Nozick's Experience Machine

Robert Nozick's "Anarchy, State, and Utopia" has been rightly hailed as one of the best philosophical arguments for a libertarianish minimal state.  His overall argument is that a state-like entity will arise naturally from a state of nature (people interacting, trying to survive and thrive, defending themselves, family and friends, etc.), making a (minimal) state inevitable in order to protect the rights and freedoms of human beings.  This strikes me me as highly compelling.  His further argument that advancement from a minimal state to a larger all encompassing state will inevitably infringe on the rights and freedoms of the people I also find highly compelling.  Both anarchists and modern state supporters both have to grapple with his arguments.

Interestingly, he has a thought experiment in the book as he builds his "State-of-Nature Theory" that speaks less about politics and more about the reality we find ourselves in and the choices that we would and should make.  It also has much in common with The Matrix, one of the most famous and brilliant sci fi films out there (the first one, the trilogy not so much). Nozick describes his Experience Machine as such:

"Suppose there was an experience machine that would give you any experience you desired.  Superduper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book.  All the time you would be floating in a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain.  Should you plug into this machine for life, preprogramming your life experiences?...Would you plug in?  What else can matter to us, other than how our lives feel from the inside?"

Sounds like the Matrix, right?  Let me be more clear here that this choice is not the choice of most of the people who are plugged into The Matrix and don't know it.  It is the choice of those who have gone down the rabbit hole and have the knowledge.  Nozick argues we should not plug in because there are things that matter to us in addition to our experiences.  What are those things?

"First, we want to do certain things, and not just have the experience of doing them.  In the case of certain experiences, it is only because first we want to do the actions that we want the experiences of doing them or thinking we've done them.  A second reason for not plugging in is that we want to be a certain way, to be a certain type of person.  Someone floating in a tank in an indeterminate blob.  There is no answer to the question of what a person is like who has long been in the tank.  Is he courageous, kind, intelligent, witty, loving?  It's not merely that it's difficult to tell; there's no way he is.  Plugging into the machine is a kind of suicide...  Thirdly, plugging into an experience machine limits us to a man-made reality, to a world no deeper or more important than that which people can construct.  There is no actual contact with any deeper reality, though the experience of it can be simulated.  Many persons desire to leave themselves open to such contact and to a plumbing of deeper significance.  This clarifies the intensity of the conflict over psychoactive drugs, which some view as mere local experience machines, and others view as avenues to a deeper reality; what some view as equivalent to surrender to the experience machine, others view as following one of the reasons not to surrender!"

Heady stuff, this.  While I think his arguments here can be debated and perhaps even refuted in some cases, there is no doubt he is bringing up fundamental questions and answers about reality and our place in it.  Maybe not all of you have a visceral aversion to plugging in, but I certainly do, and I think a lot of you might too.  Going back to The Matrix, the seduction of the Experience Machine is exactly what Cypher succumbs to, and we hate him for it.  He has failed!  Even if he wouldn't have had to betray his friends to do it, he has betrayed himself!

So why do we feel this way (or at least why do I feel this way)?  Nozick says that "what is most disturbing about them is their living of our lives for us...Perhaps what we desire is to live (an active verb) ourselves, in contact with reality."  He is hinting at something very big here about our place in reality, about our free will and what it might mean about our place in this here world.  There are very interesting responses to the Experience Machine and the Matrix that I will blog about later (David Chalmers' The Matrix as Metaphysics is one such brilliant piece of philosophy), but I want to make sure I give credit to Nozick where credit is due.  His thought experiment forces us to delve into what really matters, and a fundamental part of that is that we desire to live ourselves, in contact with reality.

This takes courage, and interestingly, may have a relationship to existential authenticity.  As I have previously described, authenticity involves accepting our contingency and our freedom, and not surrendering to those burdens, to accepting them bravely.  Perhaps this is similar to why we don't want ourselves or others to succumb to the seduction of the experience machine.  It is giving up!  It is Sisyphus unhappy in his burdens.  It is us denying our freedom, to the fact that our life is really in our hands.  That we would give that up to a machine, rightly, strikes us (or again, at least me) as horrific.  We will always have our burdens, our freedom, our choices, and no machine can take that away except if we live in bad faith.