Hedonism

Today was another Monday, and such, another happiness day.

I’m still struggling with this class. I must say that I don’t like the lack of tangible reality in philosophy. But I do enjoy the mental tug-of-war. Here’s an interesting issue that came up in today’s class.

The passage below outlines a problem Professor Robert Nozick presented.

Nozick is concerned that if we accept hedonism, we will loose sight of those aspects of life which are most important to us; namely, what kind of person we want to be and what kind of life we want to live. In order to illustrate this problem, Nozick imagines a science-fiction type story in which it is possible to plug our brains into machines which would provide us with any kind of experiences we could possibly desire. It is very important to note, here, that Nozick’s experience machine produces experiences of such perfect clarity that we cannot tell the difference between these experiences and reality. Therefore, says Nozick, there is no reason why we would not “plug in” to an experience machine. [ source ]

The teacher gave us the above setting and asked us whether we’d choose to be plugged in to this machine or not.

No? Come on! Here’s a machine that will make you feel like you’re getting all that you desire, are you sure you don’t want to take it?

Well, Nozick claimed that people would not want to be hooked up to this machine. The above-linked article goes on to say “[ Nozick says that] we are concerned with more than just our experiences of pleasure or pain (or any other experiences, in fact); not only do we want to experience things, we want to do things and be a certain way. Nozick contends that we would not be happy if we were plugged in to an experience machine because we would know that we are not actually doing the things we experience.”

So, if I understand it correctly, he claims that having pleasure come to us without our doing anything isn’t what humans want. Does that mean that part of the pleasure is accomplishing something or achieving in the face of adversity? I can’t put words in Nocik’s mouth but I must agree that I wouldn’t want to be plugged in either.

As far as I am concerned, if I agree to be plugged into this machine, I am agreeing to give up who I am as I know it. I am choosing delusion over reality. Even the certainty of positive delusions doesn’t convince me to give up reality. Artificial is artificial no matter how pleasant. The idea of exchanging fake for real sounds creepy to me. How could I consciously choose to stop being me?

After the class agreed that most of us wouldn’t hook up to this pleasure machine, the teacher put a twist on the scenario. Imagine, he said, you’re an Ethiopian suffering from starvation and disease, would you now agree to be hooked up? Some people nodded. It seems there is a limit to human suffering where delusion becomes way more desirable than reality. I assume it’s correlated to the amount of lost hope. Maybe even the helplessness that usually leads to extreme measures such as suicide.

Long after the class is over, I’m still thinking about the question. Still trying to properly pinpoint the reasons behind my extremely strong instinct not to agree to be hooked up. Which, once again, proves to me that this is indeed an interesting class. Even if it’s thoroughly frustrating.

What’s your answer? Would you choose the pleasure machine?

Previously? TV.