Is endless pleasure desirable? Nozick's experience machine

We are fortunate that throughout history there have been periods when philosophical debate resurfaces and new ideas about the world, ethics or politics flourish. The Greece of the 5th and 4th centuries BCE, the origins of Western philosophy, continues to inspire today's thinkers, as they did those of the Renaissance. Dante Alighieri, whose work will become the focus of my forthcoming book, studied philosophy in Bologna and represented another zenith, his work still valid now. Intervening in philosophical speculation today means engaging in a fascinating conversation with thinkers who have reflected on similar problems.

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A new golden age of thought occurred in the decades following the publication of John Rawls' A Theory of Justice in 1971, the work that sparked a renewed debate in political philosophy, jurisprudence and ethics. Rawls refreshed speculation on the great social questions, justice or individual rights, sparking a vibrant debate on both sides of the Atlantic among US and British academics.

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I consider myself enormously fortunate to have attended the classes of some of the protagonists of that 20th Century philosophical renaissance, while studying at Oxford University, among them H.L.A. Hart, Ronald Dworkin, Joseph Raz, Gerry Cohen, Thomas Nagel or Derek Parfitt, many affiliated with their respective law schools, but focused on legal philosophy. With hindsight, I can only say that I wish I had taken better advantage of those opportunities, largely unaware of the intellectual greatness of the characters I was dealing with.

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One of the most influential thinkers of that time was Robert Nozick of Harvard University, the most respected exponent of contemporary libertarian liberalism, although he acknowledged that he drifted towards that school of thought reluctantly. Anarchy, State and Utopia, published in 1974, generated much commentary, and his ideas are thought to have had a powerful influence on US politics. The book defends the existence of a minimalist state, "limited to the narrow functions of protection against force, theft, fraud, enforcement of contracts, and so on." A state that expands beyond that will always encroach on the individual rights of its citizens.

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One of Nozick’s many original concepts is the Experience Machine, proposed to combat the hedonist thesis that happiness is achieved through pleasure, that any life experience that does not increase pleasure does not generate greater individual well-being. Nozick’s machine produces permanent pleasurable experiences through electrodes connected to the brain. The machine avoids any negative feelings and, moreover, while it is being used, there are no hallucinations, but it imitates real life reliably. Imagine furthermore that the machine does not generate any harmful effects, and that it could be connected and disconnected easily and was within the means of everybody in society. According to the hedonists, the ideal way to be happy would be to remain attached to the machine.??

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Nozick asks: would this machine really make us happy?

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He uses this thought experiment to show that such an approach is not equivalent to living those experiences in reality, in the first person, as rulers of our existence. He explains that we want to do things, not just have the experience via an electrode attached to our brain. We have a will and agency, which decides our actions and behavior: we are not satisfied with passively accepting what we experience.

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Furthermore, we want to be a certain type of person, we make plans for the future, and we forge an image of how we want to be. The argument is similar to the criticism of Epicurus about how living in the present and not worrying about the future is not enough. We like and want to make plans, to feel we are masters of our future.

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The Experience Machine, Nozick argues, would mean we had to live experiences produced exclusively by other people, even though they were tailored to our tastes, so we would only experience things we like. For example, if we were crime movie fans, the machine would avoid showing westerns.

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There is a fundamental criticism that could be made of the machine, although it is not formulated by Nozick. A machine that was constantly cultivating our pleasure would eventually tire us out. Humans like diversity. Just as it is difficult to imagine ourselves permanently laughing, day after day, because pleasure needs contrasting with less enjoyable moments, even discomfort. ?In short, a counterpoint would give it more value. It's the same with food. Even if we like caviar, were we to eat it every day, we would end up getting tired of it. "Variety is the spice of life," goes the popular saying.

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In essence, the problem with Nozick's machine is that it places us in a virtual environment, and since we tend to prefer the real and tangible to the apparent and illusory, most people would soon tire of it. Philip De Brigard, who teaches philosophy at Duke University, developed an experiment to show that people dislike the hypothetical as well as the virtual. It is a consequence of the status quo syndrome, whereby many often prefer to stay as they are rather than try an alternative life, even though it may seem better. In his experiment, De Brigard exposed a large group of students to the idea of Nozick's machine. Separately, one third were told nothing of what they would experience outside the machine, so the reference they had was their own lives. To the second third, it was explained that outside the machine they were prisoners in a high-security prison. The remaining third were told that in "real" life they were millionaires living in Monaco. Interestingly, 54% of those unaware of their real life and half of the supposed Monaco residents decided to disconnect from the machine, but even more curiously, 13% of the supposed prisoners also decided to disengage. In general, most people are content with their own lives before taking the leap into an unknown hypothetical world. Only the most adventurous, the enterprising, would have a certain inclination to risk living in a new world.

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As Etienne De la Boétie explained in Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, the status quo syndrome is what keeps people in slavery, preventing them from rising up to change their situation, or what keeps entire peoples under the yoke of dictatorship, unless there is a famine: "it is custom that succeeds in making us swallow without repugnance the bitter poison of servitude" (...) "custom always conforms us in its own way".?

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Similarly, the status quo syndrome prevents some people from leaving their company, even if they are frustrated with their job or can't stand their bosses. It is reflected in Gallup polls where the majority of respondents express dissatisfaction with their organizations. However, the inertia of routine, along with risk aversion, as well as more utilitarian calculations, prevent them from moving.

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It would be a different matter if, in the future, the development of pharmacology makes it possible to develop remedies that stimulate pleasure by substituting or enhancing neuronal activity. For example, doses of some hormones such as oxytocin or dopamine, which would amplify a feeling of well-being to a greater extent and scale than the effects that can be produced today by anti-depressants. Again, the key test to assess the desirability of this hypothetical panacea would be whether it constrains the exercise of personal autonomy; whether it limits our freedom.

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One thing is clear: pleasure is highly subjective, something Plato understood when he posed the question about its relationship with beauty in Euthyphro dilemma: "is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?"?

Photo above:https://www.thecollector.com/robert-nozick-experience-machine/

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