Most people enjoy happiness. It’s a common belief that happiness and pleasure are good things. Sometimes, one might say that they live to experience joy and peace. However, is experiencing this kind of pleasure all that matters?
This is the question at the root of the thought experiment called “The Experience Machine.”
In this experiment, hypothetically psychologists were able to create a machine that can induce whatever happy or pleasurable experience that you want. You would not be able to distinguish these ideas from reality, and it would be able to exactly simulate whatever happy experience that you wanted, for as long as you wished. In other words, if you plugged into the machine, you could experience infinite happiness.
Given the choice, would you plug into this machine? If you would, would you prefer the machine to reality?
Most people would choose not to. The philosopher who came up with this experiment, Robert Nozick, determined with a few reasons as to why someone might choose not to plug into the machine:
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- Instead of just experiencing things, we all have a human instinct to want to DO things
- For example, I could offer you the choice between eating a slice (or multiple) of your favorite cake, or to plug you into a machine that would simulate the feeling of eating it. Most people would choose to actually eat the cake rather than experience eating.
- We all fear the loss of identity
- If one chooses to sit under the simulated experiences of a machine that would only ever make them happy, does this person have an identity? Do they have personality traits? If one does not encounter conflict and adversity, they would not have character. Would a complete lack of personality make this human more of an inanimate object?
- We are limited to what we can make
- One would not be able to make contact with the concept of reality. Everything that one creates and experiences, despite being simulated to seem real, is an illusion.
- Instead of just experiencing things, we all have a human instinct to want to DO things
Personally, I agree with Nozick’s arguments and I would not choose to plug into the machine. I also think that, although the concept of infinite happiness is nice at first, it makes one wonder – without negative emotions, struggles, and conflict, can one really experience happiness? Without real experiences of sadness and adversity, is it possible to experience positive emotion?
If emotions are more or less relative to one another, and we were to completely remove all negative emotion and feeling, we would also be removing the feeling of happiness and pleasure. This would leave us with no emotion left to feel. The alleged “happiness” would just be emptiness. Infinite emptiness and apathy that we wouldn’t choose to change because that would be all of the experiences we were having.
Nozick says that “plugging into the machine is a kind of suicide.” If we subject ourselves to a world of emptiness, is that not the same thing as experiencing death? To not allow ourselves to develop in the world that we were born in, to choose to exist in a state of endless void… how is that any different than dying?
However, a counterargument that many who choose to come up with, is that if an experience makes one incredibly happy and has the ability to make someone happy forever, does it matter if it’s real? This is a theme in the classic film, The Matrix, where one of the colleagues of the main character betrays the protagonist because he is able to get placed back into the happy utopia where he is successful and contented. Some argue that if a device has the ability to make someone happy forever, why would they choose to live in a world filled with harsh reality? Would ignoring reality for a very long time eventually become a relief instead of a burden?
And now that you’ve read this article, I’m curious to know.
Would you choose to plug into the Experience Machine?
If you’d like to read more, here’s where I got my information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_machine
