If you know me at all, you know I like thinking about simulated worlds. You might also know I’m not the best epistemologist in the world. But I’m working on changing the latter fact this semester at Palm Beach Atlantic University where I’m taking epistemology with Dr. Brandon Rickabaugh. I figure, the more I connect epistemology to simulated worlds, the more interesting epistemology will become for me, but what do I know? Wait, just who am I that ‘I’ could know anything in the first place? No, that’s phil mind—stop that. Back to epistemology.
The other day I was reading a piece by Keith DeRose on ‘Contextualism’ in epistemology and he referenced the famous fake barn cases made popular by Alvin Goldman, who attributed them to Carl Ginet. I haven’t thought much about fake barns since I was deep into Alvin Plantinga’s stuff five or six years ago but they’ve always intrigued to me.
Fake Barn Scenarios
Fake barn scenarios go something like this: there are x number of fake barns in a particular county (for whatever reason, perhaps the famers are trying to appear wealthier than they are so they put up cardboard barns which are indistinguishable from real barns to passersby), Steve is driving through this county and just so happens to look over at a barn and it happens to be a real barn. From here the debate begins. Does Steve have knowledge that he’s seeing a barn in this case? Does the presence of the fake barns rob Steve of knowledge or is Steve lucky to know that he is looking at a barn?
We could throw in a bunch more wrinkles, like, what if Steve knows about the fake barns prior to driving through the county? When he looks over a barn in this scenario, and just so happens to be looking at a real barn, does he know it now? Does the ratio of fake to real barns matter? If there is only one real barn in the whole county, Steve knows this, and he looks over from the road and randomly happens to be seeing the one real barn in the whole county, is he justified in believing that he is seeing the one real barn?
Metaverse Scenarios
Fake barn cases can get pretty wild and they have all sorts of fun implications. But who cares about fake barns? Sure, all those farmer-epistemologists care (don’t laugh too hard, Alvin Platinga actually fits this bill pretty well), but these scenarios seem a little forced, no? Well, first off, philosophy doesn’t care about the plausibility of the scenario, but rather how you answer the scenario and what reasons you have for your answer. That’s the whole point. But I do think I have a more pertinent scenario in the same vein as the barn ones: metaverse scenarios.
Okay, but first, what’s the ‘metaverse’? Well, although Mark Zuckerberg and the Facebook crew tried to get out ahead on the term ‘metaverse’ by changing their name to Meta in late October, 2021, Eric Ravenscraft, a tech commentator at WIRED, argues that term has already become a vague catchall term which refers virtual reality, augmented reality, massively multiplayer online games, and even “cyberspace” in general.[1] So, here’s what I mean by ‘metaverse’,
Metaverse = df. a fully immersive virtual world(s), indistinguishable from the base reality world, wherein one can interact with the avatars of other users and virtual items, and conceivably spend the majority of their day if they wanted to.
On this definition then, we do not have a metaverse yet, and the real thing seems to be a ways off. Perhaps haptic suits and VR headsets will get pretty good in the near future, but for the metaverse to be indistinguishable from base reality, we’d probably need a Matrix style head jack, and whether that’s feasible is another story. Nevertheless, let’s say that a metaverse, of the fully immersive variety, is possible, feasible, and rapidly approaching—within the next 20 years let’s say. I’m wondering if there are implications for our knowledge of the world as we approach a metaverse.
Here’s what I’m thinking, as we approach a full-blown metaverse, it seems like the possibility that we are currently “immersed” in a simulated world becomes a nearer and nearer possibility. So I’m wondering if the advancements in simulated worlds makes our knowledge modally unsafe. This is a separate question from whether or not we are simulated beings à la the simulation hypothesis, but rather it’s more akin to the brain-in-a-vat scenario. So we can’t just deny fuctionalism (the theory of mind that says consciousness is just inputs, internal states, and outputs—which philosophers use to motivate the possibility of conscious artificial intelligence) and call it a day. The question is not “have we always been living in a computer simulation as fully simulated beings?” but “are we base reality beings currently immersed in a virtual reality?”.
Returning to the fake barn cases, if you think that having knowledge of the fake barns gives you a defeater for or somehow diminishes your justification in barn cases, would knowing that there is a metaverse, or perhaps even many metaverses, likewise affect your justification for believing you’re in base reality? If you think that Steve can’t know he’s seeing a barn because of the existence of fake barns, even while he is unaware of the presence of the fake barns, then would the presence of metaverses mean we can’t know we are in base reality even if we are unaware of the existence of metaverses? Does the amount of simulated worlds matter? If there is just one metaverse are we more modally safe than if there are billions?
Rookie Thoughts
I’m a rookie when it comes to epistemology, so perhaps these are embarrassingly naïve questions. But I’m cool with that. Initially, I want to say that if there were many full-blown metaverses, as defined above, I would be less justified in believing that I am currently in base reality than I would be if there were none. So then I think there’s an inverse relationship between the development of genuine metaverses and my justification for knowing I’m not currently in one. So, thanks a lot Zuckerberg!
But what do you think? Leave me a comment and help me think well about this stuff!
Be sure to check out this clip from a Parker’s Pensées episode I did with Dr. Matthew Benton where we discuss this very question: