How much does "Reality" really matter to us?
The Experience Machine
Robert Nozick and his thought experiment, The Experience Machine, is arguably one of the most effective intuition pumps in modern philosophy. It is often used as a rebuttal in normative ethics, particularly against utilitarianism, in which Nozick would argue that there are more things that matter aside from the internal experiences of a person.
The basic idea of The Experience Machine goes like this:
Suppose you are in a lab with a cutting-edge technology dubbed The Experience Machine. The Experience machine has the ability to stimulate experiences undistinguished from normal experiences, and if you decide to plug in it will stimulate in you all sorts of experiences that you find to be pleasurable. You will be living a completely new life in a simulated world.
Nozick argues that we should not plug ourselves into this devious machine because we want to do things embedded in reality ‘‘and not just have the experience of doing them” (Nozick 43). Nozick claims that people value “living in contact with reality”, and that our intuitive response to being plug into an experience machine would be of disgust. This unquestioned conclusion became sufficient reason in many philosophical circles that we Homo Sapiens care more about our experiences being in reality than pleasurable experiences.
The Empirical Evidence Against Nozick
The Reverse Experience Machine
Suppose that all along you have been inside an experience machine your entire life. Would learning that fact now change the value your life has for you? Would you all of a sudden feel like a life embedded in reality is what you want and demand to be unplugged?
If our current popular intuition that we value reality over a simulated life is true then it would be the case that most people would disconnect
Felipe De Brigard, a philosophy professor at Duke University had some doubts about the dominant intuition and devised a thought experiment to test that.
In his experiment he gave the readers the same prompt as above, you have learned all along that your entire life has been spent in an experience machine and now you have to choose whether to unplug or not. Brigard presented three variations to this scenario, in the Neutral scenario you are presented “with the possibility of remaining connected or going back to reality simpliciter.” In the Negative scenario, you are given further information, and your real self is in a maximum security prison outside the experience machine and in the Positive scenario, you are a millionaire artist living in Monaco.
The results of this experiment are fairly substantial against Nozick’s assumption, “If it were the case that people care about reality more than they care about how their life is experienced from the inside, then one would expect that, regardless of how reality turns out to be, they would choose it over a simulated life”(Brigard 48). In the negative scenario, the clear majority preferred life in a simulation if that meant a life of relative comfort. The neutral scenario where the participants weren’t given any information on how their real lives were was skewed a bit in favor of reality but not to the extent where one could claim hegemony of people’s preferences for reality. The positive scenario is however confusing, more people chose to remain plugged in the positive scenario (where they know for a fact that they will be a millionaire) than in the neutral scenario (where they were given no information about their lives outside the machine).
Status Quo Bias
Felipe attributed the status quo bias to this phenomenon.
Part of the explanation for why most people prefer not to disconnect after spending their life in an experience machine may not have to do with the virtual character of the experience, nor with the amount of pleasure they are told they would feel, but rather with the simple fact that most people don’t want to abandon the life they know, the life they have lived so far, the life they are familiar and comfortable with. (Brigard 51)
The Status Quo Bias may also be the predominant reason why people were so reluctant to plug into the Nozick’s experience machine in the first place! Brigard continues, “And if this explanation of my variation on Nozick’s thought-experiment is accurate, then it follows that people’s reluctance to plug into Nozick’s original version of the experience machine may turn out to be just an effect of the same underlying psychological bias: some people may prefer to remain unplugged, not because they value reality, but because they are averse to losing their status quo.”
This theory would certainly explain why people were more reluctant to unplug in the scenarios (Positive and Negative) where their status quo would change necessarily. It can also explain the dominant intuition regarding the experience machine in the first place. Conclusively the reality/pleasure dichotomy generated by Nozick’s experience machine may just be a play on our psychological biases.
Brigard, F. (2010). If You Like It, Does It Matter if It’s Real?, Philosophical Psychology, 23, 48.