Thoughts on Nozick’s Experience Machine
Hedonistic utilitarianism is an ethical theory that hypothesizes that the presence of pleasure and the absence of suffering are the only intrinsic goods and, therefore, whether these will be achieved is the only thing that should be considered when making moral judgments. The roots of this idea go back to the founders of utilitarianism, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill and Henry Sidgwick, all of whom were hedonists. The theory is simple, elegant but not without its critics. One of the most poignant objections of this idea has been proposed in the form of the “experience machine”, a hypothetical scenario dreamed up in 1974 by the American philosopher Robert Nozick, where an individual is asked to plug into a machine that simulates pleasure. From the original formulation [1]:
Suppose there were an experience machine that would give you any experience 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. Should you plug into the machine for life, preprogramming your life’s desires?
For simplicities sake, let’s assume that everybody is given a choice to use this machine and the question of who services it then is disregarded. Also, you are certain that the machine will stay running as long you stay alive, there is no small print, the machine really is everything it promises.
Nozick assumes we would not choose not to plug in and names three reasons to do so:
- We want to do things and not simply have the experience that we do.
- We want to be a certain type of person and not simply a body floating in a tank.
- Our reality in the machine is completely man-made, there is nothing “deeper”
From this, he draws the conclusion that things beyond the direct experience matter to us, which would render hedonistic utilitarianism misguided. I am unconvinced by the arguments. They all seem to make an implicit assumption that there is more to reality than what can be experienced but fail to give any reason on why this should be true. For me, the only thing that matters is the presence pleasure and the absence of suffering and whether these are only “not real” in a cosmic sense is of no consequence as they certainly would feel real to the being experiencing them.
It has also been argued that our reluctance to use the machine is simply due to status quo bias. Recently, an attempt has been made to reduce that bias by creating a distance between the subject who might be entering the machine and the decision-maker. Kiwi philosopher Dan Weijers told his students to give a positive or negative recommendation to a stranger on a train who considers entering the machine [2]. They are also told to disregard the feelings of his friends and family. In this scenario, 52.4 percent of the students would recommend the suggest the machine, compared to 16.5 percent who would enter themselves under Nozick’s original scenario.
Reducing the status quo bias also works by imagining that we are already connected to the electrodes and we are given a choice to disconnect permanently and there is no going back. In this thought experiment, would we also be so keen to experience the outside? I, for one, would not, knowing that my life outside would be strictly worse than it is now.
####### [1] Nozick, Robert. “The experience machine.” Ethical Theory an Anthology (2013). (Source is a reprint)