On the Value of Being in Contact With Reality
I will argue that Nozick’s three-part justification for our desire to live in contact with reality is inadequate. Submitted for PHIL 1002W on December 13, 2019.
Prudential hedonism endorses the view that “[w]ell-being consists in the greatest balance of pleasure over pain” (Class Material 1). In other words, a hedonist believes that to live a good life, one must be constantly striving to achieve the greatest pleasure and actively avoid pain. Rober Nozick’s “Experience Machine,” however, introduces a problem for hedonism. Nozick imagines an Experience Machine (EM) that is capable of giving any and all desirable life experiences. If you choose to access this myriad of experiences, you must forfeit your contact with reality and float in a tank with electrodes attached to their brains. Nozick suggests that while we would have, effectively, the same experiences we could have in the real world, we still may not want to plug into the machine because “[p]erhaps what we desire to is to live … ourselves, in contact with reality” (Nozick 264). Essentially, Nozick is proposing that the experiences in the real world, whether pleasurable or painful, are fundamentally different from the experiences artificially generated in the EM—that the physical reality has an intrinsic value which is desirable in and of itself. In what follows, I will argue that Nozick’s three-part justification for our desire to live in contact with reality is inadequate. To prove my claim, I will first assess Nozick’s EM argument and the validity of one specific premise. Then, I will show the weakness of his argument by imagining an alternative EM.
Nozick utilizes the EM to put forth the following argument:
- Premise 1: If experiencing pleasure is the only thing that matters to us, we will take actions that lead to pleasurable experiences.
- Premise 2: The EM provides pleasurable experiences.
- Conclusion 1: If experiencing pleasure is the only thing that matters to us, we have no reason not to plug into the EM.
- Premise 3: There are reasons why we do not want to plug into the EM.
- Conclusion 2: Experiencing pleasure is not the only thing that matters to us.
Nozick’s justification for premise 3—namely, the reasons some people may refuse to plug into the EM—consists of three parts. Firstly, he claims that “we want to do certain things, and not just have the experience of doing them … it is only because we first want to do the actions that we want the experiences of doing them”. In other words, the act of doing, in contact with reality, must have an inherent worth. Secondly, people may refuse to plug into the EM because “we want to be a certain way, to be a certain sort of person.” If you are plugged into the EM for a long time, Nozick claims, you are killing your own identity, because there is no way to tell if you are “courageous, kind, intellectual, witty, [or] loving.” In essence, Nozick is implying that what people who live in reality think of us is fundamental to being human. And lastly, it seems that “plugging into an experience machine limits us to a man-made reality.” If you turn into an “indeterminate blob,” which you will if you choose to plug into the EM, Nozick contends that you will have “no actual contact with any deeper reality, though the experience of it can be simulated” (Nozick 264). Nozick’s assumption, then, is that a deeper reality exists, but only in what we generally view as the reality—the physical world. If it is artificially generated, like in an EM, the deeper reality it loses its value.
By imagining an EM and concluding that we have reasons to not use it, Nozick concludes that “something matters to us in addition to experience.” One of the candidates of this meaningful “something,” according to Nozick, is our “desire to live … ourselves in contact with reality” (Nozick 265). It appears that as humans, we intuitively want to maintain contact with the physical reality, even if it means that we have to endure pain. Nozick’s EM seems to suggest that the physical reality is something intrinsically valuable and desirable.
For the sake of clarity, imagine the EM as a purchasable service, only this service is free of monetary cost. You are a potential customer; you can choose to buy this service for free, or you can choose not to purchase this service, even if it is free. But keep in mind that before purchasing the EM, you, like all other potential customers, currently live in the reality. This can be assumed because Nozick poses the question “Would you plug in?” to the readers (like you and me) who currently live in the reality. Another reason we can make this assumption is because Nozick says that every two years, the customers are given “ten minutes or ten hours out of the tank, to select the experiences of [their] next two years” (Nozick 264). Out of the tank means being outside of the artificial reality composed by the EM. Of course, as Nozick emphasizes, once you plug into the machine, you will not know that the pleasurable experiences inside the EM are artificially generated; that is the whole purpose of the EM. This is the central premise to Nozick’s argument against using the EM that must be carefully inspected: the EM’s potential customers are only those who have had previous contact with the physical reality. Let us meet two potential customers, X and Y. X is a billionaire living in a billion-dollar mansion in Beverly Hills. Y is a prisoner on a life-sentence in a solitary confinement cell. Both are given the choice to plug into the EM. After deliberation, X chooses not to plug into the EM and remains in contact with the reality. Y, on the other hand, chooses to plug into the machine. As mentioned, Y does not know that he is in an artificial world while in the tank; and whether Y remember these artificial experiences after he “wakes up” is unspecified in Nozick’s experiment. Regardless, at least during the periods outside the tank, which occur every two years, Y knows that he is once again in the physical reality. At least during these times, Y can differentiate between the reality and the artificiality. The common traits between X and Y is that they both have had contact with the physical reality at least at some point in their lives, and they both know for a fact that the physical reality exists. The cognizance and acceptance of the physical reality’s existence is the crucial underlying premise of Nozick’s central argument that“[p]erhaps what we desire is to live ourselves … in contact with reality. (And this, machines cannot do for us.)” In short, despite how seemingly genuine they may feel “from the inside,” artificial experiences are fundamentally different from the experiences undertaken in contact with the physical reality (Nozick 264, 265). There is, Nozick seems to suggest, an intrinsic value to the physical reality that we desire.
Recall that these are the implications of premise 3 in Nozick’s argument against the EM:
- Implication 1: The act of doing, in contact with the physical reality, has inherent value.
- Implication 2: What others who live in the physical reality think of us is a fundamental aspect that makes us human.
- Implication 3: An essential deeper reality only exists in the physical reality. If the deeper reality is artificially generated, it loses its value.
If something has an intrinsic trait, means that this trait is inseparable from the thing itself under all circumstances. For instance, it is an intrinsic trait that apples contain sugar compounds. It is not the case that only red apples contain sugar and green apples do not; regardless of color, all apples contain sugar. In other words, an intrinsic trait is not conditional upon other elements (such as the apple’s color). An intrinsic trait objectively exists. So if it is true that living in contact with the physical reality is truly something intrinsically meaningful and desirable to us, then it ought to be objectively meaningful and desirable, not conditional upon other premises.
So Nozick’s argument would be more robust if we still believe that the physical reality is valuable when we remove the preconditions provided in Nozick’s original EM thought experiment. The preconditions are, as shown in the X and Y example, the knowledge and acceptance of the physical reality. We can create a lack of these preconditions by considering an alternative version of the EM. Suppose that some humans are born connected to the EM. Let us call these humans “Blobs.” Never in their lifetime will Blobs ever be disconnected from the EM. Administrators of the EM will simply choose the experiences which are statistically proven to generate the greatest pleasure. Naturally, the difference between people like X and Y and Blobs is that Blobs will never have contact with what we view as the physical reality. That is, Blobs will never know that the physical reality, which Nozick implies is intrinsically valuable, even exists. The lack of the first condition also implies the lack of the second condition: Blobs cannot possibly accept the existence of the physical reality, because they have absolutely no knowledge of it. Therefore, Blobs certainly would not desire the act of doing something in contact with the physical reality; they would not care about what people living in the physical reality think about them; they would not seek a deeper reality in the physical reality. Indeed, Blobs would not desire the physical reality or anything pertinent to it at all.
Surely, Nozick may contend that these Blobs are not rational human beings at all, so what they desire and value is not the same as what real humans desire and value. But that is besides the point when we assess whether the physical reality is intrinsically valuable. Whether a horse eats an apple or a human eats it does not make a difference to the chemical compound of the apple. It is an objective, non-conditional fact that apples contain sugar compounds—the existence of sugar compounds is an intrinsic trait to apples. However, by imagining the alternative EM and realizing that Blobs would not choose the physical reality over the artificial reality, we learn that the value of the physical reality is subjective and conditional upon other elements. This conditionality means that value and desirability are not intrinsic traits to the physical reality.
A basic principle of hedonism is that “pleasure, and freedom from pain, are the only things desirable as ends” (Mill 186). Through the imagining of an EM, Nozick attempts to refute such hedonistic view. He assures that some people will refuse to indulge in an eternal state of bliss because something in addition to “how our lives feel from the inside” is valuable to us (Nozick 264). But we must look at what Nozick provides as a possible valuable “something” compelling us to refuse the EM—our desire to live in contact with the physical reality—with circumspection. Though Nozick’s conclusion that “something matters to us in addition to experience” still seems plausible, as I have argued, we cannot be absolutely certain that this valuable “something” is being in contact with the physical reality, because the physical reality is not intrinsically valuable. To submit a more robust counter-argument against prudential hedonism, Nozick should find another valuable “something” elsewhere.
Works Cited
Class Material. Worksheet titled “John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism.” 2019. Mill, John Stuart. “Hedonism,” from Utilitarianism. 1863. Nozick, Robert. “The Experience Machine,” from Anarchy, State and Utopia. Basic Books, 1974.