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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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