If you’re in VR and can never leave it or see evidence of if (eg a perfect Descartes’s demon), I see no reason to see this as different from being in reality. The symbols are still grounded in the baseline reality as far as you could ever tell. Any being you could encounter could check that your symbols are as grounded as you can make them.
Note that this is not the case for a “encyclopaedia Chinese Room”. We could give it legs and make it walk around; and then when it fails and falls over every time while talking about how easy it is to walk, we’d realise its symbols are not grounded in our reality (which may be VR, but that’s not relevant).
We should probably call it something like “causalism”: using the word “real” to mean “that with which we could, in principle, interact causally.” I include the “in principle” because there exist, for example, galaxies that are moving away from us so quickly they will someday leave our light-cone. We see their light today, and that’s a causal interaction with the past galaxy where it used to be, but we understand enough about object permanence that we believe we have solid reason to infer there still exists a galaxy moving along the trajectory we witnessed, even when we cannot interact with it directly.
If you’re in VR and can never leave it or see evidence of if (eg a perfect Descartes’s demon), I see no reason to see this as different from being in reality. The symbols are still grounded in the baseline reality as far as you could ever tell. Any being you could encounter could check that your symbols are as grounded as you can make them.
Note that this is not the case for a “encyclopaedia Chinese Room”. We could give it legs and make it walk around; and then when it fails and falls over every time while talking about how easy it is to walk, we’d realise its symbols are not grounded in our reality (which may be VR, but that’s not relevant).
By hypothesis, it isnt the real reality. Effectively, you are defending physical realism by abandoning realism.
Pretty much, yes.
We should probably call it something like “causalism”: using the word “real” to mean “that with which we could, in principle, interact causally.” I include the “in principle” because there exist, for example, galaxies that are moving away from us so quickly they will someday leave our light-cone. We see their light today, and that’s a causal interaction with the past galaxy where it used to be, but we understand enough about object permanence that we believe we have solid reason to infer there still exists a galaxy moving along the trajectory we witnessed, even when we cannot interact with it directly.