The Experience Machine
Not meant to be a trick question: Is the attainment of pleasure a priority for you? If the answer is yes, what is the nature of it and where is it found? If the answer is no, why not?
We are now up close and personal to the question of prudential hedonism – the philosophical position which states that, when it comes to personal wellbeing, pleasure is the only (measurement of) intrinsic good and pain is the only bad. Our focus article (The Experience Machine) introduces a thought experiment as a way to test the meaning of, the capacity for, and attainment of happiness, defined therein as the preponderance of pleasure over pain.
You may recall the last time you pondered such questions was at 2:00 a.m. in your college dorm room as a sophomore (lit: wise fool). Two things might prompt us to freshly entertain the matter. First, you have had enough life experience to now frame the question in terms of your own more mature “reality” and, second, the below-described thought experiment is far less unimaginably fanciful given the speed of our unfolding technological world (reference MM 5/8/17 Neuralink; MM 1/29/24 AI Shared Consciousness).
That thought experiment revolves around the offer of a so-called Experience Machine – the means to stimulate the brain to deliver any desired life experience e.g. looks; talent; achievement.
Or, fame. In his novel Humboldt's Gift, Saul Bellow described the onset of fame, "I experienced the high voltage of publicity. It was like picking up a dangerous wire fatal to ordinary folk. It was like the rattlesnake handled by hillbillies in a state of religious exaltation." The Experience Machine could deliver all that and more, say in a young woman’s brain the adoration of a hundred million Swifties. You literally become a legend in your own mind.
The question posed: would you accept it? Apparently 84% of respondents answered no. That result was cited by the philosopher who introduced the thought experiment to be evidence that there must be more to life than pleasure or “feeling good.”
Not so fast, maintain the hedonists, as they push back on that philosopher’s assertion that plugging into such a machine amounts to a kind of suicide. Their argument rests on parsing the word “pleasure” the way we’d once discussed per Epicurus i.e. that pleasure includes an internal mindset of inner tranquility (MM 10/2/17 Chasing Epicurus). The bias – the failure to see the meaning of pleasure to encompass that longer-term peace of mind – is cited as but one bias in the way the Experience Machine thought experiment fails to undermine prudential hedonism.
Some other biases are technophobia (fear of the technology) or status quo (don’t move my cheese) or control (make my own decisions) and we are left, not with whether or not informed choosers prefer hedonically optimal states, but rather with who/what makes that choice. The hedonists are left unimpressed with the results of the thought experiment.
The point of all this is to share the meaning of pleasure in our own lives. A participant in our new exciting sister discussion group Notes From The Underground reported achieving pleasure, or certain aliveness, through BASE jumping, seeing life in terms of its proximity to death. Others derive a kind of pleasure in constant work overload, as in, I am my billable hours.
Might those actually represent a kind of distraction or numbness from a life otherwise offered up by the Experience Machine? Or, do the things often cited as taking precedence over pleasure really amount to a kind of reframed ego stroking as if to prove something to oneself, to one’s parents, to the universe. The thought experiment posits these too would be factored in as part of the conjured “reality.”
So, would you plug in? Why not? Why just look around and you’ll see an entire society increasingly plugged into the Experience Machine training wheels, also known as the internet.