I'll be honest, Ive already done a lot of heavy philosophising this week (see the extensive comments going on about thought experiment 97), so I'm feeling pretty tired of thinking hard. Wouldn't it be nice to have Calgon take me away so I could "lose myself in luxury" and just float in a tub all day? Or better yet, maybe an immersive machine could take care of me so I'd never get prune fingers or have to deal with the difficulties of life ever again! That's what this week's thought experiment is offering.
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Robert had been sitting in front of the consent form for two hours and still he did not know whether to sign it or shred it. His choice was between two futures.
In one, his prospects were bleak and the chances of realising his dreams slim. In the other, he would be a famous rock star guaranteed to be kept permanently happy. Not much of a choice, you might think. But whereas the first life would be in the real world, the second would be entirely within the experience machine.
This device enables you to live the whole of your life in a virtual-reality environment. All your experiences are designed to make you happier and more satisfied. But crucially, once in the machine you have no idea that you are not in the real world, nor that what is happening to you has been designed to meet your needs. It seems you are living an ordinary life in an ordinary world: it is just that in this life, you are one of the winners for whom everything seems to go right.
Robert knows that once he is in the machine, life will be great. But still, something about its phoniness makes him hesitate to sign the form that will take him to this paradise.
Source: Chapter 3 of Anarchy, State, and Utopia by Robert Nozick, 1974.
Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 292.
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I've heard the University of Pennsylvania positive psychology professor Scott Barry Kaufman say in his Psychology Podcast that his students overwhelmingly reject this choice, but I couldn't find anyone sharing their data about this to back it up. I did find facts about an inverted thought experiment though, which was developed to see if maybe people just prefer to stay wherever they currently are. In the inverted experiment, you are asked what you would do if someone came to you now and said everything you currently remember has actually been a simulation and you can choose to either continue on (this explanation will be wiped from your memory of course), or you can choose to go back to your "real world." Depending on whether that real world was then described as a positive, neutral, or negative change, the results of the survey varied quite dramatically. This was discussed in a paper published in Ethical Perspectives in 2011 titled, "Can We Test the Experience Machine", where the author Basil Smith also concluded with this:
...we cannot compare actual survey responses and (never occurring) confronted reactions. Generally, this suggests that experimental philosophy is limited, in that certain thought experiments cannot be tested at all. Perhaps this result entails that these thought experiments are themselves useless, and serve only to mislead. But the point here is simply that experimental philosophy should recognize this limit."
I agree with this conclusion about experimental philosophy. Listening to the public's opinions on contradictory moral urges doesn't necessarily tell you what is right, and it's not clear that our reactions to imaginary thought experiments would really match our emotional reactions in real life anyway. So if the empirical data on these experience machine experiments doesn't tell us much, what are we supposed to learn from them in theory? Well, the Wikipedia entry for the Experience Machine says that:
It is one of the best known attempts to refute ethical hedonism. ... The argument is along these lines:
Of course, "experiencing as much pleasure as we can" is not what evolutionary philosophy is based upon, so I share this disagreement with ethical hedonism. During my long post about pain in response to thought experiment 68, I quoted an excellent reader comment that speaks to why pure hedonism isn't enough.
Pain is a survival mechanism to bring priority awareness of bodily damage to conscious thought to facilitate corrective action. It's essential to survival for all animate life, insects included. Depending on severity it overrides other brain processes as an emergency signal for needed avoidance action.
I find this somewhat related to the answer that Mike (the author of the Self Aware Patterns website) provided in the comments section of my post on Monday for this thought experiment. He wrote:
I wouldn't sign. Not because I like suffering or see any inherent virtue in it, but because I think the best prospects for long term survival and well being lie in dealing with the real world, and I wouldn't trust any assurances that the experience machine would protect me from anything going wrong in that outer world.
So while Nozick gave three of his own reasons not to plug into the machine — 1. We want to do certain things, and not just have the experience of doing them. 2. We want to be a certain sort of person. 3. Plugging into an experience machine limits us to a man-made reality. — I think these readers' evolutionary perspectives point to the best reason.
In the real world, feelings of pleasure are reliable guides towards survival. They may only be focused on the short-term, however, which is why we have also developed some semblance of free will that allows us to choose to do temporarily painful things in service of a greater goal or later pleasure. But the experience machine in this thought experiment would remove us from the real world and just give us pleasure for the sake of pleasure. In the machine, pleasure would no longer guide us towards or away from anything; it would just be. But we should reject this because pleasure is merely a proximate goal in service of an ultimate goal. Pleasure and pain are only instrumental; they are not intrinsically or inherently valuable or costly on their own. The experience machine removes us from striving for survival—the ultimate goal for life—and so we ought not to sign up for it. Our hesitations to do so are more evidence that our intuitions are guided by our conscious or unconscious attraction towards truly meaningful goals.
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Robert had been sitting in front of the consent form for two hours and still he did not know whether to sign it or shred it. His choice was between two futures.
In one, his prospects were bleak and the chances of realising his dreams slim. In the other, he would be a famous rock star guaranteed to be kept permanently happy. Not much of a choice, you might think. But whereas the first life would be in the real world, the second would be entirely within the experience machine.
This device enables you to live the whole of your life in a virtual-reality environment. All your experiences are designed to make you happier and more satisfied. But crucially, once in the machine you have no idea that you are not in the real world, nor that what is happening to you has been designed to meet your needs. It seems you are living an ordinary life in an ordinary world: it is just that in this life, you are one of the winners for whom everything seems to go right.
Robert knows that once he is in the machine, life will be great. But still, something about its phoniness makes him hesitate to sign the form that will take him to this paradise.
Source: Chapter 3 of Anarchy, State, and Utopia by Robert Nozick, 1974.
Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 292.
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I've heard the University of Pennsylvania positive psychology professor Scott Barry Kaufman say in his Psychology Podcast that his students overwhelmingly reject this choice, but I couldn't find anyone sharing their data about this to back it up. I did find facts about an inverted thought experiment though, which was developed to see if maybe people just prefer to stay wherever they currently are. In the inverted experiment, you are asked what you would do if someone came to you now and said everything you currently remember has actually been a simulation and you can choose to either continue on (this explanation will be wiped from your memory of course), or you can choose to go back to your "real world." Depending on whether that real world was then described as a positive, neutral, or negative change, the results of the survey varied quite dramatically. This was discussed in a paper published in Ethical Perspectives in 2011 titled, "Can We Test the Experience Machine", where the author Basil Smith also concluded with this:
...we cannot compare actual survey responses and (never occurring) confronted reactions. Generally, this suggests that experimental philosophy is limited, in that certain thought experiments cannot be tested at all. Perhaps this result entails that these thought experiments are themselves useless, and serve only to mislead. But the point here is simply that experimental philosophy should recognize this limit."
I agree with this conclusion about experimental philosophy. Listening to the public's opinions on contradictory moral urges doesn't necessarily tell you what is right, and it's not clear that our reactions to imaginary thought experiments would really match our emotional reactions in real life anyway. So if the empirical data on these experience machine experiments doesn't tell us much, what are we supposed to learn from them in theory? Well, the Wikipedia entry for the Experience Machine says that:
It is one of the best known attempts to refute ethical hedonism. ... The argument is along these lines:
- P1: If experiencing as much pleasure as we can is all that matters to us, then if we will experience more pleasure by doing x than by doing y, we have no reason not to do x rather than y.
- P2: We will experience more pleasure if we plug into the experience machine than if we do not plug into the experience machine.
- C1: If all that matters to us is that we experience as much pleasure as we can then we have no reason not to plug into the experience machine. (P1&P2)
- P3: We have reason not to plug into the experience machine.
- C2: Experiencing as much pleasure as we can is not all that matters to us.
Of course, "experiencing as much pleasure as we can" is not what evolutionary philosophy is based upon, so I share this disagreement with ethical hedonism. During my long post about pain in response to thought experiment 68, I quoted an excellent reader comment that speaks to why pure hedonism isn't enough.
Pain is a survival mechanism to bring priority awareness of bodily damage to conscious thought to facilitate corrective action. It's essential to survival for all animate life, insects included. Depending on severity it overrides other brain processes as an emergency signal for needed avoidance action.
I find this somewhat related to the answer that Mike (the author of the Self Aware Patterns website) provided in the comments section of my post on Monday for this thought experiment. He wrote:
I wouldn't sign. Not because I like suffering or see any inherent virtue in it, but because I think the best prospects for long term survival and well being lie in dealing with the real world, and I wouldn't trust any assurances that the experience machine would protect me from anything going wrong in that outer world.
So while Nozick gave three of his own reasons not to plug into the machine — 1. We want to do certain things, and not just have the experience of doing them. 2. We want to be a certain sort of person. 3. Plugging into an experience machine limits us to a man-made reality. — I think these readers' evolutionary perspectives point to the best reason.
In the real world, feelings of pleasure are reliable guides towards survival. They may only be focused on the short-term, however, which is why we have also developed some semblance of free will that allows us to choose to do temporarily painful things in service of a greater goal or later pleasure. But the experience machine in this thought experiment would remove us from the real world and just give us pleasure for the sake of pleasure. In the machine, pleasure would no longer guide us towards or away from anything; it would just be. But we should reject this because pleasure is merely a proximate goal in service of an ultimate goal. Pleasure and pain are only instrumental; they are not intrinsically or inherently valuable or costly on their own. The experience machine removes us from striving for survival—the ultimate goal for life—and so we ought not to sign up for it. Our hesitations to do so are more evidence that our intuitions are guided by our conscious or unconscious attraction towards truly meaningful goals.
