Not unworthy, but not worthy: The Experience Machine

Continuous dedicated effort as the hinge for a worthy life

Striving is the hinge point in my Toward a Worthy Life model. I have been trying to think about how to better write about that part of the model, and it made me think of Nozick’s The Experience Machine. The Experience Machine is a fascinating thought experiment from the philosopher Robert Nozick in his 1974 book Anarchy, State, and Utopia he calls “The Experience Machine”. He outlines the thought experiment as follows:

Suppose there were 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's experiences? (p.42)

The experience machine is basically the world of 1999 classic sci-fi film, The Matrix. In this movie, humanity has been enslaved by AI and put into tanks, then connected to “the matrix” which functions like Nozick’s experience machine, except that the humans don’t get a choice (unless Laurence Fishbure finds them and offers them the red pill or the blue pill, but I digress…).

It is eventually revealed that at first the AI tried to create a utopia for the humans to experience, but that the humans hated it. They wanted to strive and to suffer, and so the AI created a grittier world. I liked that bit because the movie is asserting that even an experience machine would have to offer simulated striving. (The first Matrix movie is great - if you haven’t seen it yet, I highly recommend it. The three sequels go from meh to just plain bad. I do not recommend those.)

While The Matrix is full of a lot of pseudo-philosophical mumbo jumbo (a bit like in the Star Wars series), Nozick offers three sound answers as to why we find the idea of the experience machine repugnant. He says,

“First, we want to do certain things, and not just have the experience of doing them.”

We want to do certain things because they are marks of our striving, and indicate to ourselves and others of the kind of person we are. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith talks about a general who never gets to lead an army in battle. He may have had all the potential to be a great leader, but neither he nor we will ever know because he was never tested.

We also want to do certain things because the doing itself is transformative and makes us into a better version of ourselves, which leads to the second reason:

“A second reason for not plugging in is that we want to be a certain way, to be a certain sort of person. Someone floating in a tank is an indeterminate blob.”

We want to become something through the act of striving. It’s why we have no particular respect for people who are born wealthy and do nothing of any significance with their lives. We get our self-respect from our own achievements, not from what is given to us.

Regarding the person who chooses to go into the tank for an extended period,

“Is he courageous, kind, intelligent, witty, loving? It’s not merely that it’s difficult to tell; there is no way he is. Plugging into the machine is a kind of suicide.”

Even though the plugged-in person may experience all of these things, he’s experiencing an artifice and hasn’t actually done the things he is experiencing. He’s the general who has never seen combat. You have to have done the thing in real life. Playing a video game of war is not the same thing as being in a war. To be a certain way, one must come face to face with reality. Which leads to the third point:

“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…”

There are a couple of points here. First is that none of your experiences in the tank matter. In my model of meaning, contribution is essential. You have to set your life toward doing important things. Lying in a tank is fundamentally not important and makes no contribution. In fact, you simply consume without producing, which makes your net contribution negative. Second, it’s a man made reality (or AI made, as in The Matrix, but if you follow the causal chain, AI is man made, therefore even those experiences are ultimately the result of man). There is something fundamental about experiencing reality directly to being human. If you are in the tank, you are touching someone else’s interpretation of reality. It is like you are stuck in Plato’s Cave. Finally, in a footnote, Nozick talks about the feeling of transcendence. In order to transcend reality, we need a foothold in reality. He mentioned traditional religious views, but I would add that even atheists can have a sense of awe and a moment of a sense of being part of something larger than oneself. You could have that experience in an experience machine, but the fact that it is fake matters.

Let me tie in Nozick’s observations to my model. First, the person in the tank would not be unworthy. He does no harm to anyone by going into the tank. He does not violate person, property, or promises. So he crosses the barrier to potentially worthy, but then goes no farther because by any conception he is making no effort toward the 3Cs of meaning. He has negative contributions to society, he has no connections, and he has no real competence. Yet, you could argue he has a good life, in the sense that he is happy. But, like The Very Happy Gangster, it is a good life that is not worthy.

Striving is fundamentally human. As with the Matrix 1.0, where the people were plugged into an imaginary utopia, to not strive is to strip oneself of one’s humanity. I quoted Seligman in RWL #428 who says that the meaningful life is knowing your strengths and using them to belong to and serve something larger than yourself. If you go into the tank you never get to know your strengths, nor do you get to use them. It is the process of doing that reveals your strengths, and it is through using them that you become the person you are meant to be.

We are each of us born with potential, and it is through striving that we come to understand what that potential is, and to actualize it. However meager or great our gifts are, that is what we are measuring ourselves against. When I say a worthy life, this is what I am measuring against. Were you worthy of what you were given?

We go into the tank metaphorically when we choose not to engage in continuous, dedicated effort to discover and nurture our talents and seek meaning, and thus be worthy of our gifts. If we tell ourselves a story that we can’t or don’t have to, that is just as much a lie as a life spent in the tank. Take the red pill.