What follows from this? Among other things, Chalmers argues in Reality+, the question of whether we're living in a simulation has an unexpectedly theological dimension. A simulation operated by super-powerful entities is, in many ways, equivalent to a Universe created by a divine being. And it begs similar questions – not least if you turn out to be one of the super-powerful entities in question. What kinds of risks and responsibilities accompany the god-like powers associated with operating simulated worlds? Given that Facebook recently changed its name to Meta, in honour of the immersive environments it plans soon to unveil, the question of what it means for corporations to operate realms within which they're close to omniscient and omnipotent has a startlingly practical dimension.

"If you think that privacy and manipulation are already a problem on current social media," Chalmers told me, "they're obviously going to have the potential to be much more so when it comes to virtual worlds controlled and created by the same corporations." And this potential is even greater once we recognise that the values, experiences, objects and interactions at play in such worlds are real. In fact, the questions that matter most are not about reality and unreality at all, but rather about the kinds of experience, agency and opportunities afforded by any environment we are responsible for: "if these are genuine realities, ones where you can have meaningful experiences… what kind of meaningful experiences are we going to have?"

A sense of virtuality

Plenty of philosophers and ethicists have made the case in recent years for the importance of principles like privacy, transparency, agency and explicability within information environments. Chalmers is unusual, however, in the intensity of his focus upon the technology's most distant horizons – and his quest for a non-naïve optimism when it comes to humans' relationships with and through their creations.

To see what such an optimism might look like in practice, consider an inexperienced user of a virtual environment who doesn't, for instance, know that the avatar they're chatting to is being controlled by a corporate AI rather than a human. This is a scenario in which an informational asymmetry – the fact that the user is profoundly deceived about the nature of the interaction – may be connected to all kinds of manipulation or exploitation. Contrast this with an experienced user of a virtual environment who is hanging out with some avatars controlled by (human) friends as well as an AI-controlled avatar that's telling them stories beside a virtual campfire. This is a very different prospect. What's playing out here is a potentially life-enhancing encounter in an artificial realm – its pleasures derived from a knowing combination of verisimilitude and fictionality.