Simulating Pleasure
If it feels good, does it matter whether it’s real?

By Dan Weijers, Nick Munn, Lorenzo Buscicchi

7 minutes read - 1293 words

Hedonists think that our experiences are all that matter for how our lives go for us. Specifically, they think that the experience of pleasure (feeling good) is the only thing that ultimately makes our lives go well for us and that pain (feeling bad) is the only thing that ultimately makes our lives go badly for us. So a Hedonist shouldn’t care if their pleasure comes from genuine interactions with other real people or illusory interactions with computers or psychoactive substances. Of course, a Philosophical Hedonist, who cares about getting the most net pleasure over their lifetime, wouldn’t go straight for the heroin because addiction seems to lead to ever decreasing amounts of pleasure and ever increasing health and lifestyle problems, which ultimately result in less pleasure and more pain. But as virtual reality technology and neuroscience continue to advance, wonderful experiences without side-effects may soon be possible and very appealing.

Robert Nozick; Harvard professor famous for, amongst other things, his eyebrows. [1]

Robert Nozick begs to differ. Back when all the cool kids were playing the world’s original first-person shooter game, Maze War, Nozick published a book with a very important thought experiment in it [2]. Nozick asked readers to imagine a machine produced by “super-duper neuropsychologists” that could give you any experience you could think of without you realising it was all a computer simulation [3]. Nozick suggests that you could team up with the experts to create a wonderful menu of experiences for your new machine life. Assuming the machine works perfectly, and disregarding any real-world responsibilities you might have, should you plug into this Experience Machine? If all that matters is our experiences, doesn’t the machine offer us the best possible life?

I was just playing for the graphics. [4]

What do you think, dear reader? Would you want to trade in your real but frequently average or painful experiences for a set of wondrous, but entirely digitally mediated ones? Nozick thought that no sensible person, including philosophers attracted to hedonism, would choose the Experience Machine life. He argued that what really matters to us, and should really matter to us, is living a life in close connection with reality – really living our lives for ourselves. [5]

Would you want to trade in your real but frequently average or painful experiences for a set of wondrous, but entirely digitally mediated ones?

But isn’t Nozick dead wrong? That’s the kind of argument great grandparents would use on any children they see playing Fortnite or liking their friend’s first makeup tutorial vlog (or a combination – see picture below). Pleasure, pain, and all of our other experiences really happen in our minds. In fact our current feelings are probably the things we can be most sure of in life. For all we know, we are already brains in a vat, characters in a computer game, or in the middle of the longest and weirdest dream ever! So all of our experiences are equally real. The main difference between a so-called real life and an Experience Machine life is that the experiences are guaranteed to be much more pleasurable in the machine.

You won’t believe it, but the whole outfit is straight off the shelf at Costco! [6]

Great-grandparents might also think the overly technological nature of the life is a problem. But, as technology improves, and we get more used to its pervasiveness, we are less and less suspicious of it. Some people already spend more time in online worlds than out of them and virtual reality technology is only just beginning to go mainstream. While current mainstream/consumer technology can only provide immersive experiences through a couple of senses, the integration of virtual reality, psychopharmacology, and other related areas should soon produce fully immersive experiences that take place wholly in our minds – just like in an Experience Machine.

What?! What do you mean, you still don’t want to plug in? What else, other than experiences, could possibly matter? Oh… you want to continue your relationships with your family and friends. Cute. Wouldn’t those friends be better if they always showed up on time? Wouldn’t it be nice if your family always appreciated you? The Experience Machine could make better versions of them! Oh, you think you care that it’s the real them? We’re not so sure. Consider this:

What if you discovered you had been living in an Experience Machine all your life, and you were given the opportunity to permanently go back to reality, would you prefer to stay with your existing friends and family in the machine? Yes, you could meet your real parents in reality, but… they are likely jerks; They sold you to Experience Industries as a baby! And a life outside of an Experience Machine would be much more painful than a life inside one.

Or what about if you had lived in reality all your life, but then all your friends and family died in an accident?

Or what about if you had lived in reality all your life, but then all your friends and family died in an accident. Would you choose a machine life so that you could continue your relationships with them, even though it would no longer be the real them? Hedonists would certainly choose more pleasure and the machine-generated Aunt Fanny and Little Timmy etc. over making new friends in reality.

Wouldn’t you miss them so much? It seems like just yesterday that you were making the tastiest double-denim human sandwich ever. [7]

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[1] Source: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Robert-Nozick. Photograph by the Harvard University News Office

[2] Nozick, R. (1974). Anarchy, State, and Utopia. New York: Basic Books.

[3] Ibid. Page 42–45.

[4] Source: Wikimedia (original file) Attribution required: By Bruce Damer, CC BY 2.5, Wikimedia link

[5] Nozick, R. (1974). Anarchy, State, and Utopia. New York: Basic Books, pp. 42–45 and Nozick, R., (1989). Happpiness, in his The Examined Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, pp. 99–117.

[6] Image created by authors based on this source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3DjIhNJCT8

[7] “Pile of Denim” source: Today.com – Attributed to AwkwardFamilyPhotos.com

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Dan Weijers is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Waikato. His main research interests are wellbeing, moral judgments, and the ethics of new and emerging technologies. Dan is a founding co-editor of the International Journal of Wellbeing, founding member of the Australasian Experimental Philosophy Research Group, international editorial board member of Rowman & Littlefield’s book series on “Behavioural Applied Ethics”, and editorial review board member for the International Journal of Technoethics. He has published in philosophy, psychology, economics, and public policy journals. More information and links to publications can be found at www.danweijers.com.

Nick Munn is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Waikato. He works on Political Theory (with a focus on issues of enfranchisement) and Applied Ethics (with a focus on the status of virtual worlds and virtual actions). His publications include The Reality of Friendship within Immersive Virtual Worlds (2012), Friendship and Modern Life (2017), Against the Political Inclusion of the Incapable (2018), and Political Inclusion as a Means of Generating Justice for Children (2020).

Lorenzo Buscicchi is a PhD Candidate at the University of Waikato. His thesis, which employs the methods of affective science, is on the nature and value of pleasure. Lorenzo is the lead author of ‘The Paradox of Happiness: The more you chase it the more elusive it becomes’ in The Conversation Yearbook 2019: 50 Standout Articles from Australia’s Top Thinkers. He was previously the scientific director of the Global Happiness Organization.

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