Nozick's Experience Machine (Part 2): Re-calibrating the intuition pump.

In my previous post on Nozick's experience machine I suggested that "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." This comment was inspired in part by Daniel Dennet's idea of "intuition pumps," a meme originally offered (to the best of my knowledge) in his 1984 book Elbow Room. There he writes:

A popular strategy in philosophy is to construct a certain sort of thought experiment I call an intuition pump...Intuition pumps are cunningly designed to focus the reader's attention on "the important" features, and to deflect the reader from bogging down in hard-to-follow details. There is nothing wrong with this in principle. Indeed one of philosophy's highest callings is finding ways of helping people see the forest and not just the trees. But intuition pumps are often abused, though seldom deliberately.

In his 1991 book Consciousness Explained, however, Dennett deploys the metaphor polemically:

The most influential thought experiments in recent philosophy of mind have all involved inviting the audience to imagine some specially contrived or stipulated state of affairs, and then—without properly checking to see if this feat of imagination has actually been accomplished—inviting the audience to “notice” various consequences in the fantasy. These “intuition pumps,” as I call them, are often fiendishly clever devices. They deserve their fame if only for their seductiveness.

The pains and pleasures of intuition pumps.

A bit further on Dennett goes on to emphasize, in reference to classic thought experiments such as Mary the Color Scientist, The Chinese Room, and What It Is Like to Be a Bat: "These intuition pumps are defective; they do not enhance but mislead our imaginations." I suggest Nozick's experience machine is one more example of an intuition pump gone wrong (or gone exactly as intended!), an intuition pump that does not really assist or magnify our imaginations, but rather seeks to misdirect them. It is a device that pumps into us intuitions that (at least partially) obscure rather than clarify the issues at hand. In part one, I briefly sketched the historical backdrop that frames our modern experience of the experience machine idea. In this section, I want to consider the individual components of the experience machine itself, those components designed to assist and enhance (or misdirect) our imaginations.

Before examining the elements of Nozick's intuition pump, however, it is worth briefly attending to the "intuitions" that are being "pumped" by these metaphor(ical) machines. What are these “intuitions?" The term "intuition" has a long history in philosophy, and we need not go into it here. For present purposes it is enough to note that what philosophers are frequently trying to obtain with their production of/appeal to "intuitions" are non-inferential propositions from which they can draw subsequent inferences. Intuitions are sought out so that they can be made to form the foundational bedrock upon which the rest of a philosophical apparatus can be built.

Again and again one finds in the literature that we have a "prima facie case for saying that X," or simply "here we find that we have the powerful intuition that X," and so on. In Nozick's case, the intuition he wants pumped is an immediate sense that "something matters to us in addition to experience," an intuition we obtain by "imagining an experience machine and then realizing that we would not use it." If Nozick can get us to agree that when imagining an experience machine that we do indeed have the intuition that he predicts we will have--that we do not want to use the experience machine, then he can use this intuited assent to build his case that we want something more than "how our experiences feel from the inside."

To analyze an intuition pump is to try trace the origins of whatever "realizations" the pump is trying to push. To whatever degree we are able to re-calibrate the mechanisms that pump these "realizations," we may find that the intuitions the pump had previously pushed "into" us are no longer as clear as we had previously supposed. Let us consider then, the elements of Nozick’s intuition pump, the components of his experience machine--and some of the ways in which they mislead us.

1. The very idea of an experience machine

Before digging into the individual elements of Nozick's experience machine it worthwhile to briefly rehearse the fact that we can conceive of such a thing at all, with the concomitant consideration that how we think about experience will impact how we evaluate experience inducing machines. In part one I detailed some progenitors to our modern conception of an experience machine. In the present age of radical technological acceleration, the notion of an experience machine has acquired additional plausibility due to overwhelming evidence that the bulk (if not all) of what we call consciousness is an "output" of the brain. While Plato's cave must content itself with imagery that amounts to little more than a modern movie theater (though this in itself is remarkable, that it took us some 2,000 years to actually MAKE Plato's cave) and Descartes marveled at the simulacra produced by dream states (postulating that an "evil demon" might serve as the diabolical host of our experience), we can now consider with all seriousness the possibility that experiences could be injected by a literal machine directly into the "mind" via the brain, skipping contact with the ears and eyes and other organs of sense, creating a world that is only known "from the inside." Even more radically, "strong AI" proponents suggest that we might be able to create machines that themselves have experience. The sense that experience machines (of whatever type) might soon be literally possible, as opposed to merely metaphorical flourishes, gives additional cultural weight to "brain in a vat" thought experiments, of which Nozick's experience machine can be considered an exemplar. Typically such thought experiments are focused on epistemological questions: how can we know that we aren’t already brains in a vat? Such radical skepticism has managed to force the expenditure of much ink in defense of our unvatted natures, but Nozick’s argument can be considered primarily a normative attack on any desires we might have to be so envatted.

Despite these recent developments we should be wary of allowing the increasing literality of the experience machine metaphor to obscure our awareness of the non-literal conceptual schemes that enable us to consider them in the first place. The structures of Plato’s cave and Descartes evil demon metaphors remain relevant to our considerations because we are still holding on (perhaps erroneously) to key concepts embedded in those metaphors. As Dennett notes at the end of Consciousness Explained:

I haven’t replaced a metaphorical theory, the Cartesian Theory, with a nonmetaphoircal (“literal, scientific”) theory. All I have done, really, is to replace one family of metaphors and images with another, trading in the Theater,the Witness the Central Meaner, the Figment, for Software, Virtual Machines,Multiple Drafts, a Pandemonium of Homunculi. It’s just a war of metaphors, you say—but metaphors are not “just” metaphors; metaphors are the tools of thought. No one can think about consciousness without them, so it is important to equip yourself with the best tools available. Look what we have built with our tools. Could you have imagined it without them?

Indeed we cannot do much imagining without our metaphors, and this is precisely the reason we must be so careful when constructing intuition pumps that “help” our imaginations produce intuitions. In the case of the experience machine metaphor, it should be noted that while Dennett has done a great deal to destabilize and/or re-imagine the Cartesian Theatre and the Central Meaner, he has done little to soften our sense that “experience” is rooted in a machine. On the contrary, he has intensified it. While previously the experience machine was either an apparatus or an agent that produced experiences for, and delivered experiences to an observer; functionalist approaches tend to imagine experience is the output of a virtual machine, software running on the wetware of the brain.

A full analysis of how these various metaphors interact with our sense of what an experience machine could or could not do is obviously pertinent to our considerations here, but will have to be set aside due to the scope and subtlety of addressing the questions in play. For now simply note that the various metaphors of “machine,” “apparatus,” “theater,” and “agent” are remarkably difficult to shake, and that it is unlikely that the addition of “Software, Virtual Machines, Multiple Drafts, [and] a Pandemonium of Homunculi,” to our stock of metaphors will in and of itself provide an answer the question: “do we want something more than experiences felt from the inside?” For even if we succeed in banishing “the inside” into a pandemonium of homunculi, we will not suddenly find that we have no experiences left to introduce via an experience machine. Rather, we will find we are the experience machine that is busy producing experiences. The question may then simply become: "Do we want to be something more than experience production machines?"

2. How do the experiences get injected?

 

Nozick suggests that we imagine the experience machine as tank in which we float, with "electrodes attached to [our] brain." This image is clearly intended to evoke "brain in a vat" imagery, but as stage setting for an investigation into our hedonistic preferences it is needlessly biased. The question at hand is: Is there something more important to us than “how our experiences feel from the inside?" Given that we have no idea how exactly we would implement such technology, the notion of “floating in a tank," seems an arbitrary conceit, one that Nozick explicitly frames in a pejorative manner, stating “someone floating in a tank is an indeterminate blob." Clearly this is not a charitable vision of how an experience machine might be implemented. Given that the possibility of a true experience machine is distant at best, and given that we have no idea how full blown “experience technology" will work, we need not generate invidious descriptions of "blobs floating in tanks," imagery akin that found in the nightmarish film "Altered States".  The reader can of course imagine any number of contraptions, and popular culture can furnish many more: the fleshy consoles controllers of Cronenberg's "Existenz," the gruesome vats and robotic IV injectors of "The Matrix," the sleek modern recliner chair of Joss Wheaton’s "Dollhouse," The MRI-like scanner of "The 13th Floor" and so on. To these we could even add drugs like Phillip K Dick’s Chew-Z.

However the experience machine is imagined, what is crucial is that we recognize the influence that the mode of experience delivery can have on our evaluation of the experience machine itself. We might not be attracted to becoming "indeterminate blobs floating in a tank." We might be more inclined to take a pill, or lie down on a comfortable recliner have have neural nets attached to our foreheads.  Any experience machine thought experiment that really wants to test just our attachment to "reality," ought to remain as bland as possible in its description of experince injection. This is certainly a situation in which the medium can infect the message. Any serious test of intuitive responses to the experience machine needs to allow for a variety of experience machine injection mechanisms--in order test for responses not only to the experience machine itself but also how the experiences get injected.

In a certain sense, though, the question of how the experiences are injected is a purely aesthetic exterior coating, given that our central focus is the quality of the experiences "on the inside." Indeed, “the outside” becomes even more irrelevant if we to the experience machine for life.

3. How much time must be committed to the experience machine?

 

Nozick at one point seems to suggest that our commitment to the experience machine must be lifelong. He writes: "Should you plug into this machine for life, preprogramming your life's experiences?" Strangely he seems to back off this radical commitment a sentence or two later when he suggests that re-programming sessions will be allowed: "After two years have passed, you will have ten minutes or ten hours out of the tank, to select the experiences of your next two years." Nozick’s suggestions here seem to contradict each other. First, why even bother to add this intermittent visit to the real world? And if one is going to allow reprogramming sessions outside “the tank” why stop there? Why not allow a visit to family and friends? In other words, why isn’t the question "should you plug into this machine for 2 years, and then go out and have some cake and cookies?" For that matter, why isn’t the question "should you plug into the experience machine for 2 days, 2 hours, or 2 minutes?”

This confusion significantly impacts the quality of the intuitions that Nozick's thought experiment pumps as it is likely that the question of whether or not one is committing to the experience machine for life will heavily influence any decision to hook up to the experience machine.

On the one hand, a hardline inquiry testing whether or not we care about our connection to "real" reality would seem to favor an experiment that tests a more absolute commitment. For if our goal is to discover whether or not there is anything that matters to us other than how things “feel from the inside,” we cannot admit to our thought experiment anything but things felt from the inside. If we are given a safety valve, an “out” from our time in the experience machine, then we will be able to have our experiences and eat them too. Whatever it is that we want other than a diet of experiences felt “from the inside,” a thought experiment that offers us the ability to choose how much time we spend in the experience machine will surely give us the opportunity to imagine this balance. If people were given the opportunity to pick and choose when to don and when to remove the experience machine apparatus, it seems likely we would see lines forming around the block in anticipation of “experience adventures” doled out in the time increment of the purchaser’s choice.

On the other hand,  it is not entirely clear that such a lifelong commitment to the experience machine is nearly as restrictive as it might first appear. I submit that Nozick's description of time spent outside the experience machine is a technical superfluity--the purpose of which is the accentuate the sense that time within the experience machine is "preprogrammed." For there is no clear reason that the machine must be reprogrammed from "outside" of its experiential matrix. We could, for example, simply allow for a mechanism that permits the next slew of experiences to be adjusted from within the experience machine itself. Why add the image of waking up in in a tank of water from which one must emerge for 10 min to select the next batch of experiences? Why is it necessary to exit the experience machine in order to alter the experiences it produces? One we make this adjustment, not only can we dispense with the “indeterminate blob” floating in the tank of water, we can dispense with the 2 year "reprogramming interval" as well. If we are considering what it would mean to commit to a life lived only “on the inside,” then we ought to stipulate that no emergence from the experience machine is required to adjust the experiences it outputs to our "interior." Whatever experiences we imagine the experience machine offering, we should also imagine this crucial additional experience: the ability to experience ourselves altering the experiences we are having. But this change suggests that an experience machine might offer us an unparalleled experience of freedom.

I believe that it is precisely a sense of a  loss of freedom that is illegitimately being pumped by Nozick's experience machine. Whether we imagine the ability to freely choose whatever amount of time we spend inside the experience machine, or whether we imagine being able to re-map the experiences we are having from inside the experience machine, we still wind up with an intuition of freedom that is substantially greater than that afforded by the awkward confusion of "lifelong commitment" with intermittent "preprogramming" sessions.

4. What does it mean to "preprogram" our experiences?

 

Immediately after asking us if we are willing to commit to the experience machine for life, Nozick suggests that use of the experience machine "preprograms" our experiences. "Should you plug into this machine for life, preprogramming your life’s experiences?" This question flies by so quickly, that the intuition it pumps is easily overlooked, a seemingly minor component of Nozick's experience machine. But we should think carefully about the assumptions made by Nozick’s question, for the notion that experiences can be “preprogrammed” goes right to the heart of one of our most fundamental concerns: the question of whether or not we have free will.

It is all too easy when reading Nozick’s thought experiment to accept that all of the experiences produced by the experience machine will be determined, that the possibility of choice will be foreclosed once the experience “program” is engaged. But framed in this manner, the question does not assist but misleads our imaginations. Nozick may as well have asked: would you like to enter an environment in which you have no freedom, in which everything that happens to you is preordained? It is easy when considering this question to assume that we are in a non-programmed environment right now, that we currently have free will, but that upon entering the experience machine that all our experiences will become "preset." Thus Nozick has given us not only the anxiety that we will lose contact with a "deeper" reality, but also lose our precious ability to determine our future (excepting, of course, our initial choice of the pre-programmed experience, selected from the experience machine’s library of experiences).

But do we currently have free will? Are there not analogs in daily life of “experience programming?” Are there not many activities we engage in precisely so that we might have experiences that we are passive recipients of? Obvious candidates are things like TV and movies, our proto experience machines. But the question is more broadly applicable. Do skydivers "preprogram" a rush of adrenaline when they jump out of airplanes? Is the psychiatrist trying to "preprogram” her patient’s future experiences when subscribing a particular anti-depressant (from her library of antidepressants)? Is the patient who visits the psychiatrist requesting an opportunity to “preprogram” themselves or "reprogram themselves? Is there a difference? Do our genetics create "program limitations" on the range of possible experiences we might have? Are the covers of supermarket magazines “programmed” to get some segment of the populace to pick them up? When members of the demographic in question pickup said magazines are they doing so because of "internal programming?"

All of these questions would be interesting to pursue. But we need not pursue them here. It is enough to note that it is not clear where we should draw the line when it comes to our real world practices and their relation to free will. It is not clear to what degree we are either “programmed” or engaged in “preprogramming” as we go about our daily activities. Certainly it is not obvious that we are free now in a way that we would not be upon entering an experience machine, for we have neither settled what the necessary and sufficient conditions of real world freedom are, nor which of those conditions would or would not be transferred over to the environment offered by the experience machine.

Indeed, Nozick has only given us the barest sketch of how the experiences “inside” the experience machine would unfold. He writes: "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." But here we are left with many questions. What would it mean to “have the experience of writing a great novel?” Would you be able to experience what it was like to have written Hamlet? Could you be Shakespeare as he wrote the play? Or is it that in the experience machine one believes that one is writing a great novel, but that no such novel is actually produced at the end of the experience? If one returned to the real world after “writing a great novel” inside the experience machine, would the memory of the experience remain intact? Would one remember having written this novel as though it were one’s own? Would there indeed be an extant great novel produced as a result of this process? If it was a great and original novel, would that mean that the machine had written it "for" you, and then produced an illusion in your mind that you had written it on your own? Is the preceding question coherent?

The lack of obvious answers to the preceding questions suggests that we should not cavalierly accept Nozick’s suggestion that the machine would “preprogram our life’s experiences.” It is enough to merely ask: “would you plug into this machine for life, so that it was the exclusive source of your experiences?” So framed, the question loses most of its negative connotations, for it now only asks of us that we choose between two sources of experience: the atoms and void of the real world, or the ones and zeros of the experience machine.

It is particularly crucial to clean out this portion of the intuition pump given how freedom focused our culture is, a culture where the terms "program" and “preprogram” are likely to invoke deep anxieties. It is one thing to program a rocket ship and send it to the moon. That is a great accomplishment. It is another thing to preprogram people. To engineer a robot is a technological feat; to engineer human beings is to threaten dystopic nightmares.

5. What happens to everyone else while you are on "the inside?"

 

It flashes by quite quickly, but Nozick does offer some consolation for our friends and family--those whom we will lose and who will also lose us--should we leave the "real world" for the temptation of the experience machine. "Others can also plug in to have the experiences they want, so there's no need to stay unplugged to serve them. (Ignore such problems as who will service the machines if everyone plugs in)."

Never mind that our human relations are reduced to the "serving" of "others," the question of "what happens to everyone else while you are on the inside?" is surely an important one. For most humans, personal relationships form a substantial portion of what makes life worth living. Failure to spell out clearly what will come of one's closest personal associations upon hooking up to the experience machine allows too much room for anxieties to arise about the things many of us care about most: our favorite human beings. To see this one need only imagine to what degree the emotional tenor of the experience machine would change if it were possible to hook up to the experience machine in groups, such that the various experiences provided by the experience machine could be shared with friends and family. Or even to allow for friends and family to visit the experience machine enthusiast by occasionally "dropping into" the experience machine environment.

It seems quite plausible then that the question "will we lose contact with those we care about most upon connecting with the experience machine?" may well be obscuring the question of whether or not we care about "losing contact with 'real' experiences."

 Re-calibrating the experience machine

 

Nozick believes that his experience machine shows that "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." But as we have seen there are far too many variables introduced by the experience machine to give us a clear sense of what this "something in addition to experience" might be. 

First, there is the question of how the experiences are injected into our "interior." There is no reason to imagine the experience machine in the grotesque way that Nozick does. If what we are testing is whether or not "something matters to us in addition to experience" we should strive to test just that intuition and not also our intuitions about being indeterminate blobs in tanks, particularly when it is not clear that it is necessary that we "become" the latter.

Second, there is the question of how much time must be spent in the experience machine. Nozick's writing is ambiguous on this point. Making the commitment to the experience machine "for life" is a good way to test whether or not we need "something that matters to us in addition" to just a life inside the experience machine. But Nozick is substantially ambiguous about what the precise features of this lifelong commitment will be. He suggests that there will be "break" from the experience machine of up to 10 hours during which we can re-program it. He does not establish the ground rules for contact with other people during our life long commitment to the experience machine. Finally, he does not make it clear how much control we will have over the experience machine over time. 

Third, and closely related to the question of time, is the question of what it means to "preprogram" our experiences. Nozick seems to suggest that the experiences produced by the experience machine are "prepackaged," that we are selecting the experiences from a "large library" of experiences. But there are many issues here. It is not clear how long any given experience must be, before it is subsequently modified by the user of the experience machine. It is not clear how much control the experience machine user has over any given experience. Most importantly, we do not have a clear idea of how much the metaphor of "programming" relates to our real lives. People regularly seek out and "consume" experiences during the normal course of life. Recreational drugs, television and movies, even exercise and meditation can induce altered states of consciousness. Can we clearly delineate between these forms of "experience induction" and Nozick's experience machine?

Fourth, and quite crucially,  there is the question of what happens to the people we care about most once we enter the experience machine? Can they come with us? Must we go alone? Can they visit us inside our happy dream? Might it not be the case that sum total of what we want "in addition to our own experiences" is contact with other people? Nozick's thought experiment does little to help us settle this question.

Finally, there ambiguous nature of experience itself. While questions about "the nature of experience" are rich enough that they offer an entire separate line of inquiry, it is important to  keep in mind that any project that mediates on our feelings about experience machines rest on a host of metaphors and presuppositions about how experience works in the first place.   

In the next section we will examine some of these components more closely, with particular emphasis on the question of time, in order to see how unclear it is that there is anything that matters to us "in addition" to experience.

To understand Inception, begin at its inception: Memento

The having the idea of anything in our mind no more proves the existence of that thing, than the picture of a man evidences his being in the world. –John Locke

In all of the analyses of Inception I’ve read so far, I have been surprised to find Nolan’s previous film Memento conspicuously absent from the discussion. The Matrix comes up most frequently, but so too do a number of other films, such as Dark City, Lathe of Heaven, Paprika, and on. To my mind this is odd, for the key to “understanding” Inception, or even just appreciating it as something more than “a fancy heist film that sports some fancy but well trod ideas about the appearance/reality distinction” is to understand the continuity it has with the themes developed in Memento. To see how this is so, let us step quickly through Memento.

In Memento Lenny creates his reality by using information that he has inscribed onto his body, as well as "mementos" that he carries around with him. Using these codes and artifacts he able to construct, repeatedly, in an iterative manner and on an ongoing basis, a narrative that guides him to his ultimate goal: the killing, in revenge, of the man who murdered his Beloved, his wife. Unfortunately for Lenny, it is possible for him to be manipulated by people who are able to get inside his "decision loop." Because Lenny has no memory outside of his physical inscriptions and photographs, anyone who is able to manipulate these objects, either directly or indirectly, winds up altering Lenny’s reality. At the end of the film we reach the beginning of the narrative where it is shown how Lenny is one of the participants in this reality manipulation, as he is revealed to have been manipulating himself, as a third party, fully knowing that he is consciously producing a fantasy for himself, but also knowing that this fantasy will help him accomplish a concrete goal that he wants to accomplish. Fantasy (a false belief) becomes a means to a real end (the slaying of person that he realizes has been manipulating him).

Inception picks these ideas back up, but generalizes them to the point where they become metaphysical. In Inception Lenny's physical mementos are dissolved into pure "ideas," and as such, they become, in a Lockian fashion, the ground of our access to reality. The film makes this explicit as it opens with Cobb discussing “The Idea” as the most powerful force in reality generation (not having the script I don’t recall how he phrases this, he may have called it a “virus” or “parasite” but the crucial point here is that he here lays out the thesis of the film: that a single idea can transform our experience of reality). Here Cobb nodes in the direction of memes, but much more importantly invokes the “Idea” idea, which can be traced back to Locke:

even the most abstruse Ideas, how remote soever they may seem from Sense…are yet only such, as the Understanding frames to itself, by repeating and joining Ideas, that it had either from Objects of Sense, or from its own operations about them.

For the remainder of the film the Idea idea remains lurking in the background, repeatedly manifesting in a variety of ways. The most obvious way that it manifests is as the possibility that all the proceedings are “just a dream.” This is emphasized by the “dream within a dream” scenarios, and by the general acknowledgment that it can be difficult to tell dreams from reality. This latter fact necessitates that each dreamer carry a special token called a "totem" to serve as their anchor to reality; each totem's special attributes enabling its owner to establish whether or not they are in their original frame of reference. Here danger threatens: as in Memento, the loss of the totem (memento) or its corruption will render the bearer of that totem anchorless, adrift without a way to establish their original frame of reference, unable certify that they are really in the “primary” frame of reference, also known as “the real world.”

These epistemic problems are not, however, the message of the film, it is not just one more VR film once more reminding us that it might all be a dream (though obviously it is doing this too insofar as it accepts this as a possibility, as does Memento, though in Memento it is suggested that this is the case only for Lenny, or people in Lenny’s condition, as when Lenny asks, in a moment of anxiety that stems from an intuited sense that he is just making everything up as he goes along: “Is the world still there when I close my eyes?”). Inception, at the meta level, more or less accepts that “it is all a dream.” Therefore, the question becomes: what are the psychological consequences of this fact? What does it mean that we are driven by ideas rather than driven by something called “reality.” The “real” story that lies behind the surface story of the heist, and of the dreams that house it, is the story of “inception”—that is to say, the story of how transformative ideas are generated, and how that generation shapes our experience of the world. We are clued in to the importance of the idea of “inception” precisely by the fact that it is offered, at the beginning of the film, as the opposite of “extraction.” But inception is not the opposite of extraction. The opposite of extraction is insertion, not inception. Yet insertion would seem to be a sufficient category: aren’t Cobb and his team merely placing an idea in someone’s mind? Why not call the movie “Insertion?” Inception on the other hand means roughly “at the beginning of something.” So here we are alerted to the fact that inception has a special import or quality over and above the “mere” insertion of an idea. What is this special quality?

This quality can be found in the conditions required to make inception possible. In both Memento and in Inception the condition is this: one must be able to access the deepest drives of the individual that is being incepted, those emotions that are constitutive of their identity. Once one understands what these driving emotional forces are, they can be harnessed to redirect, or even remake the individual. The emphasis is thus not on the insertion of the idea, but on the fact that the insertion of the idea results in an inception, that is to say, in a beginning, a new identity for the individual who has been “infected” or “inspired” by this new idea. We can see these constitutive forces in Lenny’s drive for revenge, as it is constantly being reshaped to fit new targets; we see it in Fischer’s yearning for both acceptance by and individuation from his father, and ultimately we see it in Cobb’s crushing guilt over the death of his wife, who was killed when Cobb infected her with the Idea idea itself.

In all of these cases the central dynamic is the dynamic of interpretation. We see this very explicitly in the case of Lenny, who is constantly pouring over his mementos, trying to build a picture of his target, John G, a target that morphs over time as various bits of data are added and removed. We see this in the case of Fischer, who agonizes over his father’s last word: “disappointed.” His Oedipal deadlock is finally resolved when he reinterprets this word not as testimony of his father’s disappoint in him, but as his father’s disappointment that he ever tried to be him in the first place, that he is not "his own man."

With Cobb, the question of interpretation becomes more difficult, for Cobb’s condition is tied to the central problematic of inception itself. At this level of the film all the threads come together: in order for Cobb to complete the mission, the mission that will get him back to his Beloved children, he must overcome his guilt over having infected his wife with the Idea idea. The success of the mission, and his overcoming of his psychic deadlock are thus coextensive: he cannot “see” his children until he completes the mission, and completion of the mission becomes the event of confronting his wife who personifies the collapse of the real into the Idea idea. Once Cobb reinterprets his psychic inventory, contained in all the rooms of memories “he cannot change” he is freed from his Limbo, and able to re-unite with his children. In the final moment when Cobb reunites with his children, we are once again reminded that frames of reference are ambiguous relative to interpretation. For Cobb now leaves his anchor behind: having acquired the Beloved, he no longer needs it, but we watch it spin so that we can know if Cobb has really acquired his goal. Will the top spin forever, detached from physical law? Or will it at long last fall to earth, so that we can know he is once again anchored in a world with determinate rules? We are not given this final confirmation, just as we are not shown in Memento if Lenny’s wife was ever murdered, for Nolan wants to inspire us with the Idea idea, which is to say: he wants to leave it open to our interpretation.

To some this will be unsatisfying. Some will prefer Neo’s assent out of the cave, The Matrix teaching us that when we understand The Matrix, we will be able to achieve god-like control (similarly Dark City). Inception (like Existenz) denies us this route, and recommends the view that no final anchor can be found once we find ourselves behind the veil of ideas. If there is an anchor to be found here, it is simply this: to love the objects of our care.

A final note: none of the preceding is intended to function as a commentary on the quality of the film as such. It is simply a quick sketch of the film from the vantage point of its meta structure, in particular as it relates to the themes of Memento. The question of how well the film hangs together at its various levels in terms of coherency, aesthetics, and so forth is another matter, and one that I am not addressing here.

Nozick's Experience Machine (Part 1): Is it OK to live in a world composed entirely of our own shit?

The next several posts will consider Rober Nozick's well known "Experience Machine" thought experiment offered up in Anarchy, State, and Utopia. An online .pdf can be found here.

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

Kick off: on kicking rocks and making shit up.

In "The Life of Samuel Johnson" Boswell narrates a discussion he had with Johnson regarding the philosophy of Berkeley:

After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it -- "I refute it thus."

A couple hundred years later, Richard Rorty, sketching out the typical (essential?) structure of essentialist vs. anti-essentialist debates noted:

Essentialists typically rejoin at this point, that psychological nominalism is a mistake, that we should retrieve what was true in empiricism and not admit that language provides our only cognitive access to objects. They suggest that we must have some prelinguistic knowledge of objects, knowledge that cannot be caught in language. This knowledge they say, is what prevents the table or the number or the human being from being what they call a 'mere linguistic construct'. To illustrate what he means by nonlinguistic knowledge, the essentialist at this point in the argument, usually bangs his hand on the table and flinches. He thereby hopes to demonstrate that he has acquired a bit of knowledge, and a kind of intimacy with the table, which escapes the reach of language. He claims that the knowledge of the table's intrinsic causal powers, its sheer brute thereness, keeps him in touch with reality in a way in which the anti-essentialist is not.

Oh how little things change.

Berkley's idealism and Rorty's pragmatism are not the same of course, and the arguments they advanced were not directed toward the same ends. Berkley was trying to prove, by a kind of process of elimination, that everything must be an idea in the mind of God. Rorty, who had no use for gods of any kind, was trying to dissolve all "gods," supernatural or otherwise, into a creative naturalistic soup. Nevertheless, there is a connection between Berkley's rejection of abstract ideas, his emphasis that all things come "mixed," "blended," and "complicated," (an insight Hume called "one of the greatest and most valuable discoveries that has been made in late years in the republic of letters") and Rorty's anti-essentialist denial "that there is a way to pick out an object from the rest of the universe except as the object of which a certain set of sentences are true;" sentences, he goes on to note, that can only relate objects to one another (a fact that entails all objects so described are "blended," "mixed," etc.).

In this respect at least, in their emphasis on a kind of relational holism, Berkley and Rorty are united together against the rock kickers, as are all who find themselves attracted to thinking that strives to connect "all things" together. In opposition to this syncretic hackery, the rock kickers strive to determine the essential nature of each individual thing and thus, by extension, to discover the most essential things that there are (in order to better kick them).

Here I am running roughshod over further distinctions that could be made (a habit I will continue for at least the remainder of this post), as this is merely an introduction to the primary distinction I would like to make, a division of the world into "rock kickers" and "shit maker upers." Readers may recognize that I am here attempting to put one more spin on what C.P. Snow called "The two Cultures," which, very generally speaking, are the cultures of "science" and "art."

But as the rather informal expressions that make up my two cultures indicate, this is no technical distinction prefacing a delineation of boundaries between the various interfaces of scientific and literary culture. Rather I intend it to function like the distinction offered by William James in his lectures on pragmatism where he suggests that

The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments...Of whatever temperament a professional philosopher is, he tries, when philosophizing, to sink the fact of his temperament. Temperament is no conventionally recognized reason, so he urges impersonal reasons only for his conclusions. Yet his temperament really gives him a stronger bias than any of his more strictly objective premises. It loads the evidence for him one way or the other, making for a more sentimental or a more hard-hearted view of the universe, just as this fact or that principle would. He trusts his temperament. Wanting a universe that suits it, he believes in any representation of the universe that does suit it. He feels men of opposite temper to be "not in it," in the philosophic business, even though they may far excel him dialectical ability.

James called these two temperaments, these "sentimental" and "hard-hearted" views, the "the tender-minded" and the "tough-minded" positions respectively. James intended that these temperaments stand in for clusters of "traits"--characteristics generally associated with the traditional divide between rationalists and empiricists. Adding to this basic distinction James layered on "idealism" vs "materialism;" "religious" vs "irreligious;" "dogmatic" vs "skeptical," as well as other oppositions. James intended to show how these oppositions might be mediated--or even dissolved--by the application of philosophical pragmatism. Ironically his efforts to mediate the temperamental split have largely earned him a place at the table of the tender-minded. For his pragmatic assertion that "ideas become true just insofar as they help us to get into satisfactory relation with other parts of our experience," earned him few friends among the tough minded. Indeed, on the tough-minded view, ideas are true just insofar as they help us get into satisfactory relationship with reality itself, in the way bits of maps relate to bits of the world. To suggest that "ideas" are "true" insofar as they are in "satisfactory relation" with "experience" comes far too close to suggesting that what is true is whatever shit we make up to keep ourselves happy, and that is a truth no self respecting rock kicker can abide.

The cluster of dispositions and philosophical stances that James suggested as representative of the tough-minded temperament are, I think, still largely serviceable for today's rock-kicking contingent. Empirically minded, "going by facts," materialistic (philosophically speaking), irreligious, and skeptical are attitudes/stances with which most modern rock kickers would happily be associated. On the other hand, if we take Rorty as a paradigmatic case of milder than mild realism, a tender-minded fellow who just can't help but peddle his share of fashionable nonsense, we can see that the categories James proposed in conjunction with his "two temperaments" no longer apply (if they ever really did). For Rorty is a materialist through and through, not to mention irreligious and skeptical (exactly what he was skeptical about is point of contention).

That James's traits do not match up well with today's temperaments should come as no surprise: by his own admission, the traits he invoked were somewhat arbitrary, invoked as much to make a general point as to try to nail down once and for all the differences between the two temperaments. Discarding, then, the suggestions James offered, and interested in advancing my own variation on the theme, what basic traits do I suggest for today's loyal opposition?

For my purposes here, I do not think it necessary to go any further than the categories implicitly contained within my original distinction. On the one hand we have rock kickers, who find the truth, either through the careful and meticulous unearthing of rocks that were heretofore hidden from us by layers of obfuscation, or by accident, where the rocks are merely tripped over (or in the case of certain apples, when they are dropped on certain heads). On the other hand we have shit-maker-upers, primarily concerned with the fact that we are makers of things (not to mention ideas) and here we can open up our scope quite widely indeed, for shit-maker-upers are, in their wildest moments of excess inclined to declare that everything is in some important sense "made up," including rocks (at which point rock kicking and table slapping doth commence).

Let us consider some objections to the preceding.

It may be objected, that the label "tough-mindedness" should not be handed over so quickly to the rock kicking realist camp. Who, after all, is more "tough-minded" than the cultural relativist/nihilist, rejecting as he does all final values, whatever the dangers of such a position might be? What could be more "tender-minded" than realist fantasies about future utopias in which all men and women live out their lives happily exercising the commandments meted out by the Very Structure of Reason Itself? The categories are too malleable, they have an all too "aesthetic" or "emotive" feel to them. They are too easily wielded as platitudes to be paid to "one's own kind," or to be delivered as sneering rebukes.

Despite this potential plasticity of use, my own inclination is to let the stereotypical characterizations stand. For if we consider merely the common habits of use in this area, it does seem to be the case that more often than not "the tough think of the tender as sentimentalists and softheads. The tender feel the tough to be unrefined, callous, or brutal," if by "tough" we mean rock kicking realists, and by "tender" all those fuzzy headed purveyors of whatever-they-are-making-up-these-days. As this set of paired lists suggests, and perhaps even illustrates, the tough-minded have a "straight up" attitude, while the tender-minded serve up their thoughts "with a twist."

More difficult are objections to the very notion of temperament as a constitutive element of philosophical positions. The current crop of tender minded thinkers: the "new fuzzies," people who like to focus on the fact that we make a lot of shit up (and who want to contribute their share), will not be so put off by the notion of "temperament" guiding their thinking. Our tough minded rock kickers on the other hand, may not be so enthused by this characterization. For to suggest, as James does, that the realist (empiricist) [rock kicking] position is itself guided by temperament comes close to suggesting that the realist is herself making shit up to suit her position. As James writes, the philosopher "trusts his temperament. Wanting a universe that suits it, he believes in any representation of the universe that does suit it." This will not do. The entire idea behind the current "tough minded" stance is precisely that one is tough because one has suppressed one's own prior commitments in the pursuit of the the reality that lies in wait ready to be discovered. This is what makes "the truth" the truth: that it waits for us ready made, ready to be revealed after we peel back the layers of confusion and uncover the hard kickable rocks that lie underneath (all that shit).

In a sense this is a difficulty that recapitulates the entire debate. The make-shit-uppers want to suggest that it is precisely this fact, the fact that we always have prior commitments, be they temperamental or otherwise, that cause us to confabulate, to organize our very picture of reality around a small core of presuppositions from which we inevitably infer/construct the world, and that there is no final "way that the world really is." The rock kickers assert that it is not our own antecedent commitments that make up the makeup of the world, but rather that it is precisely the antecedent reality of the world that allows us to discover its true nature in the first place. On a tough minded view the suggestion that temperament guides both realist and anti-realist views is itself an entirely tender minded idea. If the rock-kicker admits that the notion of temperament plays an important role here at all, it will likely be via the suggestion that the tough minded realistic view that they espouse produces the kind of temperament we should all want. They may even want to suggest, in fact, that the pursuit of the truth will make us "straight up" folks, in a way similar perhaps, to the kind of linkage that Plato suggested must occur between knowing the good and doing the good.

So perhaps here one must take sides: Kick rocks? Or make shit up? Or is perhaps, some sort of synthesis possible, the way James hoped it might be? In the posts ahead I intend to continue to explore both rocks and other shit, and perhaps shed some light on this seemingly intractable controversy (or maybe I will just make more shit up). For now let us end with a little Wittgenstein, whose writings often seem to me like middle fingers pointed in all directions (a type of synthesis):

But the idealist will teach his children the word 'chair' after all, for of course he wants to teach them to do this and that, e.g. to fetch a chair. Then where will be the difference between what the idealist-educated children say and the realist ones? Won't the difference only be one of battle cry? (Zettel 414)