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Hi everyone! We are having our monthly gathering this Sunday in Santa Monica, the usual 3rd Sunday of the month (5-18-08; see the event listing nearby on this tribe page). I hope to see you there! Whether or not you come to Sunday's meeting, feel free to carry on a discussion by posting your own ideas here, either before or after Sunday's meeting.
Here's the "official" wording of this topic, which was the winner of the email voting this week. This one is much longer than usual:
WOULD YOU CHOOSE TO ENTER THE HAPPINESS MACHINE? Consider this thought experiment, which came up at the end of our "Meaning of Life" discussion at last month's meeting:
"You have the option to permanently enter a virtual reality/ brain stimulation machine that provides you with a subjective world you fully believe to be real, and in which you have all of the experiences you most desire to have, i.e., intense physical pleasures, successful adventures, power, fame, insights, the satisfactions of helping the poor or ill, literary or scientific achievements, religious experiences, great friendships, love, and so on. Not only do you choose the experiences you want (before you enter the machine), but (if you'd like) the machine also can sense and give you whatever it is that you most value and enjoy, even if you don't fully know what that is. It even provides you with hardships, uncertainty, dangers, pain, and weighty decisions to struggle over, if that's what you need to be as happy as possible. Once you enter it, you won't realize you are in a machine, though you'll remember your previous life (unless you want to forget it). Nobody else will witness your dream life/ virtual life within the machine, the "Pulitzer Prize-winning novel" or play you may choose to write will not actually be the superlative work of fiction you are totally convinced it is (though other "people" in your world will tell you it is), and when you die, your dream world will end. The machine will not break or malfunction, cause you to die prematurely, or produce any untoward side effects. The question is this: would you choose to enter this machine for the rest of your life? Is this what is best for you? Why, or why not? What is your instant, gut reaction to this example? What is your final choice after thinking about it for a while?"
To feel the full force of this experiment, imagine that you are in the 20-30 year old range when you answer this question, with a full life ahead of you. If you imagine you are 90 years old when you have this choice, your answer will probably miss the point of the question. Philosopher Robert Nozick invented the "Experience Machine" scenario, as he called it, to spur us to explore and reveal to ourselves our intuitions about what our well-being consists in and what we take to be most worth living for. Note that the issue is not whether such a machine will or could exist, but if it did exist, whether you'd choose to live in it instead of remaining in the real world, interacting with real people and real things. (For you skeptics and solipsists, this example assumes that our present world is fully real, that other people exist, that we're not already in a "Matrix," etc.)
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For the curious, here are the full vote-by-email results for this month:
1) Are You An Ethical 'Speciesist' Or Anthropomorphist? (20.5 Votes)
2) Is Science Converging Upon The Truth? (17.0 Votes)
3) Would You Choose To Enter The Happiness Machine? (23.0 Votes)
4) Why Is It Wrong To Pollute? What Is Pollution, Anyway? (9.0 Votes)
5) What Moral Obligations Do We Have To Obey The Laws And Legal Rulings Of Our Government? (15.75 Votes)
Each topic stays on the list until it wins or consistently receives a paltry number of votes. You may have noticed that the votes do not come in whole numbers. This is not because fractions of a person turn in votes, but because you receive one vote for your top choice, a half vote for your 2nd choice (if you had one), a quarter vote for your 3rd choice, and so on.
See you Sunday!
Brian
Here's the "official" wording of this topic, which was the winner of the email voting this week. This one is much longer than usual:
WOULD YOU CHOOSE TO ENTER THE HAPPINESS MACHINE? Consider this thought experiment, which came up at the end of our "Meaning of Life" discussion at last month's meeting:
"You have the option to permanently enter a virtual reality/ brain stimulation machine that provides you with a subjective world you fully believe to be real, and in which you have all of the experiences you most desire to have, i.e., intense physical pleasures, successful adventures, power, fame, insights, the satisfactions of helping the poor or ill, literary or scientific achievements, religious experiences, great friendships, love, and so on. Not only do you choose the experiences you want (before you enter the machine), but (if you'd like) the machine also can sense and give you whatever it is that you most value and enjoy, even if you don't fully know what that is. It even provides you with hardships, uncertainty, dangers, pain, and weighty decisions to struggle over, if that's what you need to be as happy as possible. Once you enter it, you won't realize you are in a machine, though you'll remember your previous life (unless you want to forget it). Nobody else will witness your dream life/ virtual life within the machine, the "Pulitzer Prize-winning novel" or play you may choose to write will not actually be the superlative work of fiction you are totally convinced it is (though other "people" in your world will tell you it is), and when you die, your dream world will end. The machine will not break or malfunction, cause you to die prematurely, or produce any untoward side effects. The question is this: would you choose to enter this machine for the rest of your life? Is this what is best for you? Why, or why not? What is your instant, gut reaction to this example? What is your final choice after thinking about it for a while?"
To feel the full force of this experiment, imagine that you are in the 20-30 year old range when you answer this question, with a full life ahead of you. If you imagine you are 90 years old when you have this choice, your answer will probably miss the point of the question. Philosopher Robert Nozick invented the "Experience Machine" scenario, as he called it, to spur us to explore and reveal to ourselves our intuitions about what our well-being consists in and what we take to be most worth living for. Note that the issue is not whether such a machine will or could exist, but if it did exist, whether you'd choose to live in it instead of remaining in the real world, interacting with real people and real things. (For you skeptics and solipsists, this example assumes that our present world is fully real, that other people exist, that we're not already in a "Matrix," etc.)
-----------------------------------
For the curious, here are the full vote-by-email results for this month:
1) Are You An Ethical 'Speciesist' Or Anthropomorphist? (20.5 Votes)
2) Is Science Converging Upon The Truth? (17.0 Votes)
3) Would You Choose To Enter The Happiness Machine? (23.0 Votes)
4) Why Is It Wrong To Pollute? What Is Pollution, Anyway? (9.0 Votes)
5) What Moral Obligations Do We Have To Obey The Laws And Legal Rulings Of Our Government? (15.75 Votes)
Each topic stays on the list until it wins or consistently receives a paltry number of votes. You may have noticed that the votes do not come in whole numbers. This is not because fractions of a person turn in votes, but because you receive one vote for your top choice, a half vote for your 2nd choice (if you had one), a quarter vote for your 3rd choice, and so on.
See you Sunday!
Brian
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Re: Would You Enter The Happiness/Experience Machine?
Sun, May 18, 2008 - 2:39 AMOPTIONAL READINGS FOR SUNDAY'S DISCUSSION: Note that the discussion will focus on the question/ thought experiment, and what our answers to it mean, rather than specifically on the text of the readings. However, if you'd like to inspire and stimulate your interest or thinking on the matter, or clarify the ideas and debates involved, read or skim one or both of the following interesting articles:
1. plato.stanford.edu/entries/well-being/
This article, on the nature of "Well-Being," is by well-known philosopher Roger Crisp. It's from The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, one of our usual sources of good articles. If you don't want to read the whole twelve page article, just read Section 4, "Theories of Well-being" (six pages long), which discusses the happiness/ experience machine scenario and what it implies about our notions of our own well-being.
2. www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Valu/ValuRive.htm
This article ("What Does Nozick's Experience Machine Argument Really Prove?") argues against the implications Nozick draws from his thought experiment. Written by philosophy professor Eduardo Rivera-López, it is six pages long.
