I can’t help but always associate discussions of an experience machine (in whatever form it takes) to television. TV was just the alpha version of the experience machine and I hear it’s quite popular.
And the pre-alpha version was reading books, and the pre-pre-alpha version was daydreaming and meditation.
(I’m not trying to make a reversed slippery slope argument, I just think it’s worth looking at the similarities or differences between solitary enjoyments to get a better perspective on where our aversion to various kinds of experience machines is coming from. Many, many, many philosophers and spiritualists recommended an independent and solitary life beyond a certain level of spiritual and intellectual self-sufficiency. It is easy to imagine that an experience machine would be not much different than that, except perhaps with enhanced mental abilities and freedom from the suffering of day-to-day life—both things that can be easier to deal with in a dignified way, like terminal disease or persistent poverty, and the more insidious kinds of suffering, like always being thought creepy by the opposite sex without understanding how or why, being chained by the depression of learned helplessness without any clear way out (while friends or society model you as having magical free will but as failing to exercise it as a form of defecting against them), or, particularly devastating for the male half of the population, just the average scenario of being born with average looks and average intelligence.
And anyway, how often do humans actually interact with accurate models of each other, rather than with hastily drawn models of each other that are produced by some combination of wishful thinking and implicit and constant worries about evolutionary game theoretic equilibria? And because our self-image is a reflection of those myriad interactions between ourselves and others or society, how good of a model do we have of ourselves, even when we’re not under any obvious unwanted social pressures? Are these interactions much deeper than those that can be constructed and thus more deeply understood within our own minds when we’re free from the constant threats and expectations of persons or society? Do humans generally understand their personal friends and enemies and lovers much better than the friends and enemies and lovers they lazily watch on TV screens? Taken in combination, what do the answers to these questions imply, if not for some people then for others?)
And the pre-alpha version was reading books, and the pre-pre-alpha version was daydreaming and meditation.
(I’m not trying to make a reversed slippery slope argument, I just think it’s worth looking at the similarities or differences between solitary enjoyments to get a better perspective on where our aversion to various kinds of experience machines is coming from. Many, many, many philosophers and spiritualists recommended an independent and solitary life beyond a certain level of spiritual and intellectual self-sufficiency. It is easy to imagine that an experience machine would be not much different than that, except perhaps with enhanced mental abilities and freedom from the suffering of day-to-day life—both things that can be easier to deal with in a dignified way, like terminal disease or persistent poverty, and the more insidious kinds of suffering, like always being thought creepy by the opposite sex without understanding how or why, being chained by the depression of learned helplessness without any clear way out (while friends or society model you as having magical free will but as failing to exercise it as a form of defecting against them), or, particularly devastating for the male half of the population, just the average scenario of being born with average looks and average intelligence.
And anyway, how often do humans actually interact with accurate models of each other, rather than with hastily drawn models of each other that are produced by some combination of wishful thinking and implicit and constant worries about evolutionary game theoretic equilibria? And because our self-image is a reflection of those myriad interactions between ourselves and others or society, how good of a model do we have of ourselves, even when we’re not under any obvious unwanted social pressures? Are these interactions much deeper than those that can be constructed and thus more deeply understood within our own minds when we’re free from the constant threats and expectations of persons or society? Do humans generally understand their personal friends and enemies and lovers much better than the friends and enemies and lovers they lazily watch on TV screens? Taken in combination, what do the answers to these questions imply, if not for some people then for others?)