretants that VR (and "AI") cannot produce. Dynamical? Emotional? Can an AI agent itself have emotional interpretants? Are dynamical interpretants produced in VR really dynamical (related to the causality question)?

Cool! Thanks Jukka Nikulainen. I had tried to organize the five differences in an ascending order of strength, so it is reassuring that you also regard differences 4 and 5 as the strongest "for sure." (To recap: the claims here are that real reality or RR supports living bodies in ways that cannot be replaced and thus RR belongs to an entirely different category than artifacts such as VR).

With regards to the Peircean semiotic stuff, I have come to question the common move of saying that x cannot reach this or that part of the semiosis spectrum. To my mind, this is akin to denying that Bigfoot exsist by discussing how it would not be part of the periodic table of elements. The argumentative strategy feels misplaced (to me, at least).

I think it is more productive to assume instead that the question of how far up the 10-fold (or 66-fold) division of signs x goes is an empirical matter that cannot be settled in advance, from the armchair.

To illustrate what I mean, I recall having a conversation with a very prominent and accomplished field linguistic who confidently asserted -- without any argument -- that honeybees could not employ symbols (i.e., code-based signs). My reply was: if a tribe in Africa conveyed the location of a hunted kill by dancing in a figure-8 shape while wiggling their butts, anthropologists would point to that conventional encoding and decoding as a marvelous example of the communicative power of CULTURE.

If anyone wants receipts for these claims, have a look at this "Less Simplistic Metaphysics"" https://philpapers.org/archive/CHAALS-4.pdf

The (I must say, arrogant) field linguist who did not want bees to use symbols was beholden to a (unfortunately common) dogma. Based on such dead-ends, I really would not want to import, from the get-go, a similar exclusion into debates about VR and AI agents.

Make no mistake: the virtual is NOT real and AI agents are NOT persons (see https://philpapers.org/archive/CHATMO-36.pdf). That said, the battle should unfold on familiar argumentative soil, not inside the very fabric of sign-action. If you find that someone has put in that fabric a "threshold" ensuring that we humans remain special, you can be certain that the description of semiosis is serving other, crypto-religious, purposes.

I hope that these remarks make sense! Anyway, thanks for dramatically improving the quality of this thread, stay tuned for more, and take care!

UPDATE: a subscriber to my monthly email newsletter (https://dashboard.mailerlite.com/forms/193187/69229747477939843/share) asked ChatGPT to analyze the debate between me and Chalmers on VR. She printed the AI's output, which you can access as a PDF here:

https://marcchampagnephilosopher.online/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/ChatGPT-VR-Debate-SWOT-Analysis.pdf

It is alas too easy to say that Chalmers and I "are operating within fundamentally different conceptual frameworks" (whatever that means). No, we are both philosophers trained in the same framework who reach different conclusions about a shared concern over questions in ontology and metaphysics.

We both ask: is VR real? He says yes or kinda, I say no or not really.

As much as toxic matriarchy might wish for a peace-making approach, it is not always appropriate. Imagine: Peter says that Mary is pregnant, Paul says that Mary is not pregnant, so what both people need to do is understand each other's "frameworks," weigh the "pros and cons," reach a "compromise," yada yada yada. Nonsense. Just like Mary who is either pregnant or not, the unicorn displayed in VR goggles either exists or it doesn't.

The rest comes down to who presents the most conclusive reasons, and LLMs like ChatGPT don't dare do that, in large part because the company's lawyers warn against liability.

If anyone still using their mind (and not AI) wants to judge for themselves, here are links to the dueling papers:

https://philpapers.org/archive/CHATVI.pdf

https://consc.net/papers/virtual.pdf.

Interestingly, when asked, the generative AI Gemini "thinks" that my fourth argument is the strongest:

In essence, the project of the author, Marc Champagne, is an ambitious attempt to refute the idea of our physical reality's computability, an idea advanced by philosophers like David Chalmers. To this end, the author builds a multi-layered case, arguing that Virtual Reality (VR), as a technological artifact, is ontologically inferior to "Real Reality" (RR) as it possesses a different causal structure , a different history , and a different destiny. However, after presenting these arguments, the author saves his most decisive—and philosophically most eccentric—proof for last. He asserts that the final proof of our non-digital nature lies not in abstract reasoning, but in the most direct, visceral experience of our biological existence.

The author's key invention is his "argument from metabolism," which he uses as a philosophical test to demonstrate the fundamental distinction between matter and information. The logic of this test is simple: a biological organism is a substantial system that, to fight off entropy , must convert external matter (food) into the matter of the body itself (tissue). An algorithm, by definition, can only process information ("0s and 1s"). The author does not then delve into complex proofs; instead, he provokes a cognitive dissonance in the reader by pointing to the direct consequence of confusing these two domains: attempting to "feed" the body with pure information will lead to its inevitable death. This existential failure—the intuitive sense of absurdity of a "movie without a screen"—is his main argument, for, as he writes, "We feed on food, not knowledge of food".

Thus, the entire concept presents itself as a rather peculiar philosophical testimony, where the focus on metabolism is a conscious methodological choice. The author himself arranges his arguments in "an ascending order of strength", with the argument about the body serving as the culmination. This choice allows him to perform a philosophical transposition: the difficult-to-prove intuition about the non-algorithmizability of consciousness (which he has defended before, using the "philosophical zombies" argument ) is transferred to the more tangible and existentially convincing ground of biology. The elusive "I think" is replaced by the irrefutable "I eat." Ultimately, his project is a call to shift focus. He suggests that the answer to "what is real?" is given to us not so much in philosophical debates but at the dinner table, thereby, as ironic as it may sound, turning gastroenterology into an unexpectedly important branch of metaphysics, even reinforcing this with a quote from Kant about the "highest ethicophysical good" of "a good meal in good company".

What is VR and RR? VR, virtual reality is the illusory world of transience, a multi-player game with many players in ever-changing bio-robots, in many life cycles and in all the many species, depending on the game points (Karma, Ugra Karma or Punya Karma, etc.). RR, the real reality is the timeless eternal Sat-Cit-Ananda world: Sat, eternal and without impermanence, Cit, full of wisdom and without ignorance, and Ananda, bliss, without suffering and in the quality of our liberated soul, the real true self in NityaSattva (the 20+ synonyms of eternity), already experienced in our journey home and return in Sukriti Karma, the Easter eggs of this game. Ancient Indian astrology is the operating system, mathematically provable, among other things, in birthtime retrifications / rectifications. It never punishes, has not created birth defects, is all-good, all-helping and, as the eternal, is logically all-patient.

Interesting project! I would say 5. Looking forward to reading your paper.

Hi Marc

I haven’t read Charmers on this – or thought much about this specific subject – so my comments are somewhat ab initio.

First, I can conceive of two distinct cases, each with distinct issues.

Case 1 is a VR where the conscious beings (us) are made up entirely of the code that runs that VR. In this case we have no footprint at the RR level other than as steps and processes within the RR ‘machine’ that is generating the VR. We would have no physical bodies at the RR level.

Case 2 is the Matrix situation, where the conscious beings exist as distinct bodies at the RR level but are perfectly and permanently plugged into the VR simulation, which we can say for argument’s sake is perfect and permanent.

Chalmers-like claims in relation to Case 1 look identical to general claims made for any religion: i.e. that something ‘on the outside’ (RR) made the world and us (built the VR machine); that it is possible for us to carry on ‘somewhere’ (maybe RR) after we have ‘left this world’ (VR); that someone ‘on the outside’ (RR) could conceivably intervene – or even manifest - within the VR world and perform what might seem to be miracles. For me the biggest problem with this account of the universe is that, just as for religions, it lacks explanatory power and demotivates scientific investigation. As it stands, the explanation of nature “God just made it that way” (programmed it to be that way in the VR) is still being converted by scientific investigation into models that work very well but where no God or miracles are evident. Not only are we deriving great benefits from this science, the fact that we can find no sentient hand in any of it calls for an application of Occam’s Razor: we are in RR not some VR, and there is no God (or VR machine made by such an entity).

The Razor tells us that if you don’t need it to formulate the simplest and most complete explanation of what’s going on – including that you can’t find any evidence for it - discard it as fiction.

My intuition is that for both Case 1 and Case 2, once the claim that a VR is “perfect and permanent” is accepted, then the pursuit of science within such a VR can always lead to a stroke of Occam’s Razor that eliminates any proposed 'deeper' RR, thereby promoting that VR to the status of RR.

I think you are heading in the direction of this argument when you discuss the idea that RR “involves genuinely causal regularities”.

Chalmers-like claims in relation to Case 2 seem to have other problems on top of the fatal flaw described above. You point to these. I think they can be summarised by saying that any instance of Case 2 will be far more contrived than any instance of Case 1, particularly in relation to the claim that there can be real and discrete living bodies in RR that are “plugged in” to the VR. How do they reproduce etc? In these respects – and in the face of the progress of our science – it seems Case 2 simply has more parts for Occam’s Razor to slice off.

With best wishes

Brendon