BY RANDOLPH M. FEEZELL
“Apple’s Vision Pro virtual reality headset launches in U.S.” [Feb. 2, 2024]
“Apple CEO calls it ‘tomorrow’s technology today.’”
“The spatial computing revolution is here, and I love it … Everything about it is spectacular … fantastical.”
“Apple announces more than 600 new apps built for Apple Vision Pro.”
“Is Virtual Reality Addiction real?”
“As VR technology becomes more immersive, there is an increased risk of VR addiction … Players can become VR addicts, wanting to spend more and more time in their simulated environment, away from the stress and pressures of life.”
“If the future is full of VR addicts should we bring them back to reality?”
Recent headlines sent my mind scurrying to a famous thought experiment proposed by eminent American philosopher Robert Nozick [1938-2002]. Some find such philosophical thought experiments preposterous, but “intuition pumps,” as Daniel Dennett calls them, often help us to see something we might have missed. At their best they may clarify and even persuade. They may cause us to think differently.
Here’s Nozick’s description of the experience machine [EM]:
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 this machine for life, preprogramming your life’s experiences? … Of course, while in the tank you won’t know that you’re there; you’ll think it’s all actually happening. … Would you plug in? What else can matter to us, other than how our lives feel from the inside?
At first many of my students didn’t see the point of wild, imaginative scenarios – although my discussion of Descartes’ Evil Deceiver Argument was considerably enlivened when The Matrix appeared at their local theaters in 1999. One student commented: whoever wrote The Matrix may have had the EM in mind.
Perhaps they needed a clue about how advances in technology could allow us to consider reality to be radically different from what it appears to be. References to popular culture were more pedagogically useful than reminders about how physicists describe quantum weirdness.
Others, however, immediately connected the EM with their own experience of the seductive attraction of drugs and alcohol as local experience machines capable of distortion and illusion.
In 1973, when Nozick wrote this, he had to add some qualifications concerning how life in the EM would be possible, how it might work, practically speaking.
Now? Persons have merely to put on a headset or helmet to be immersed for hours and hours in a simulated reality, leaving only long enough for indulging biological necessities to sustain them: nutritional needs, the elimination of waste, a little sleep. An imaginative scenario that once seemed wildly fanciful and unrealistic now seems empirically possible.
Yet in the end, the fact that technology now allows us to conceive how a person’s situation might tangentially approach life in the EM isn’t really the point – or is it?
Nozick’s thought experiment often appears in undergraduate ethics textbooks. It is taken to be a criticism of a well-known theory of value and, more broadly, a theory of the good life.
Hedonism [hedone: the Greek word for pleasure] holds that pleasure is the sole intrinsic good in life. All pleasure is good, it is the only thing good in itself, and all other goodness is derived from pleasure.
According to hedonism, pleasure [broadly construed, including the absence of pain] is what makes other things in life good. If friendship is a significant human good, it is because we find pleasure in having friends. Intellectual activity, meaningful work, creativity, the exercise of moral virtue, the contemplation of beauty, play: their value resides in enjoyment, satisfaction, sensory or attitudinal pleasure.
What is pleasure? Mental states that feel good.
On this account happiness is subjective; it is what our lives feel like from the inside. What else could matter to us? Nozick asks. The good life, the best life, is one as rich as possible in enjoyments; it is characterized by optimal subjective well-being.
As a theory of value and an account of the good life, hedonism should have no immediate negative connotations, as it sometimes has in ordinary language, when, for example, someone is criticized for being a “hedonist.” Epicurus and the classical utilitarians [Bentham and J.S. Mill] were hedonists.
Moreover, for the modern person, as opposed to another classical Greek philosopher I have in mind [Aristotle], the notion that happiness is subjective well-being, the claim that what matters most to each of us is how our lives feel from the inside, has the flavor of self-evidence. I would say that hedonism is deeply embodied in our culture. It is expressed in dime-store self-help slogans: “Do whatever feels good.” “If that’s what makes you happy, go for it!” “The most important thing in life is to feel good about yourself!”
I was struck by an advertisement in the student newspaper during a campus blood drive. There’s an image of a smiling young man. The print says: “Why give blood? Because it feels good.” The ad doesn’t say: “because it helps others” or “because it’s good” or “because it’s the right thing to do.” Moral motivation is lumped together with beer pong and cheering for your team.
Hedonism is expressed in the idea that good parenting and effective education should enhance a child’s self-esteem. 2+2=5? “What a wonderful answer, Ashley!” She beams.
Why, of course happiness is subjective, one might say. What else could it be?
We might construe Nozick’s thought experiment as an argument [although there is some controversy among philosophers about whether this interprets too strongly what’s going on].
If Hedonism is true, then we would want to live in the EM.
But we wouldn’t want to live in the EM.
Therefore, hedonism is false.
The defense of premise No. 1 is straightforward. If we plugged in and lived indefinitely in the EM, we would maximally achieve all that makes life worth living: pleasurable experiences, enjoyable mental states, a “lifetime of bliss.” After playing shortstop for the New York Yankees I could finally write the Great American novel! Strap on the Apple Vision Pro headset!
The defense of premise No. 2 would generate reasons why we would not plug in. The support for this premise identifies goods that would be missing in the EM, despite living a life of optimal pleasure.
“First, we want to do certain things and not just have the experience of doing them.” What’s missing in the EM is action, and goods essentially related to being an agent. A good life seems to require activity, not merely feelings [pleasant or enjoyable experiences or sensations]. In the EM or when we are strapped to a VR device we are passive. What’s missing is freedom and autonomy: the capacity to decide for ourselves what principles will govern our lives.
“A second reason for not plugging in is that we want to be a certain way, to be a certain sort of person. Someone floating in a tank is an indeterminate blob.” What kind of person is she? “Is [s]he courageous, kind, intelligent, witty, loving?” Nozick says, “plugging into the machine is a kind of suicide.”
A primary good in life seems to be associated with being an identifiable kind of self. We value our capacity to shape our character and express ourselves.
“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, although the experience of it can be simulated.”
Nozick’s point here is to highlight our metaphysical or religious aspirations. It is an open question what may be the object of such contact [or whether there is contact at all]. God, Nirvana, the Tao, Brahman, the Absolute, the Unified Ocean of Being – or nothing at all? Possible contact with a deeper reality is negated in the EM.
I would like to add two other missing elements not explicitly mentioned by Nozick.
There are no real people in the EM. The individual exists in “splendid isolation.” The result of plugging in is solipsism. There are no real friendships; there are no human [or animal?] relationships.
Also, while plugged in, persons are deluded; they are living a computer-induced dream. Therefore, persons have false beliefs about their true situation in life. They lack knowledge of the way things are. In the EM there is no actual contact with reality nor is there the self-consciousness of illusion. Delusion is ignorance.
[When the Apple Vision Pro is strapped on, does immersion in simulated reality undermine the awareness that what is experienced isn’t real? In the EM you don’t know your experiences are illusory.]
Action. Freedom. Character [self-identity, self-development, self-expression]. Relationships. The possibility of actual contact with a deeper reality. A more complete set of true beliefs.
Nozick says, “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.”
I can imagine being reduced to a situation in which I willingly chose to be immersed in a simulated reality for most of each day, but my life circumstances would have to be dire. It would have to be a form of life in which typical goods were absent, in which the goods Nozick and I have highlighted were no longer possible – and living in my mind would be the only escape. For most of us, that’s not what our life is like.
We shouldn’t misunderstand the point of Nozick’s thought experiment. It’s not that pleasure is unimportant in life. The larger point is that acquiring mental states that feel good isn’t the only thing that makes life worth living, nor should pleasure-seeking dominate our decisions if we want to live well. A life rich in enjoyments is important but not the whole picture. Nozick’s thought experiment points us in the direction of value pluralism: there are many kinds of intrinsic goods.
Nozick asks us to reflect on what matters to us other than how our lives feel from the inside. And if we reject hedonism and endorse the messiness of pluralism, does that matter?
It would probably take a clever social science experiment – or a series of them – to show how deeply the hedonistic ethos has invaded our social life, from education and parenting to our thirst for entertainment. Do parents and educators now feel more obligated to entertain, to respond to the constant need among their children and students to veto any part of their life in which their mental states don’t feel good? As if boredom is the main enemy in life? Consider the primacy of technological distraction in the life of a modern family.
I’m reminded once again of Wittgenstein’s quip: “I don’t know why we are here, but I’m pretty sure it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.”
A final thought. The genius of Nozick’s thought experiment is to create a scenario in which cause and effect are sharply distinguished. If all value resides in the effects, then of course we should prefer a life in which pleasurable mental states are maximized at the expense of their real causal antecedents. It turns out that we may have misunderstood the source of value and the relation between real life and the enjoyments that may or may not arise in our life. Our causal model may be mistaken. We think that friendship, for example, is good because we enjoy having friends. In fact, we enjoy friendship because it’s good to have friends.
If the future is full of VR addicts, should we bring them back to reality? By all means.
Randolph M. Feezell, PhD, grew up in northwest Oklahoma and is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Creighton University, in Omaha, NE. Feezell is the author of several books, including two new titles – Late Life: An Oklahoma Story [a novel], Fine Dog Press, 2022; and Beyond the Fields: A Cherokee Strip Farm, a Baseball Life, and the Love of Wisdom [a memoir], Lamar University Literary Press, 2022. Both books are available for order from most online and brick-and-mortar bookstores. Feezell’s essays appear regularly in The Oklahoma Observer.
