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Notes -
Thoughts on Nozik's Experience Machine, Hedonism, and the Culture War
For many years there has been a lot of discussion of Nozik's "Experience Machine." The idea is that there is a hypothetical virtually reality type setup which allows the user to experience a great life, full of pleasure and accomplishment (with just the right amount of suffering), while in reality they are in a Matrix-style pod the whole time. To make the experience even better, the machine is set up so that while you are using it, you are not even aware that the life you are living is a big lie.
Apparently most people, when asked whether or not they would choose such a life, decline the proposal. To Professor Nozik (the man who came up with the thought experiment) this is evidence that people reject hedonism; that most people agree that there is more to life than simply maximizing good feelings.
Having had a chance to think about this in the light of matters I learned from the community, I've come to disagree with Nozik's conclusions. There are various factors in play, but I think one of the biggest is peoples' strong desire for social status. It's simply low status to be so obviously living a fake life. For evidence, consider The Matrix. Put aside the question of who is happier and ask which group is cooler: The Red Pill types who know what's really going on or the Blue Pill types who spend their lives in ignorance. As another example, consider the John Wick movies and ask who is cooler -- the professional assassins who comprise an underworld hidden in plain sight, or the everyday people. The same point could be made about the Harry Potter universe, the world of international espionage (both fictional and real) and so on.
From that perspective, I'm pretty sure that most people would actually choose Nozik's Experience Machine, provided that it was marketed properly. The people pushing the Experience Machine would promote the idea that the life you live inside the machine is actually reality; it's everyone else who is living a lie.
How does this relate to the Culture War? Well, it occurs to me that the Culture War actually offers people a crude version of the Experience Machine. Certain political movements allow people the option to believe in huge obvious lies. In exchange those people enjoy the feelings of (1) moral and intellectual superiority; and (2) social acceptance. I'm talking about false beliefs where there is no possible way that any reasonable, non-deluded person could harbor such beliefs. (I'm sort of conflicted as to whether I should offer some examples, since people who are plugged into the Matrix, so to speak, tend to freak out at the suggestion that they are living a lie.)
My conclusion, based on the above reasoning and evidence, is that Nozik is wrong. A large percentage of people would in fact choose the experience machine and most people are in fact hedonists. You just need to factor social status into the equation.
I don't think it's even about status, it's about "you are in a machine". That means you can't get out, that someone else put you in there, and if they decide "this pleasant life is boring, I wanna watch them scrabble and suffer for the lulz" they can do it to you.
Make it so that the terms of the experiment are "you are in control all the time, you are free to go where you want, nobody except you can decide to stop living this life whenever you want, nobody is spying on you except to monitor, in a limited way, that the good things are happening and the bad things aren't, and you have plenty of money paid into your bank account regularly, to spend as you wish", and I bet a lot more people would be willing to take the bargain. Why not? Any setbacks will be temporary, you are guaranteed that nothing very terrible will happen to you (e.g. your six year old kid dies of cancer), and you'll be rich, fat and happy (relatively speaking).
Sure, but this violates one of the fundamental postulates of the original thought experiment: while you’re in the simulation, you don’t know that it’s a simulation. If you do know (which would seem necessary in order to be able to leave the simulation at any time), then everything is different: by entering the simulation, you’re not pre-committing to reduce your future self’s knowledge of reality and set of possible actions in exchange for whatever good experiences you sign up for; rather, you’re just spending your time in a particularly enjoyable way.
It may indeed be more pleasurable than any heretofore-dreamt-of pastime; it may be more addictive than the most addictive substances currently known to man. It may even be so hedonically potent that once you enter the simulation with informed consent, knowing full well that you can leave at any time, your value function changes such that you don’t want to leave. But this gets us into the realm of wireheading, which is a separate (though related, and still interesting) thought experiment.
I do agree, though, that many more people would take the wireheading bargain, even though it may change them in ways that their pre-wireheaded selves would find abhorrent: cf. heroin addicts, college freshmen who get hooked on WoW or League and flunk out, etc.
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Well, first of all thanks for choosing to not offer examples of political movements you think fit the bill; that would almost certainly just have turned your post into a crude "DAE my outgroup is deluded" exercise that made some readers feel fuzzy and others mad, while this way we can discuss the proposition for its own value in the abstract.
That being said, I don't agree with your thesis. The part where you say
bears a lot of load. It may be philosophically/poetically appealing to draw comparisons between ideological frameworks/theories and a putative machine that literally puts artificial data into the user's brain's input stream and tries to pass it for real, but at least at the current level of ideological framework technology, the political Grand Theories, which both with an outside and an inside view are purporting to explain how actual, material, top-level reality functions, are not at all similar to a Matrix-style spinal tap, which explicitly aims to input something that is self-evidently not reality; and nobody would have trouble distinguishing them. What would a convergence of the two classes of technology have to look like, for your argument to work?
A Matrix that is more like ideology would have to be some sort of neurolinguistic programming scifi device, where hearing the right sequence of words can force your brain to non-consensually perform essentially arbitrary computations. Perhaps 4chan's Tulpamancers are moving in that direction, but otherwise this is not where the smart money in the building-the-Experience-Machine business is right now. Even with a streamlined process to induce full blown schizophrenic psychotic breaks where you move to TulpaTown, there would be no obvious way to reframe the process as bringing you closer to reality.
An ideology that is more like the Matrix would maybe look like They Live-style goggles that purport to reveal the true face/hidden aspects of reality to the wearer. The problem there is a chicken-egg issue: anyone peddling such goggles would have to convince the potential user that they actually reveal reality before they agree to wear them. This puts strong constraints on the shape of the Experience that can actually be conveyed: you can't just take people straight to TulpaTown (or anything else too obviously different from the world they saw with bare eyes) and you can't even really make them happy in obvious ways, since political movements only really recruit through misery. This looks quite different from the original thought experiment where people are straight up asked "would you accept fake good qualia to replace all your real bad ones", and I suspect political movements wouldn't be very successful if they even just made the implicit deal that is a very weak form of this ("would you accept the fake good qualium of purpose to replace your real bad one of your life being pointless") explicit. Every step further away from reality would also come with additional friction, in the same way in which every failed prophecy of a doomsday cult whittles down its follower base.
Good point -- I was actually pretty close to doing that.
Absolutely, and I think that the analogy is not bad. Either way, you are living a lie.
I disagree . . . as stated, I think that certain ideologies are, in effect, crude Experience Machines. One takes advantage of a "spinal tap" as you call it, the other takes advantage of what could be called "more traditional channels."
Either way you live a lie, and either way, you get certain positive experiences in exchange for drinking the Koolaid.
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Who were the people they asked? If this is a social science experiment, usually it's "our students in the psychology department" and that is going to be way different from "we went out and randomly surveyed single mothers living on welfare, junkies, the homeless, elderly people living in poverty with no family around them, working class people living paycheck to paycheck and really worried about losing their crappy job, and people in chronic pain".
Ask somebody whose joints are turning to sand and they have to load up on over-the-counter painkillers just to be able to walk around their own kitchen "would you prefer to live in a virtual reality where you can move without pain and are as fit and healthy as you were at twenty, or stay as you are now?" and I think you'd get a different answer.
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If people need to be convinced that the experience machine is high status in order to enter it, does that not prove that people value status over pleasure? It seems to me you are in agreement with Nozick, only you expand on his idea by suggesting a candidate for the thing which people value over hedonism.
For a culture war take, I reckon something like the experience machine is already in play in my opinion in the ever increasing part of our lives by swallowed up by the digital. From titillating 24/7 drama in the news and on social media to gaming and porn, a lot of it is not too far removed from the experience machine, providing continual stimulation, most of which is devoid from any meaning in the real world. The main difference is that this continual meaningless hedonic stimulation seems to not actually make people all that happy in the long run. And furthermore, people will often acknowledge it's fake and makes them miserable, and yet are unable to spend less time glued to their screen. Rather than voluntarily entering Nozick's experience machine, it's more like we placed unconsenting in a Skinner box by an egregore running the techno-capitilist establishment. Misaligned AGI is a scary scenario, but I'm afraid that the current leaders of our technological advancement are already misaligned to humanity's best interest. Whether we will achieve AGI or not, as long as our technology is made by the current crop of tech CEO's, the result will be something like a Matrix style dystopia where all of us are forced to watch adds as we move from one addictive pleasure to the next in a digital experience machine, whether we like it or not.
I see your point, but I think that this is kind of a semantic issue. Would a hedonist seek out the experience of feeling that he is important; of feeling that he is superior; of feeling that he is "cool"? It really depends on the definition of hedonism. Normally when one thinks of hedonism, one thinks of experiencing pleasures such as those provided by sexual stimulation; opiates; tasty food; and so on. But I think it makes sense to think about hedonism in a broader way. When some political activist pursues activities that are very unlikely to accomplish anything except to make the activist feel good about himself (and we've all seen examples of this), how is this not fundamentally a case of hedonism?
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Again, I think you’re describing something closer to wireheading than to the Experience Machine, namely, people’s every waking thought being sucked in by hedonic superstimuli which our primitive neural reward systems have no evolved defenses against. The difference is, we know what is happening to us and it is physically possible (if perhaps not easy in practice) to “unplug”: turn off your phone, touch grass, etc. By contrast, the premise of the Experience Machine is that while you’re in it, you have no knowledge of the real world, and it is impossible, even in principle, to unplug.
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Ray Bradbury wrote this story back in 1953. When I read it as a teen in the 70s, it seemed so far-fetched as to be impossible. Now we're living in that world, or getting very near to it. The real horror is how easily everyone (except the murderer) has adapted to this world of constant stimuli and invasion:
It's also funny how he forecast the Internet of Things; for him, it was an example of the horrible interference in human life, for us, it's the Latest Modern Must-Have:
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There is a natural desire to not be duped, trapped, enslaved, or subordinate, and there is also a desire to be aware of one’s surroundings. The decision-maker does not wish to place himself in this condition even if he knows that his future self would forget about these negative features, because in the present he feels a primal aversion to doing these things to himself. The thought experiment might only prove that we have certain hedonic concerns (eg safety from threats = aware of surroundings) which override our ability to envision pursuing other hedonic interests, that in certain contexts we are averse to forecasting future pleasures because of an urgent concern. An animal that doesn’t desire to sleep (and pleasantly dream) because a predator is nearby is still expressing hedonic interest. Or if you tell someone, “eat this [disgusting waste product] and when you’re done eating it you’ll receive 100 free meals” — our hedonic primitive aversion supercedes any thought of entertaining rational cost-benefit analysis (insofar as we have an intact disgust instinct). So perhaps Nozik has only proven that, not only are we hedonic, but we are also instinct-oriented about our hedonic concerns.
An alternative to the experience machine would be the following: God has given humanity the opportunity to enter a perfectly hedonic realm. All of humanity has a vote in this, majority rule. No one is left behind on earth — an essential clause to mitigate any status concern about who gets to inherit the earth. No one will be subordinate and all will be in bliss. What will we choose? We will choose the hedonic realm, certainly. There’s no residue of “dastardly scientist harvesting us” as is found unconsciously in the machine experiment. And religions speak in similar terms precisely because we love the hedonic realm. It was blissful in Eden and it will be blissful in Heaven. The traditional vision of Heaven is maximally hedonic. Anselm articulates it as not unlike a heroin user’s description of his first high:
And this shouldn’t be surprising given the social role of religion. You want a maximally appetitive state to direct behavior, and the most appetitive states for humans is obvious when looking at what humans do when they’ve relinquished the primal instincts of social obligation: endless desiring (MMORPGs, meth, nicotine, x, tik tok), endless pacifying (alcoholism), endless wonder, endless pleasure (heroin). Similar to what you wrote about status, the original vision of Heaven is described to satisfy our need for status: the inheriting of a Kingdom, the ruling over of your tribes, room in a heavenly mansion, the sitting on thrones.
I agree, except that a lot of people will happily accept these kinds of things if they can be convinced that it's COOL. Or if they can be convinced that doing so will make them respected, which is very similar to being cool.
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I don't agree. The experience machine is another version of the blissful ignorance problem for many versions of utilitarianism.
Do you have any desire to not have your spouse cheat on you, as long as you didn't know it (and assuming no disease, pregnancy, etc.)? Most people would say that yes, they have a desire for something to be true that they can't sense and that won't affect their life. And I don't think this is just because it's low social status to have your spouse cheat on you.
That's a very interesting question. One thing I do know is that marital infidelity tends to cause a lot more drama if the affair partner is someone in the innocent spouse's social circles. "How could he humiliate me like that!?" is a question that is often asked. To me, this suggests that, at a minimum, issues of social status play a significant role.
Being a cheated-on spouse is definitely low status, although I am having trouble thinking of additional scenarios to tease out how significant this is.
Well, its not just about status. People do feel humiliated and embarrassed, especially if it is someone in the same social circles. "Everyone else knew but me, they must think I'm a terrible fool or worse, that I knew and was complacent about it!" The idea that others knew and were laughing at you is excruciating.
But it's the sense of betrayal and breaking of trust, as well. Someone close to you has consistently lied and deceived you, and you didn't know (until they did something to arouse suspicion/someone told you/they confessed). They pretended to still love and care about you and went on with the usual domestic life, but they were sneaking around behind your back with someone else, being sexually and emotionally involved with a new person, and diverting their love to that new person. It's very hurtful. Some people can forgive, some can't. I don't know how Mackenzie Bezos wasn't more vengeful in their divorce; maybe there were problems in the marriage before the split, but to find out your husband has been knocking boots with the floozy next door? I'd go nuclear if that were me, but she was a lot more gracious about it (and it's not "because he promised to pay her off", since if she really wanted to be vengeful she could have dragged this through the courts and given his reputation even worse of a hit, revealed a lot of inside scandal about Amazon - and every big company of that kind has some skeletons in the closet).
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