Imagine a world in which anything is possible. You could experience everything, from the feeling of the sun on your skin to the giddy stomach summersaults of falling in love. You could be a millionaire sailing across the wide seas, an up and coming artist in Venice, or a bookkeeper in some obscure provincial town. You could choose and pre-plan the perfect life.
But there is a catch: in reality, you are floating in a tank attached to electrodes. The perfect life you have chosen is a simulated experience, though when you’re in this ‘experience machine’, you would think it is real. Would you plug in?
Philosopher Robert Nozick argues that we would not. He created this ‘experience machine’ thought experiment to prove that humans desire more from life than felt experience, like pleasure. We do not merely want to feel the sun on our skin, we want to know that the sun exists and that it is shining above us.
Nozick seems to think that we value things like reality, truth, honesty, virtue, morality, and knowledge for more than the fact they may make us feel a certain way. He hopes that we do not merely want to feel like we’re in touch with something like the truth, as could be simulated in the experience machine, but that we genuinely want to be in touch with it. Do we desire to be grounded in some sort of ultimate reality, and not just the feeling of reality?
He argues that above pleasure or felt experience, people desire to be a certain kind of person. They want to be, for example, brave, successful, or kind. And they could not be a certain type of person if their whole life is a simulated experience.
Philosophy Masters student from Rhodes University,
Danyel Hartley, explains Nozick’s experience machine in more detail in this audio clip.
With the rise of Virtual Reality and its ability to reproduce real-life experiences, this experiment has become increasingly relevant.
We now have VR-headsets that can transport us to other worlds, at least in terms of 360-degree visuals and fully surround-sound audio. One group of developers is also trying to create a full body suit that can simulate touch.
But as it exists now, VR probably does not meet the requirements of Nozick’s experience machine. In order for the thought experiment to work, Nozick says that the experience machine must meet two conditions.
The first is that the felt experiences created by the machine must be realistic; so realistic that one would not be able to tell the difference between the simulated and ‘the real’.
“He created this ‘experience machine’ thought experiment to prove that humans desire more from life than felt experience.”
But in its current state, VR cannot accurately simulate experiences. The visuals often lack High Definition, there are no virtual bodily sensations, and if you look down during a VR experience, you feel like a bodiless spectre: you have no hands, or body, and if you do, they are not in your control.
Developers are trying to create technology which can sense hand and body movements so that you feel as if your body is in the virtual scene. But this has not entered mainstream VR experiences just yet.
And while we may soon be able to put on a body suit and experience the feeling of sand between our toes without having to go to the beach, there are some feelings that are difficult to imitate. Can you imagine a world in which we can simulate the experience of falling in love or being happy? I’m not sure if I want to.
The second condition for the machine is that you should be able to choose any experience your heart desires. The machine must have a complete catalogue of experiences to choose from.
VR programmes already offer an array of different activities, games, and experiences, but they do not offer any and every experience.
And if these conditions are not met – if there are some experiences that cannot be reproduced or these experiences are not entirely realistic – then the thought experiment fails: people would have other reasons, other than the desire for truth or reality, to stay unplugged. Maybe someone just wants chocolate ice-cream and VR only offers them vanilla.
“Do we desire to be grounded in some sort of truth or ultimate reality, and not just the feeling of reality?”
“[Another] problem is that you would still know that you’re wearing a VR headset,” says Hartley. The experience could never be exactly like reality if you know it is not reality. So there would have to be some technology or drug to trick people in this way.
But VR is progressing. When I put on a headset and enter the world of VR, my knees wobble when I’m at great heights and my heart skips a beat when war-zone noises erupt around me. As blogger Jordan Zino points out, people are shocked at how authentic the experience feels.
VR experiences will become more immersive, and the inventory of available experiences will grow. As it becomes more realistic and accessible, will increasing numbers of people choose to enter the matrix, as it were, and to what degree? How immersive will VR become and how immersed will people be in it? How long will they plug in? These questions make Nozick’s thought experiment, and the philosophy it probes, relevant and enduring.
As it stands, we may be closer to answering Nozick’s question than we think. VR is not realistic at present. But the fact that people choose to plug into the machine, as rudimentary as it is, perhaps does partially answer Nozick’s question. We may not know whether felt experience is all that matters to people, but we do know that for many people it matters a lot. People do plug in.
As VR develops, Nozick’s philosophical quandary will become more and more relevant. We cannot deny VR’s power to enable escapism, and we can only guess at what that will mean for our world.
Everyone engages in escapism, and it can be healthy if not taken to extremes. Few would say that escaping everyday life to read a novel is a bad thing. On the contrary, one of the most powerful features of novels is their ability to help us imagine alternative worlds; realities that are perhaps more just than our own. VR could offer us similar glimmers of hope for something different, something better.
“Fiction can be used to imagine better worlds, or it can be used to escape the injustices of our own.”
But although some are trying to use VR for humanitarian purposes such as to increase empathy, it could just become an opiate for the masses. VR could just be used for pleasure-seeking gaming or porn, or for encouraging the disenfranchised to live a virtual life of opulence. I agree with Ethan Zuckerman, director of the MIT Center for Civic Media, when he says, “There’s something hideously limited about an imagination that sees VR as a tool for placating the world’s poor.”
Fiction can be used to imagine better worlds, or it can be used to escape the injustices of our own. The world is on the brink of crisis, and if there is a time when we should have our heads on our shoulders and our eyes set fast on the world in front of us, it is now.
If experience is really all that matters to people, above justice, morals, truth, or saving the environment, and technology is being developed that can help people bury their heads further into some virtual sand, then we might be in trouble.
Featured image: Rhodes University Computer Science student, Kyle Marais, wears a VR headset. Marais worked with VR technology in his Computer Science Honours project.
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