I dunno about you but I am basically just a pants-wearing monke. I have an intuitive aversion to the experience machine but I think that is tied to my own experience of life and that my monke brain just does not fully understand the hypothetical being put forward and how radically different it is. In life thus far, and in any version of the scenario that seems plausible to me, there are real hedonic costs, or at least risks of costs, to being deceived. Maybe the machine company steals my organs or forgets to feed me or something while I am deluded and unable to care for myself in the real world. And then either I die, or experience much more pain than I would have. I think if I had perfect certainty that the machine would work as advertised I would take it, but my monke brain thinks it’s foolish to have such certainty, and in any real-world situation it is probably right.
I used to think I held truth as a terminal value but now I think that is not even a meaningful thing to state. To quote a famous movie guy, “YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH!!!” Or more fundamwntally, you can’t even KNOW the truth. You can know a few limited truths, but without a brain enhancement so serious that it’s questionable whether the resulting being is even you anymore, that knowledge is quite limited. We make fun of pigeons and goldfish for being dumb but we can’t even see all the colors they see. Even your vision of the milk right in front of you is a simulation, and a pale one that leaves out details so basic they can be understood by a pigeon. Even limiting it to knowledge humans can actually know, the body of knowledge is too large for one individual to know it all, so you are limited to knowing just a few things that interest you. While in a simulation, there really is some combination of particles forming the thing you see, so it is “real” in the sense that it is a thing that exists in the universe, even if not the thing your mind thinks it is. There is a sense in which the world outside the machine is more real, but one human’s understanding of that world is so limited anyway that I am not sure the warping done by the machine matters, except insofar as it has external consequences.
I dunno about you but I am basically just a pants-wearing monke. I have an intuitive aversion to the experience machine but I think that is tied to my own experience of life and that my monke brain just does not fully understand the hypothetical being put forward and how radically different it is. In life thus far, and in any version of the scenario that seems plausible to me, there are real hedonic costs, or at least risks of costs, to being deceived. Maybe the machine company steals my organs or forgets to feed me or something while I am deluded and unable to care for myself in the real world. And then either I die, or experience much more pain than I would have. I think if I had perfect certainty that the machine would work as advertised I would take it, but my monke brain thinks it’s foolish to have such certainty, and in any real-world situation it is probably right.
I used to think I held truth as a terminal value but now I think that is not even a meaningful thing to state. To quote a famous movie guy, “YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH!!!” Or more fundamwntally, you can’t even KNOW the truth. You can know a few limited truths, but without a brain enhancement so serious that it’s questionable whether the resulting being is even you anymore, that knowledge is quite limited. We make fun of pigeons and goldfish for being dumb but we can’t even see all the colors they see. Even your vision of the milk right in front of you is a simulation, and a pale one that leaves out details so basic they can be understood by a pigeon. Even limiting it to knowledge humans can actually know, the body of knowledge is too large for one individual to know it all, so you are limited to knowing just a few things that interest you. While in a simulation, there really is some combination of particles forming the thing you see, so it is “real” in the sense that it is a thing that exists in the universe, even if not the thing your mind thinks it is. There is a sense in which the world outside the machine is more real, but one human’s understanding of that world is so limited anyway that I am not sure the warping done by the machine matters, except insofar as it has external consequences.