Reference: broadclarity.com/the-experience-machine
What I want to do here, as concerns Hawkin’s essay, is start with J S Mill’s point, that happiness seems to be a side effect of something else, then hopefully put some shine on Nozick’s experience machine. And, hopefully, I will not have managed to simply go off on my own tangent (the self indulgence of being off topic (in the process. If you think about your experiences with it: those happy moments in your life, Mill’s seems to be right. It’s never like having someone jacking in to the pleasure center of your brain (as scientists have done (and keeping you in constant state of pleasure: a technological land of the lotos eaters. Still, we can only assume that pleasure (or the pleasure center of the brain (has something to do with happiness. Nor can we deny the role that displeasure or even the indifferent (that state of experiencing neither pleasure nor displeasure in any significant measure (plays in it. Therefore, we could define happiness as a crap in one hand and gold in the other situation, one that is defined through an accumulative effect of pleasant experiences (that which stimulates the pleasure center of the brain (in relationship and contrast to the unpleasant and indifferent experiences we have.
(And we as the intellectually and creatively curious should understand that as well anyone. Think about the tedious shit we go through, such as reading pages of text that often makes no sense to us whatsoever, in order to achieve that experience of revelation and the pleasure that comes with it.)
And if we follow Lacan’s concept of Jouissance, we can see how our experience of happiness is rooted in and an expression of our experience of the component of pleasure:
First of all, Jouissance (as your initial instincts might tell you (is French for sexual ecstasy: the very bar by which most of us define the experience of pleasure. What Lacan goes on to point out is that Jouissance, in terms of sex, is a conscious experience of pleasure while we experience discomfort (or displeasure (at a subconscious level. Lacan’s support for this was to point out that if you took it up to the point of climax, then shut it down, you would experience displeasure. True enough. But it goes a little deeper and more subtle than that. If you think about it, sex is a process of working towards a threshold that will take you out of a place that you are really enjoying at the time. In other words, the experience of that pleasure is one of being pulled in 2 directions at once. This puts a little shine on the aesthetic experience we sometimes get with artistic creations: that feeling it gives you of wanting to fold into yourself. But it gets even more subtle than that when you think about direct experiences of pleasure (such as that of cocaine: the kind of discomfort that always seems to accompany it, one we would feel if someone jacked into the pleasure center of our brain and stimulated it.
But if we think it through, we can see what distinguishes pleasure from happiness, even though the experience of happiness presupposes the experience of pleasure. Say someone was to jack into the pleasure center of our brain and leave the switch on. At some point, it would seem, the experience would have to become unpleasant (we would become unhappy (since it would become undifferentiated and undistinguished. The pleasure would lose all meaning since we would no longer have anything to compare it with. To offer an example (and hopefully I’m not gerrymandering here: one of the most interesting scenes in the Hellraiser series was one in which the characters were walking through Hell and in one of the rooms, a man and a woman were condemned to engage in an eternal sexual act –that is without any hope of a climax. Now think about how brutal that would be: to be eternally working towards a threshold (the comparatively less pleasant experience (that one will never arrive at and be able to engage in the added pleasure (the happiness (of remembering a pleasure one is no longer experiencing. In other words: while they may be in an eternal state of pleasure, they will never be happy or satisfied. It’s never enough to experience something pleasant. A good party is never a matter of getting blackout drunk and forgetting what a good time we had. Part of the pleasure comes in the hindsight of having a good time: of having pleasure.
And I think we can apply what we have learned about the pleasure machine (Jouissance (to the happiness machine: the experience machine we might use to experience eternal happiness. Like eternal pleasure, the eternal happiness of the experience machine seems impossible since sooner or later our experience and the pleasure we derive from it would become undifferentiated.
So yeah!!! I think I would have a few reservations about the eternal pleasure of the experience machine.