i can’t remember the name of the bloke who did this thought experiment, but if you were given the choice to be hooked up to a machine that would grant you unlimited pleasure (not necessarily just physical) for life, would you take that oppurtunity? is happiness all we crave, or do we wish for something more, and if so, what is it?
Well…does the machine fit in my pocket, so I can still do what I was going to anyway, or am I going to be locked up in it like an iron lung?
I had those ideas myself when I were studying art. My performance idea was to put myself inside a box and have feeding tubes connected to the box (plus some other tubes to take care of any byproducts). I were meditating back then regularly and during this meditation I felt satisfied with life without any other activities. I never put myself inside a box however. Today I don’t believe in this idea because life is physical development, and physical development does not happen inside a box. This is the same reason why I’m not taking heroin. It will be like being attached to a pleasuremachine and you do not care about your life anymore. The only problem is that you have to buy the drug and that you have to take care of your body. But if I were rich I could maybe order some people to supply me with the drug and take care of my body. This will last for a while until my brain become jelly. But no; I do not want to do this.
So a life without pleasure have a value? I would say that if you never experience pleasure you must be in a very bad situation, and handle this situation very bad. And you must also be able to increase your pain every day. I think you can be in a very bad (objective) situation and still feel pleasure. Pleasure depend on how you focus your attention. Pleasure is natural: If you let go of everything pleasure is what you will feel. The secret is to let go of everything and still keep on doing it because it’s a good thing to do.
Johan
nozick i think or maybe nagel…i think nozick as it, or sometime very similar in anarchy,state and utopia…
‘when bird flies this roost, does mother’s egg lament his passing’
nozick - that was it. he did a few others and i can’t remember for the life of me what they were. i just found the concept of this one quite interesting, especially as most people i’ve spoken to (ie my tutorial group) said that they wouldn’t want to be hooked up to sucha machine for life. i know i wouldn’t. although it might be fun for a week.
Motion pictures are crude versions of the experience machines; we sit in darkened rooms and experience through the eye of a camera and the ear of a microphone. When the film has finished and the lights come up we’re suddenly thrust back into our own reality. Of course, one confined to a concentration camp, or some other horror might welcome the relief provided by Nozick’s experience machine. But I think Nozick is asking us if we have a reason to prefer reality to an experience machine. Could you give a reason? I can.
My father was returned from Southeast Asia in 1966; discharged from the military for reasons of insanity. I subsequently grew up in his experience machine. My father’s separation from reality caused an immense suffering on my part. My suffering only ended when my father stabbed me. He’s been dead for some years but I can still put my hand on the long scar that came from his knife and remember how it felt to be stabbed. I think I know what one must feel like to be murdered. The only experience I missed was the part where one actually dies. But no murder victim feels that part; you can’t feel death, you can only feel the act of being murdered. So, I had a very life-like experience of being murdered, courtesy of my father’s experience machine.
It was all part of my father’s experience machine. He never suffered from his delusions; his world was always perfectly balanced. But the world should not be such that a ten-year old boy should try and fail to persuade a thirty-year old man to see reason. This is my reason for refusing to submit to Nozick’s experience machine. What gives men our common bond is that we inhabit the same world, we have the same joys and sorrows. The fact that we share this reality makes it preferable to any other. This life is a shared experience. And this common experience is what we would lose if we were to plug into the experience machine. If we were to all live in our own worlds, then like my father, we would each be the only sane person in our world.
I’m sorry to unload this baggage at your doorstep. I’ve no doubt that my obsession with reason and order as an adult has much to do with my having grown up in the shadow of madness; where the pegs were all square and the holes all round. Nothing fit together. Nothing made sense. So, I began to question everything at an age when things were just beginning to make sense to other kids. Unlike Descartes, I never had to dismantle my world in order to rebuild it from scratch, because it was already a shambles when I found it. And the fact that I distrusted everything meant that I also distrusted everyone. That was an enormous mistake. No one can survive alone. Even if one could survive in isolation the resulting life would not be worth living. We all need each other. The result of seeing my father live in his own world has taught me how crucial it is that we all live in a shared world. To isolate ourselves from a shared human experience is nearly as dangerous as to isolate ourselves from the common atmosphere that all men breathe.
Michael
IF the box DOES do what it says: and what is says is to “grant you unlimited pleasure (not necessarily just physical) for life”
and IF " for life " meaning until my death, and my death being over 20-30 years from my connection
Then Yes because life is filled with infinite hardships. but if i could be connected to a pleasure box that kept me alive till my death and i would experience no more pain or hardship then yes. Because the basic human impulse is to Run or fight the bad and Chase and hold on to the good.
someone probably mentioned this in a post but out of intrest do you mean like the matrix sort of machine … dam good movie
No, that’s not really comparable, when you are “inside the matrix” or in the constructed reality in the film you get pain as well as pleasure, in fact it’s modelled on reality. If anything they’re talking about what the agent was, the paradise that was initially created but “rejected” by it’s human participants. A pleasure machine would give you pleasure, maybe spiced with tiny amounts of pain, but only to make that pleasure even greater (as some argue there is no pleasure without pain).
I’ve thought about Nozick’s machine a lot, it’s a major problem for Utilitarianists, until you realise that in all honesty we already have crude forms of these pleasure machines, namely TV, video, DVD, computer games, as polemarchus says. I’m sorry for that tragedy inflicted upon you, but a true pleasure machine wouldn’t even let you know that it wasn’t reality. It would be an even better version of the game for Red Dwarf novels (if any of you have read them). You wouldn’t die, your deepest desires would be satisfied, and what’s more, you would feel that you deserved them. Nor would you die from starvation, etc. All in all, anyone saying they wouldn’t go into such a machine would be a little weird for me.
I know this is a hypothetical question, but i was just wondering…How does the machine work? Does it make you innanely happy regardless of what is going on around you or does it continually construct an enviroment that makes you happy?
Excuse me if I am wrong, but wouldn’t a machine that produced infinite pleasure be synonomous with “Heaven”? And who would not want be in heaven? I must concur with Matt by saying anyone that wouldn’t want to be hooked up to the machine would be beyond my comprehension. Of course, in order to be truely happy, you must not remember any of the times you were not. Or know that you are hooked up to a machine. Which follows that your memory would most likely have to be erased (or atleast some of it). Then the neverending debate of identity or “what makes you today, who you were yesterday?” would ensue. So really, I must modify my previous statement and conclude: yes I would enter the machine only if I believed I had not. I think the situation would progress along these lines:
“So Mr. Matthew E. have you decided to spend the rest of your life in the pleasure machine?”
“Actually, no. I couldn’t be happy knowing I was hooked up to a machine. Sorry guys, but thanks for the offer.”
Slowly but surely my life would become happier and more blissful with each passing day. Money and beautiful naked women would fall from the sky, and I would write it off as dumb luck. I would think that I had walked out of the office without signing up, when in actuality I was under the machine’s control. Ooohhh, the power of ignorance.
In closing I must point out that even in my example I would still not be “truly” happy. (although with all those naked women…) Allow me to elaborate. To know happiness , one must know suffering. To know suffering is to not be happy. The contraption would have to be called The Happiest Place on Earth, but still not quite perfect machine. Although Disney may have a few reservations with the first part.
i’m not so sure that you have to know suffering in order to know happiness. I think that expression was just invented to make people accept suffering. Its crap. I don’t need to know suffering to know happiness. I need to know happiness to know happiness. If i had spent a life of total misery, I don’t think suffering would be a stranger to me. I think i would be damned familiar with it.
The problem with that view is that pleasure can be subjective, much like hot and cold are subjective. If you haven’t eaten in a day or two, a half-decent meal can taste sublime. If you’re cold, an averagely heated room will feel warmer thanif you came in from a sauna.
It’s exactly the same with pleasure, if you just have pleasure all the time you don’t appreciate how much better it is than pain, an occasional reminder of pain can heighten thepleasure experience.
Yeah, but it doesn’t have to be relative to your own experiences. I know I was happy just by seeing misery in the world.
we should be careful not to assume an identity between pleasure and goodness.
for instance: it could be argued that the majority of great works of literature were not produced as a result of pleasure, happiness, of comfort, but rather as the result of angst, sadness, and restlessness.
in some ways, philosophy itself seems to be grounded in a sort of restlessness, and it is this restlessness and discomfort that drives us to continue thinking (questioning).
the point: we probably wouldnt have these great works of literature, and probably wouldnt engage in philosophy, if we were subjected to some form of infinite pleasure. and the point of this is that it calls into question the assumption that there is some intrinsic goodness to pleasure.
Although some people may entertain the idea that a pleasure machine would be great, it would be a life without dignity… and such a life is not valuable. I am a firm believer that everyone has ‘rights’, and we have duties and obligations to others, and ourselves, and to submit to a pleasure machine would be relinquishing those rights… Do we have the right to take away others rights? If not, then do we have the right to take away our own rights? I would love everyone’s thoughts on this…
what is doesn’t wish. “it” doesn’t have what we falsly assign “humans”. “it” just is. and “it” feels wonderful.
I don’t think happiness is something that can be granted on it’s own independently, I think it is something that comes from within the mind itself when you are content with what is going on around you… That said, ask me again if I ever try heroin.
TheIdiot - Without some personal understanding of that suffering you could not empathise with them, you must have experienced displeasure in order to understand why they are unhappy. Much like a blind-from-birth man cannot understand sight until he expereinces it, you cannot understand pain until you have experienced it. Even after then yu will ned occasional reminder ‘doses’ of pain to keep the experience based.
km - know you posted that a while ago but it did bring up some good points.
Your arguments wouldn’t necessarily make any difference if one is just trying to adopt the pleasure principle in order to justify Utilitarianism however. The escape for us utilitarians is that we must in effect subject certain persons to pain in order for them to create great works so that others can be happy. In other words the net gain in pleasure from their personal suffering warrants us subjecting those people to a ‘torutred’ existence.
Sounds absurd? If it does then you’ll never be a true utilitarian!
Now navelgazer’s post does present us with a particular difficulty, what ‘right’ do we have to enter the machine. Of course there would be suffering for others ouside the pleasure machine, your loved ones would miss you and wonder what is so wrong with you if You couldn’t stay in ‘reality’. However this could be sidestepped by using a corollary, just make sure everyone goes into the machine, then no-one’s being hurt.
As to rights, well, for a start I don’t believe in them, to me they’re just a useful way of expressing a rule of thumb of morality that can be broken for the right reasons. That is a consequence of my utilitiarian view on morality however, so feel free to disagree. Secondly if we all go in to the machine and it is interactive, would you relinquish those rights at all?
One immediate problem that arises for the pleasure machine is could it ever be interactive, as people will fall out of love with you, etc.? Does it matter if it wasn’t, if you though you were interacting with real people instead of constructs, what difference does it make (in the way Matthew E. was describing, you don’t even know you entered it). All this, by the way, is vaguely touched upon in Vanilla Sky, a film which i was very impressed with, though it did avoid some of the more important questions.
I’ve got more and more thoughts coming out as I think about this, I’ll have to stop here for now as I really should go and do some uni work. Maybe I’ll post more about it in a week or two. Sigh. If only the questions they asked were as interesting as this, rather than “can Frege’s system of Arithemtic e rescued from inconsistency?”. I think the question should have been, who cares? I jest 
GraveDisorder, while I remember to mention it, the point of a pleasure machine might be to construct a reality around you in order to make you content, happy, etc. I say might as it depends what you term as the pleasure machine. A very simple pleasure machine might be as you must be thinking of it, a constant high. The distinctions between each machione does raise some problems for the utilitarian again though! Just look at Mill’s qualitive distinctions of pleasure for more about that.