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Nozick's Experience Machine - would you plug in? (pg. 2)
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| BTG |
| I would have sex with all the white girls. |
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| Joss Weatherby |
| quote: | Originally posted by Miss Pie
Soma. |
fm |
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| AnotherWay83 |
| quote: | Originally posted by Tangil
Thanks for pointing this out Lira, no rush to give your opinion.
Hmmm... if you can connect and disconnect whenever you want, it seems more likely that most people would give it a go at least once just to see what it's like. This case is more analagous to taking a drug.
If you can only connect once however, I doubt many people would do it. |
i'm definitely not one of those ppl then...i'd do it without thinking twice! |
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| Arbiter |
| quote: | | If you had the choice, would you plug in? |
No.
| quote: | | If you don't, are you essentially saying that there's more to increase your well-being than simply pleasurable experiences? |
I have priorities other than my own well-being. |
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| pkcRAISTLIN |
| quote: | Originally posted by Arbiter
No.
I have priorities other than my own well-being. |
How would it be any different to playing starcraft or final fantasy? |
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| Tangil |
| quote: | Originally posted by AnotherWay83
i'm definitely not one of those ppl then...i'd do it without thinking twice! |
Are you sure about that? Everything you'd be experiencing isn't actually real, you wouldn't actually be "doing" anything! |
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| Lira |
All right, here's the actual excerpt from his book "State, Anarchy, and Utopia":
It's a bit appalling that Nozick himself answers the questions for us, and these are the reasons he presents:- We want to do certain things, not just have the experience of doing them;
- We want to be a certain way, and someone floating in a tank is just a blob;
- The experience machine limits us to a man-made reality.
And, even if we had machines that could solve these problems for us (with the exception of the problem #1), we'd be reluctant to plug in.
Personally, I'd do it as long as I had the opportunity to opt out (don't knock it till you try it), and depending on my mood, I'd probably plug in later in life for the hell of it, which would undermine Nozick's argument. Still, I don't think our refusal to live this "alternative life" is related to our sense of well-being, though this is Nozick's argument in the end.
Goethe's Faust "plugs in" and I believe most people would be tempted to do the same under his circumstances. The difference? The Devil (they were short of scientists back then) gave our intrepid anti-her the opportunity to have any experience he wanted until he found the one experience that would be so pleasant he'd wish time stood still (what makes this choice difficult is the price Faust has to pay for these experiences - namely, an afterlife in hell).
We humans are great fantasisers: How much time do you spend daydreaming in a week? If you think about it, being in the machine beats the hell out of daydreaming - why imagine something you can actually experience? And, according to Paul Bloom "our main leisure activity is, by a long shot, participating in experiences that we know are not real" (from the 6th chapter of his book "How Pleasure Works") - why is it okay to watch a film but repulsive to experience whatever it is that this machine has to offer?
Well, when we daydream, we don't really know in advance what we're going to think (problem solving would be a lot more complicated if we already knew the answers before we started our inquiry). When we watch a film, we don't know what's going to happen (well, we often do have an idea of what's going to happen, but we don't know how it's going to happen). And Faust did have control to change the variables (acquire land, have people fall in love with him), but he never knew what that would lead to.
The idea behind the experience machine, as I understand it, is that you sort of write a plot and get the chance to live it. But, the problem is - you already know what's going to happen! And, even when you do watch a film (or read a novel) for the second/third/thousandth time, you remember the moments you lived/experience when you didn't know what would go on (reason why after a while it gets boring).
That's problem #1: Knowledge. We dread omniscience, we never experienced anything similar to it. If you were not allowed to pick an experience but just a context (let's say the machine is just a "travel simulator" and you want to simulate a vacation in Uzbekistan), the machine would be much more attractive, wouldn't it? That's why we play games, and there's so many people on Second Life.
And there's problem #2: Sociability. Even the sociopaths amongst us seem to turn down the opportunity of living a whole life as a hermit in the mountains. If TA wasn't made up of different people (and we just had very smart bots coming up with different replies), it just wouldn't feel right - not unlike what happens with the machine.
I may be missing something here, but is this related to well-being, at all? Well, problem #2 definitely is but, how about knowledge? Let's face it, even if we knew what's coming for us in our life, it's hard to believe we'd want to "stick to the pre-programmed script". Would you? |
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| Arbiter |
| quote: | Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN
How would it be any different to playing starcraft or final fantasy? |
I can't imagine how a game in which your brain creates everything and controls everything would be worth playing. |
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| Arbiter |
| quote: | Originally posted by Lira
And there's problem #2: Sociability. Even the sociopaths amongst us seem to turn down the opportunity of living a whole life as a hermit in the mountains. If TA wasn't made up of different people (and we just had very smart bots coming up with different replies), it just wouldn't feel right - not unlike what happens with the machine. |
You are all just a bunch of squishy flesh-bots to me. |
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| pkcRAISTLIN |
| quote: | Originally posted by Arbiter
I can't imagine how a game in which your brain creates everything and controls everything would be worth playing. |
rape games! |
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