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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.
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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