The Experience Machine

My good friend Avery brought the game Castle, Forest, Island, Sea to my attention (1). If you haven't played it yet, I'm about to spoil it. Go play it. Okay? Good.

The game goes through the same areas regardless of what choices you make, but it's a great way to see the practical implications of various philosophical views. It's almost like a literary story with philosophical themes. How the game leads you down a linear path and presents you with "choices"--in the video game they're-not-really-choices sense of the word--is supremely interesting. Castle presents a deterministic view of the very act of choosing philosophical beliefs.

It reminds me of the Steam game The Stanley Parable (2). They both destroy the notion of choice in a similar way. The game is brilliant and quite funny, but also to express a difficult point. By exposing its own internal structure, Stanley makes the artificiality of video games painfully obvious. One particular ending of the game refers to menial jobs. It gives that wonderful feeling of existential dread. The game makes you push buttons to advance the script in exactly the same way that a mindless worker would. And video games are supposed to be a leisure activity. 

A fully deterministic world would be boring and predictable unless one didn't have full knowledge of the world's predictability. That is, if we remain ignorant to the true nature of the world it makes no difference whether there are a finite amount of choices, or whether free will exists. If everything seems unpredictable then it might as well be, at least from the experiential side of things.

That's where the Experience Machine section of Castle comes in. Your character opens a book and becomes absorbed in an ideal world. "Ideal" not in the sense that this virtual world provides boundless pleasure, but rather, the perfect amount of pleasure, challenge, suffering, preordained outcome, and free ones--all resulting in the truest sense of happiness. We as people like choice, or at least the illusion of it. In fact, one can't be happy without sadness as a reference point. So too with other emotions such as boredom, tiredness, etc. Aristotle's golden mean of pleasure and virtue seems to be the obvious inspiration for this more modern thought experiment. I find it very similar to The Matrix (3). Agent Smith says that the first Matrix was a perfect world of boundless pleasure, but humans grew bored if life didn't have enough challenges, enough defeats to make the victories worthwhile. In this way, the machines settled on the frustrating modern world, with all it's potential successes and actual failures intact for all of it's human inhabitants. So it is with human motivation.

The end-of-game recap of the Experience Machine describes the situation as one that, given the choice, most people would turn down: with a few notable exceptions who'd accept it. You'd be happy to know that the Epicureans, Stoics, and some Aristotelians (depending on how literally you read the Ethics) fall into the latter category. Presumably, these Hellenistic philosophers would be happy to accept the experience of the machine even if they knew it wasn't real (not getting into that word). I'd argue this is because these three ethical schools make pleasure, virtue, and happiness/excellence/areté (respectively) the final end, and the Experience Machine provides all that in precisely the perfect amount that each theory necessitates.

However, I believe virtually everyone would choose the Machine if and only if it was impossible to determine the reality of the world, once firmly inside it.  Any prior knowledge of the Machine's world being fake would be erased upon entry, much like The Matrix. Unlike The Matrix, there would have to be no way of finding this out, or ever getting out. That is, our world and the world inside the Machine would then both be rea", because there is no way to find out otherwise. The Machine is interesting because it may not be so hypothetical. We have just as much reason to believe that we are in it now as to the contrary. This possibility changes nothing except in the way that some philosopher's privilege the truly Real (with a capital R, meaning objective reality one would see if all barriers and illusions were removed, i.e. outside of the Matrix. As Morpheus first says, actually quoting Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation, one of the founding texts of media aesthetics, "Welcome to the desert of the Real.") (4). But why is this the case? In a truly perfect Experience Machine, where your sense are all you can ever know, why would we subjugate them? The position I'm furthering, one of taking the Machine, or, at the very least, accepting it once you're in it, is similar to how Aristotle places his trust back in the senses after Plato's extreme skepticism. (See Raphael's School of Athens (5). Why is Plato pointing up? And Aristotle?) 

If one accepts this position, then I believe a specific type of physical theory must directly follow. Whether it would be determinate or indeterminate, and further, what it would appear to those inside the system, is a question I have no idea how to even approach. 

However, it's not so simple to accept this position. Stanley and Castle made me transpose video games' notion of linearity into real life: is the total set of possible philosophical beliefs limited in number? 

If there are only a finite amount of beliefs to be held, then they will all eventually be discovered and presented with time and effort. This applies equally well to philosophy, morality, religion, and physical theories. If there is a correct view of each, one can only hope that perseverance and lack of ignorance will naturally select these correct views out of the less-correct ones. But if both of these types of views reoccur--that is, the set of total beliefs is assumed to be finite-- then even a liberal reading of free will is powerless to invent and ponder novel views of the world. (I think the whole notion of "novel discovery" is vastly overrated--I often think that the philosophic/scientific world has this massive virginity complex about discovery: as if, correct or interesting views aren't worthwhile if they aren't novel or freshly discovered, and I think that lies in the selfish desire to take credit for things and be remembered--but that's neither here nor there.) Ignoring the discovery aspect, I am optimistic that a metaphysics of this nature would eventually produce real insight through science. Or there would simply be nothing more to discover after a certain point. Do we then become like Dr. Manhattan (6)? Alternatively, we could get sick of the search and there could be no scientific answer. Like a dying Feynman says, "If it turns out it is like an onion with millions of layers and we are just sick and tired of looking at the layers -- then that is the way it is" (7).

Consider the alternative case. If there is an infinite amount of beliefs to be had, then the chances of discovering the correct ones out of the ocean of possibilities seems hopelessly slim. At least, a position that doesn't trust the senses would have no way of discerning the correct and less-correct ones. We would be limited by what we could imagine, and may miss certain possibilities outside of the realm of our experience. For example, if a man hypothetically never knew hunger, he would also have no knowledge of being too full. Conversely, a position such as Aristotle's that does trust the senses would find a tight correlation between proposed theories and realities in determining correct theories i.e. scientific inquiry that naturally progresses. We still face the above problem of searching, but in this case philosophy would not be a hindrance to science so long as we can use the senses.

For these reasons I'm inclined the think the senses are a form of truth. I consider the Experience Machine just as real as whatever world we're living in, because the machine I picture in my mind is essentially this world as far as I can tell.

One last note: Castle asks what is philosophy and records player responses. A good proposal was "what science doesn't deal with"--although this is perhaps too narrow. I just wrote "everything", but of course this is unsatisfying. Philosophy is perhaps the hardest category to pin down, although my best guess at the moment would be: thinking about thinking. This includes most metaphysics, ethics, language, games, math, religion, and everyday conversation. It excludes most sciences, except psychology and behavioral econ, I think. The latter two fields are much less science and much more logical, rational explanation, which is what I think philosophy values more highly than data. It also excludes art and literature, although they can certainly be philosophic to the degree that they encourage thinking about thinking. 

Between Stanley, Castle, and Bertrand Russell's excellent History of Western Philosophy, I've been pretty busy thinking about philosophy (8). Although by no means is this blog supposed to be only philosophy. I don't anticipate posts being this long, especially during school. Anyway, the important thing in my mind is to devote a little time to explore your own thoughts and see where they lead. As I'll explain in more depth (hopefully) next time, I think this is perhaps the most important thing one can do for himself. These type of fringe thoughts often end up being the most valuable to record. And the most fruitful.

References:
(1) Castle, Island, Forest, Sea
(2) The Stanley Parable
(3) The Matrix
(4) Simulacra and Simulation -- Jean Baudrillard 
(5) The School of Athens -- Raphael
(6) Dr. Manhattan from Watchmen
(7) "On Science and God" -- Richard Feynman
(8) The History of Western Philosophy -- Bertrand Russell