The experience machine
In preparation for a philosophical discussion on Saturday, I meditate on Robert Nozick’s Experience Machine.
The question:
“Suppose there were an experience machine that would give you any experience that you desired. Superduper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book. All the time you would be floating in a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain… Of course, while in the tank you won’t know that you’re there; you’ll think it’s all actually happening.”
(Taken from: Robert Nozick — Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974))
Would you plug in?
1. Introduction
Origins — The experience machine and hedonism
The experience machine thought experiment was proposed to show that how our lives feel to us “on the inside” is not the only thing that matters.
Hedonism is the position that life is first and foremost about maximizing pleasure. Sure, most people agree that the pursuit of pleasure is a big part of being human, but in hedonism it is the highest moral good. Your opinion on whether hedonism is right or wrong is important, because it will determine how you live your life.
There are two ways to logically relate hedonism and the experience machine thought experiment:
- If hedonism is true, then we should plug in to the experience machine.
- If we have reasons to not plug into the experience machine, then hedonism is not true.
These statements are both hypothetical — they begin with “If”. This is because, we are neither sure about whether we should plug into the machine, nor hedonism. However, this link compels us to better understand the thought experiment as a means to understanding hedonism.
Given no obvious starting place, let’s really dig deep into some details of the experience machine. Not those that have to do with whether it is possible to make such a machine, or the details of how you will get to choose the experiences of your redesigned life. Instead we will assume that building such a machine to any specifications is possible and focus on the details that are directly relevant to hedonism.
2. The Nature of happiness
Will the experience machine even make us happier?
(I am not questioning the technology of the experience machine, but rather whether happiness by nature is compatible with what we are proposing here. Let’s see.)
At first look this might seem obvious. If you could have whatever you want — things, people, experiences, etc., surely you wouldn’t be sad, lonely, stressed, etc. You would be rather happy.
But I’m sceptical that it would work.
There is a concept known as the hedonic treadmill. It is a scientifically tested phenomenon in which humans have been observed to return to a relatively stable level of happiness even after major positive or negative events in their lives. If you were asked to score your happiness on a scale of 1 to 10 then winning the lottery might get you up to a 10 for a couple of days, but after a while you will return to about a 7. Then a really tragic loss of your favourite pop star might bring you down to a 3, but within a week you will return to a 7. In other words, life goes on.
My question to the hedonists all set to plug in is this: Would the experience machine even work in giving you more pleasure? Or will it get old after some time?
Also, don’t many of the things that give us pleasure or happiness, and that attract us to the experience machine, only work because of their aloofness? Once they become so easy to get, won’t they lose their charm especially quickly?
A response to this might be to use the machine cautiously and respect the hedonic treadmill. Moderate your wins to get you through your life without losing its charm. That just sounds too close to how we have to live life already.
An exception to the hedonic treadmill
Interestingly, it has been said that there is one exception to the hedonic treadmill and that is spending time with loved ones. Apparently doing this never really gets old.
That has interesting consequences. If you are to sign up for the experience machine, will you not be leaving your family— your one true source of lasting happiness — in the real world? The creative hedonist may propose a “group experience machine” so you can go into this world with your family. Fair.
The other interesting consequence is an argument for signing up. If you use the experience machine as a tool to spend time with your loved ones, then the experience machine could once again work. So perhaps a recreated reality in the experience machine allows you to spend 24/7 time with your family with no job to suck away most of your time and energy. Or it could bring back a lost family member or cure their disability. Moreover it could make it such that you never have to even worry about disease or disability, guaranteeing quality time spent. While this may work, I highly doubt that this is what people are thinking about when they fantasize about the experience machine.
The gap between what we think will make us happy and what actually makes us happy
Moreover there are arguments that we do not know what makes us happy.
These come in the form of empirical evidence — experiments designed specifically to show how our expected happiness deviates from our actual happiness on things such as money, youth, qualifications, etc.
I’d say having too many choices or too much freedom could also be one of the things that leads to less happiness.
Hmm… what if we had an experience machine that made the best choices for us? This would respond to the gap perfectly. It seems a little hard to imagine what choices it would make. But on an abstract level, such a machine would be way better.
End of Section 2
Ok so that leaves us with a redesigned experience machine. One that instead of giving us choices and removes the barriers to our happiness, makes the choices for us and maximises our happiness. Now the difference between reality and the experience machine 2.0 is plainly: reality seems more “real”.
(Interestingly, as I later found out, the author also redesigns the experience machine in the original text to fill other gaps. From the beginning, I could have just supposed that any gaps could be removed by simply redesigning the machine. But it helps to go through this discussion and see what specifically the redesigning process would need to address because as we have seen it might reveal something about the nature of something involved in the problem. In this case we realized that happiness is bounded by the hedonic treadmill and that total control is something we might not want in an experience machine)
3. Reality!
Romanticising Reality
Robert Nozick says we have reasons to not plug into the machine. He proposes three reasons but I believe that they are in the same spirit. The first two are that what we want is to do certain things, and to be certain people not merely experience it as such. Whatever we do and whoever we become in the experience machine will not be real, but just felt. His third reason is that the virtual reality of the experience machine is not really reality and that people value actual reality over any sort of illusions.
So all of them are just alluding to reality being more important than experience.
I think this is on some level just romanticising reality.
Why exactly is reality so important?
When people say things like “Whatever happens in video games is not real, so eventually doesn’t matter”, to what extent is this true, if it is true at all?
Reality has consequences, and they might catch up to you
In a virtual environment, you can potentially mess up and undo your mess ups. In reality, you have to suffer the consequences.
Since video games aren’t nearly as good as the experience machine, eventually real world considerations get into the way of your game time. But this will not be a problem for us in the perfect experience machine.
Reality has consequences, and that’s why decisions matter
Since we have to suffer the consequences, we need to make our decisions carefully. This careful deliberation of our choices, decisions, likes, affiliations, etc. is a source of meaning in our lives.
Removing this source of meaning might be a problem. Or it might not. Come to think of it, people only find meaning in suffering, and not in pleasure. No one’s ever obsessed over finding meaning behind some unsolicited pleasure, only suffering.
Reality is inaccessible anyway
No human has ever known reality. Our brains do a lot of work to simplify reality into meaningful chunks of information. What we see is merely a perception. (This is not some obscure philosophical belief, any neuroscientist will agree.)
With this in mind, the experience machine virtual reality is only “relatively” less real. If you signed up for another experience machine which was within the first experience machine somehow (hopefully not because you were not satisfied with your life in the experience machine) then that would be even less real.
So I guess what matters about reality is not whether something is real or not, but rather its consequences and how much your decisions matter.
End of Section 3
That leaves us with: Reality has consequences whereas the experience machine might not. This might matter in terms of life being meaningful/interesting/challenging whatever word you like. Reality has no other inherent value. (This is my analysis, if you have other ideas do share them)
4. Meaning of life
Experience machine and suicide
Camus famously said that “There is but one important philosophical question, and that is suicide” — or in other words the question of whether life is worth living. Would Camus see the experience machine question as equally important?
There are similarities between the decision to kill yourself and the decision to plug in. In both cases, one confesses that the alternative is better than a normal real life. One difference might be that suicide is an escape from suffering, while plugging in is chasing more pleasure.
Going back to how the meaning of life problem only seems to matter because of suffering, it seems that the experience machine might be a strictly better alternative to suicide. This way instead of ceasing to exist, at least you are guaranteed to have a good time.
Here I have expertly (complete fluke) made the experience machine seem like a glorified form of suicide. Now whatever arguments we had against suicide, we can throw them at the experience machine as well. And we had lots of those the last time I checked.
5. Final remarks
All that I’ve said merely elucidates the problem. It does nothing to argue against hedonism. But hopefully the intuitions might push one to see value in other things beside pleasure.
A man who is not content with his life can see the experience machine as an escape, and that would be a personal choice based on personal value judgments. All we reality-lovers can do is hope to build a society where people are not attracted by such prospects. Spreading philosophy could lead to this state of affairs.
Is it fascinating that those content with their lives, or those with the belief that one day they will be content with their lives would say no to this experience machine offer? Is it then just a case of “hey life kinda sucks”? Perhaps the experience machine thought experiment is a good way to figure out whether we’re living well; and if we’re not, we could make it our goal to one day be able to say “No, thanks” to this machine.
I think the experience machine might become a reality some day. If not in its full capacity then at least partially. Once partial versions (and we already have some approximations of it; cf. the entire entertainment industry. Even a book is an experience machine of sorts) begin to take over more and more of our interactions with reality, then discussions like this one, tuned to the specific experience machine in question, would be practically important and not just lofty old philosophy.
Notes
I was writing this post as I was thinking(what I mean by meditation in this context) and kept going back and forth making edits. It might be messy and uncoordinated but it is filled with insights and it was really fun to write.
The Wikipedia page on the experience machine is rather misleading and I would recommend reading the actual text on the experience machine which is not longer than 3 pages of prose (Page 42–45 of Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) by Robert Nozick)
