The Experience Machine: A Thought Experiment on Pleasure and Reality
Which one would you choose? (5 min read time)
Imagine this scenario:
There have been wonderful improvements in technology and scientists have figured out a way to enhance our psychological experience without any repercussions.
They have created a machine/tank that will simulate you to feel pleasure, all the time. They have a plethora of experiences that you can select and program the machine for two years. The experiences have been carefully curated by novelists and psychologists. You would be able to feel anything that you can dream of.
You will swim inside the vat of fluid, with electrodes connected to your brain to stimulate the experience. You will not be aware that you are inside a simulated reality when you are in the machine. After two years you will be out of the machine and you will get somewhere around 10 mins or 10 hours to select the experiences that you want for the next two years.
Now the question is, would you go into the machine?
Origins
This was a thought experiment put forward by Robert Nozick (1974) in his book Anarchy, State and Utopia. He put forward this thought experiment to challenge ethical hedonism. Hedonism, says that anything that doesn’t induce pleasure is not good for our well-being. Nozick wanted to prove that there was more to life than to explore pleasure all the time.
Second Version
There are two versions of this thought experiment. One is from the book Anarchy, State and Utopia, the version that you read above. The other one is from the book, The Examined Life(1989).
There were some concerns regarding the first version. The first one is that coming back after two years of experiencing the pleasure can be very sombre and depressing. To rectify that he made it into all or nothing.
Select the things that you want to experience and drift away into the simulated reality forever. You will not be back in this reality.
This forces us to choose between reality and simulated reality. Between something that gives pleasure all the time and something that doesn’t.
Reasons to Plug in
If pleasure is all that matters to us then there’s no reason to not plug in. It is the ultimate machine that is created to experience the ultimate life.
There would be no harm in experiencing anything that you want as it‘s a simulated reality. Things cannot go wrong as it has been designed to not go wrong.
It is a magnificent solution to experience true well-being in life.
Reasons not to Plug in
We like doing the activities not just experiencing the high that it gives us. Your choices are limited in the machine as it’s a simulated reality, you can go as far as the boundaries set by the machine are. Free will, will not exist as the path has been set prior. A movie that you have designed will be playing in front of you.
We usually want things to be true, we don’t want to just experience the pleasure. Imagine this scenario, a middle-aged man is happily married, the love of his life and they are in a monogamous relationship. They both hang out a lot and enjoy each other’s company. But the reality is that the wife is cheating on him, and he has no clue about it. He thinks that he has a very happy and faithful marriage. But it doesn’t look that pleasurable now does it? Knowing that things are true enhances the experience of pleasure and gives some meaning to it. But obviously, you won’t know this while you are in the machine but this has been shown to affect the decision to opt in to out of the machine.
The relationships that you will have in this reality will be nullified. You will not be able to meet them and check in on them. When you are in the machine, everything will be bright and light. But, in reality, you will not be able to understand or know what the truth is, the truth will be forgotten.
Status Quo Bias
Status quo bias is an emotional bias where we prefer things to be the way they were. We prefer to maintain the current state of life instead of switching things around that will change the state of the current situation.
Philosopher, Filipe de Brigard published a paper titled, ‘If you like it, does it matter if it’s real?’. Here he experimented on 72 undergraduate students, he divided them into three groups.
Brigard had told them that they are already inside the machine and gave three groups, three different stories on how their lives were.
Group 1: No backstory was given
Group 2: Prisoners in a high-security prison facility
Group 3: Multimillionaire artists in Monaco
With all the information that they had, the subjects were asked if they wanted to stay inside the machine or get out of it.
54% of subjects in group 1 decided to get out. 13% of subjects in group 2 decided to get out. 50% of people in group 3 decided to get out.
This shows that the decision to go inside the machine is dependent on the quality of your life right now.
Will I go into the machine?
Simple answer, probably not.
All the reasons that I have mentioned in the reasons not to plug in are valid and I stand by them. Also, I like the journey more than the destination and knowing that my journey is real gives me a lot more pleasure. However hard might the journey be, I am at peace knowing that it’s a challenge that I can solve.
Aren’t the lows that make us appreciate the highs? If there were no lows we wouldn’t know the value of highs nor would we appreciate it.
I might be making a dumb mistake by not going into the machine. It’s the ultimate pleasure that one can experience. But, being in delusion is not that fun, so hard pass on the machine.
Let me know if you would go inside the machine. You’re reasons to go or not go. Click on the button below to comment your answer on my linkedin post.
I asked the same question to Bard(Google’s Ai), and it said this:
“As for whether or not I would plug into the experience machine, I'm not sure. On the one hand, the idea of experiencing constant pleasure is very appealing. On the other hand, I think I would miss out on a lot of the other things that make life meaningful, such as relationships, challenges, and growth. Ultimately, I think I would choose to stay in the real world, even if it means experiencing some pain and suffering.”
ps: 🐶🫂(click on the emoji)