Most people would agree that having pleasurable experiences is a necessary part of being happy. But are pleasurable experiences, in and of themselves, sufficient for happiness? If there was a way to ensure that you would have nothing but pleasurable experiences for the rest of your life, would that be enough to make you happy? Robert Nozick's experience machine thought experiment purports to help us answer this question. By many accounts, the experiment is, if not conclusive, at least strongly suggestive that most of us are not philosophical hedonists (we do not believe that pleasure is the essence of the good). We want, according to this story, something more than the experience of pleasure.
Opening his thought experiment Nozick asks: "What matters other than how people's experiences feel "from the inside?" To answer this question he suggests we imagine a machine capable of producing consistent, high quality, desireable experiences for us on an ongoing basis:
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.
On the standard reading of Nozick's machine we are to ask ourselves: if such a device existed, and if we were completely assured of its efficacy in producing pleasurable experiences of the exact type and quality we desired, would we want to to plug in? And if not, if we feel that we don't want to plug in, or if we have the intuition that we shouldn't plug in, doesn't this mean that we reject philosophical hedonism? Doesn't it tell us something important about what is important to us?
Nozick puts it this way: "We learn that something matters to us in addition to experience by imagining an experience machine and then realizing that we would not use it." What do we learn? Nozick offers 3 reasons we would not want to plug into the Experience Machine:
(1)"First, we want to do certain things, and not just have the experience of doing them."
(2)"A second reason for not plugging in is that we want to be a certain way, to be a certain sort of person."
(3)"Thirdly, plugging into an experience machine limits us to a man-made reality, to a world no deeper or more important than that which people can construct. There is no actual contact with any deeper reality, though the experience of it can be simulated."
I think that the way Nozick presents both (1) and (2) are problematic, and I'll discuss the reasons why in subsequent posts. For now I want to focus on claim (3), particularly as I think most if not all of Nozick's concerns can be reduced to (3), and furthermore, that it is (3) that drives the popularity of the thought experiment, as it makes assumptions that play to deeply ingrained biases that philosophers are likely to have. Nozick's concern is that hooking up to the machine will cut us off from something important (a "real reality?" readers are invited to come up with their own pleonasm here), and confine us to a "man-made reality." Nozick complains that in a "man-made" reality there is no "actual contact" with any "deeper" reality. To put it another way, Nozick is concerned that by hooking up to the experience machine, we will wind up living in a world composed entirely of shit that we make up, and will thereby lose contact with reality, the kind of contact one gets when, for example, one is kicking rocks. This notion, the notion of losing "contact" with reality, goes way back in the western philosophical tradition. Rather than being a problem of losing contact with reality, however, it is typically described as the problem of getting into contact with reality in the first place.
Plato, to whom we are reportedly footnotes, came up with (as far as the western tradition is concerned) the original experience machine, what we now know as Plato's cave. Describing the cave to Glaucon, Socrates paints a picture of this remarkable device:
"Next then", I said, "make an image of our nature in its education and want of education, likening it to a condition of the following kind. See human beings as though they were in an underground cave-like dwelling with its entrance, a long one, open to the light across the whole width of the cave. They are in it from childhood with their legs and necks in bonds so that they are fixed, seeing only in front of them, unable because of the bond to turn their heads all the way around. Their light is from a fire burning far above and behind them. Between the fire and the prisoners there is a road above, along which see a wall, built like the partitions puppet-handlers set in front of the human beings and over which they show the puppets."
Elaborating his example further, Socrates goes on to describe how "along this wall human beings carrying all sorts of artifacts" move their various objects to and fro, so that the light from the fire projects shadows of those objects on the wall upon which the gazes of the cave denizens are fixed. "Do you suppose," asks Socrates "such men would have seen anything of themselves and one another other than the shadows cast by the fire on the side of the cave facing them?"
The denizens of Plato's cave live, in other words, in an entirely man-made world. A world of human artifacts, human energy, and human sounds. Within the cave, it is as James said: "the trail of the human serpent is over everything." Escape, however, is possible. At the back of the cave there is a path out, a "rough, steep, upward way," that leads from the darkness of the cave to the real world, or at least a non-human world, a world where the true nature of objects are revealed, "the things themselves" unmediated by fire and shadow.
The parallels with Nozick's experience machine are clear: human beings trapped in a world of their own making, out of contact with "actual" reality, unaware that a "deeper" contact with reality is available to them (or worse, consciously choosing to reject this deeper reality). I think there are (at least) two interesting things we can note here.
First, if one accepts a Platonic account of our epistemic condition, i.e. that our starting point is one of dramatic epistemic poverty, then most of us are already in a kind of experience machine. If this is right, how does our ignorance impact our considerations at the moment we consider hooking up to additional experience machines? I'll take up this question in a subsequent post.
For now I want take up a second consideration. Using Plato's allegory of the cave we can recast Nozick's thought experiment as follows: "Suppose there were a cave somewhere, where all experience was mediated by human artifice, but the form of that artifice could be organized by you ("preprogramming your life experiences" is the way Nozick puts it). In this cave you could ask for the specific kind of puppet show that you wanted, and all your experiences would be guaranteed to fit your tastes perfectly. Would you go to this cave and chain yourself up?" Given that the Platonic division of the world into "reality" and "appearance" has dominated the Western philosophical tradition for some 2 millennia, is it remotely suprising that philosophers might be somewhat disinclined to hook up to the experience machine? Framed in this way one is tempted to ask: did philosophers really need a new thought experiment to remind us that we don't want to be chained up in Plato's cave?
But note again Nozick's opening question: "What matters other than how people's experiences feel 'from the inside?'" This passage suggests that Nozick's philosophical anxieties go deeper than those unearthed by Plato's cave. What is the "inside" that he is referring to? Given the way the experience machine is described it can be nothing other than the "inside" of the human mind itself. What, after all, are our "experiences," but "ideas" lodged in the mind? So not merely the cave of culture, the cave of received opinion, the cave of human artifice, but the cave of experience itself. For the entire conceit of the experience machine assumes a deliberate hijacking of what Daniel Dennett has called "the Cartesian Theatre."
The Cartesian Theatre is the model of the mind that was bequeathed to us by Rene Descarte. It is a kind of souped up Platonic cave, where the prisoners are supplanted by our own "inner eye," a disembodied prisoner that inspects the parade of images supplied by our sensory experience and imagination. With the world of experience imploded into non-extensible mind, we are unerringly directed to the conclusion that we might be able to retreat entirely "within ourselves." This was the conclusion that Descartes came to during his Mediations, a metaphorical 6 day survey of the contents of mind, a cleansing programmatic exposition of radical doubt, a process of epistemological purification that would eliminate any unclear or indistinct ideas from the catalog of Descartes' beliefs, and thus lay a foundation for real knowledge, real contact with reality. But how much of the world can be doubted? As it turns out, quite a bit:
However, I must here consider that I am a man, and consequently that I am in the habit of sleeping and of representing to myself in my dreams those same things, or sometimes even less likely things, which insane people do when they are awake. How many times have I dreamt at night that I was in this place, dressed, by the fire, although I was quite naked in my bed? It certainly seems to me at the moment that I am not looking at this paper with my eyes closed; that this head that I shake is not asleep; that I hold out this hand intentionally and deliberately, and that I am aware of it. What happens in sleep does not seem as clear and distinct as all this. But in thinking about it carefully I recall having often been deceived in sleep by similar illusions, and, reflecting on this cicumstance more closely, I see so clearly that there are no conclusive signs by means of which one can distinguish clearly between being awake and being asleep, that I am quite astonished by it; and my astonishment is such that it is almost capable of persuading me that I am asleep now.Here Descartes lays out the possibility that we are not only in a cave of received opinion, where we are chained to the particular ideas of our cultural milieu, but that we are locked inside the very substance of our own minds, our beliefs the spontaneous product of our imagination. But once this possibility is admitted, once the "images of things" are converted into "ideas" that we "represent to ourselves," then the way is left open to intense fantasies about radically skeptical scenarios:
I shall suppose, therefore, that there is, not a true God, who is the sovereign source of truth, but some evil demon, no less cunning and deceiving than powerful, who has used all his artifice to deceive me. I will suppose that the heavens, the air, the earth, colours, shapes, sounds and all external things that we see, are only illusions and deceptions which he uses to take me in. I will consider myself as having no hands, eyes, flesh, blood, or senses, but as believing wrongly that I have all these things. I shall cling obstinately to this notion; and if, by this means, it is not in my power to arrive at the knowledge of any truth, at the very least it is in my power to suspend my judgment.
Putting Descartes's meditation in Nozickian language we can say: "I shall suppose, therefore, that I am hooked up to an experience machine, a machine that produces 'the heavens, the air, the earth, colours, shapes, sounds and all external things that we see,' and further, that this machine is controlled by an entity whose sole interest is in deceiving me about that true state of the world." Isn't it precisely this that Nozick asks us if we want to do? Doesn't he ask us if we want to become our own evil demon? To willingly give up our putative "connection" to reality and replace that connection with nothing but the limits of our imagination--in thrall to the vicissitudes of desire? Are we imaginative enough to be our own gods? Given the powers of an experience machine how could we help but become our own demon? In such a scenario, closed in on ourselves, with no "deeper" reality into which we might vent our spleen, how could our phenomenal world not fill up with our own shit?
Such, in my view, is the philosophical backdrop of claim (3), the claim that "plugging into an experience machine limits us to a man-made reality, to a world no deeper or more important than that which people can construct." Thus, far from merely arguing that we do not, despite ourselves, wish only to have pleasurable experiences, the experience machine argument is itself an experience machine that injects into us Platonic/Cartesian intuitions complete with concomitant ready-made anxieties. It is clear why such a thought experiment might be considered useful in undergraduate philosophy courses: if you want to pump into your students a powerful set of intuitions about the reality/appearance distinction, and connect those intuitions to things that that really interest them (TV, drugs, movies, music, video games, and other powerful experience inducers) then Nozick's experience machine is a good way to start the conversation. Who knows? You might even coax them out of the cave, or at least be the first person to give them a shovel.
With the preceding bit of context to ground our considerations, I think we can now consider some other questions. In particular, what of reasons (1) and (2) not to use the machine? Do these relate in any interesting ways to (3)? When people find that they have the intuition not to use the experience machine, is it the experience machine qua experience machine that they are reacting to? Or are there other contaminants in the vicinity? I will attempt to make some headway answering these questions in subsequent posts.
Part 2
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