Day 16 out of 30 days of blogs about philosophy.
From Robert Nozick:
“Suppose there was an experience machine that would give you any experience you desired. Super-duper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel yu 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? […] Of course while in the tank you won’t know that you’re there; you’ll think that it’s all actually happening […] Would you plug in?”
Would I choose to live a life that I had pre-programmed for myself?
Nope.
I might be the going who is taking the hypothetical a little to serious, but the idea that you could pre-program an enjoyable life for yourself is crazy.
Think about how you would have programmed your life when you were 15… it’s not the life you want to live now.
Ignoring my semantics, the real question is says something about how you think of reality. Is there something about being alive here that you value more than having “simulated” experiences, even though you won’t know that they are simulated.
Of course, you don’t know that you’re not already in a simulation machine. You don’t know that you aren’t going to achieve everything you want because you have previously programmed it for yourself.
So I say, no, don’t plug in. Not because I think there is something more real about now than this hypothetical simulation. But because you already live in an amazing experience machine and there is a possibility that you programmed it better the first time.
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