Choosing the Experience Machine

Neo made the right choice, but Cypherism is rampant in contemporary culture.

In Anarchy, State, and Utopia, the philosopher Robert Nozick posed the following now-famous thought experiment:

Suppose there were an experience machine that would give you any experience that you desired. Superduper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you 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's experiences?

Nozick’s point was to expose the limitations of any purely hedonic conception of the good life. After all, if the summum bonum is simply to maximize pleasure and minimize pain, the experience machine sounds like a ticket to paradise. If all that really matters are enjoyable mental states, who cares if those states are divorced from anything happening in the real world?

Nozick assumed that his readers would share his aversion to the experience machine, and that their reaction would reveal the shortcomings of the Benthamite view of happiness as nothing but sensation. He then offered some explanations as to why the experience machine is unappealing. “First,” he argued, “we want to do certain things, not just have the experience of doing them.” Furthermore, “we want to be a certain way, to be a certain type of person,” desires that cannot be fulfilled as “an indeterminate blob” in a tank. Finally, the experience machine can only offer us artificial simulations: “there is no actual contact with any deeper reality.” “Perhaps,” he concluded, “what we desire is to live (an active verb) ourselves, in contact with reality.”

I’m with Nozick on this one, but it turns out that not everybody has the same reaction. Consider this December 2021 tweet by Megan Fritts, a philosophy professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock:

Just taught Nozick’s Experience Machine for the hundredth time. All but one student were immediately and unreservedly in favor of entering the machine for life. Never had that happen before, rather threw off my lesson plan!

Seeing this led me to root around and find some empirical examinations of how people respond to the thought experiment. These studies did find that strong majorities reject the experience machine — 84 percent in one study, and 71 and 76 percent in a pair of experiments run for another study. Yet the authors of these papers all concluded that rejection of the experience machine sometimes reflected extraneous considerations — worries that the machine would eventually break, or simply loss aversion and a consequent preference for the status quo. They caution that the desire to live “in contact with reality” may not be as robust as Nozick assumed.

I fear that they’re right, and that Nozick seriously overestimated people’s attachment to reality. But the degree of that attachment is best revealed, not by hypothetical binary choices about spending the rest of your life plugged into a machine, but by the actual choices people make on the margins as they decide from minute to minute how to spend their time.

Nozick explicitly excluded from his thought experiment choices about whether to plug into the experience machine temporarily. It seems clear that he considered such choices to be unexceptionable — at least up to a point. But that’s the key question: how much time on the machine is too much? It’s always the dose that makes the poison, so at what point does choosing virtual experiences over real ones become dysfunctional — a hindrance to, rather than an enjoyable embellishment of, a fulfilling life?

I’m not sure where that point lies, but I’m reasonably confident we’re now on the wrong side of it. Americans currently spend about seven hours a day, nearly half their waking lives, staring at a screen, and numbers in the rest of the world look similar. We know we’re addicted to our phones, but we can’t stop. We recognize the absurdity of people sitting around a restaurant table, staring silently into their phones and ignoring the friends and family around them, but still we can’t stop. On flights these days, window screens down is now becoming the norm, as people forgo the sometimes breathtaking vistas to reduce the glare on their little rectangular opium dens. The temptation of the experience machine is real, and bit by bit our capacity to resist it has been eroded.

Let me be clear: there’s nothing wrong with experience machines per se. On the contrary, we’ve been building and plugging into them for as long as we’ve been human. Indeed, the earliest form of experience machine, the ingestion of intoxicating substances, apparently predates humans: at least some other animals enjoy getting high. Among humans, achieving altered states of consciousness through the combination of intoxication, music, and dance was one of the earliest ways that our species’ religious imagination expressed itself. And that religious impulse led further to the construction of what are likely the first man-made experience machines: the magnificent cave paintings of Chauvet Pont d’Arc, Lascaux, and elsewhere, tens of thousands of years old, may well have been the original form of cinema.

Our religious and artistic capacities have always been intertwined: our belief in the existence of other realms of experience links up naturally with our drive to create our own virtual representations of experience. Epic poems memorized and sung by bards over centuries, the Greek invention of theatrical drama, the European invention of the novel: all great leaps forward in the creation of experience machines that sweep audiences up into the suspension of disbelief and the temporary occupation of virtual worlds. Like our contemporary models, these earlier experience machines often provoked anxiety and backlash. The Roundheads banned the theater and its “lascivious Mirth and Levity” from 1642 to 1660. And the wave of suicides inspired by Goethe’s early novel The Sorrows of Young Werther stirred reactions not unlike the 1980s panic over alleged Satanic messages in heavy metal music.

So experience machines, and worries about them, are nothing new. But with the advent of first television and now the internet and social media, the story of our attraction to virtual experience has undergone a qualitative and disturbing shift. Instead of enriching lives oriented toward people and projects in the real world, hooking up to experience machines is now serving increasingly as a substitute. In sync with the simultaneous rise of the postindustrial service economy and the cultural shift toward increasing focus on personal identity and self-expression, the emergence of highly addictive experience machines can be seen as part of a larger and regrettable retreat from reality.

In my last essay about human flourishing, I wrote about how people pursue the good life along three broad avenues: relationships, projects, and experiences. At the individual level, there is incredibly wide latitude in how to live well. Some good lives are focused primarily on sustaining relationships, others on absorbing projects, others on rich and delightful experiences; meanwhile, there is an astonishing variety of different kinds of relationships, projects, and experiences that are capable of imbuing lives with meaning and purpose and joy.

But there are some limits. We can admire the career of a great artist or inventor or entrepreneur or political leader, but if we know that their personal life was a dysfunctional shambles we will not envy their lives. And we neither admire nor envy drug addicts, whose pursuit of pleasurable experience comes at the expense of everything else. Recall the rollicking opening monologue of Trainspotting: “I chose not to choose life. I chose something else. And the reasons? There are no reasons. Who needs reasons when you have heroin?” The error here isn’t thinking that heroin feels good; it’s the idea that feeling good in the moment is the only thing that matters.

I believe that contemporary society has succumbed to a similar error: collectively, we are overinvested in the production and consumption of virtual experiences and underinvested in vital relationships and projects to improve the physical world. We have staged a general, broad-based withdrawal from the world outside our heads. In our personal lives, we marry less, have fewer children, spend less time with fewer friends, and are less active in community organizations. As a society, with physical production absorbing ever less of our resources and labor, we devote increasing energies instead to analyzing abstract symbols. Along the way, we’ve lost a lot of our interest in remaking the physical world to serve human purposes – and have focused instead on erecting political barriers to ensure that changing our built environment becomes as difficult as possible. Our collective retreat from people and projects has created a vacuum in our lives, which we have filled with experience machines and their mediated simulacra.

The causal arrows seem to run in both directions here. On the one hand, social and cultural forces that are making it more difficult to form personal relationships or get things done in the real world heighten the relative appeal of the virtual. Meanwhile, the ready and undemanding pleasures that experience machines offer us 24/7 may well have blunted our desires for the more demanding and less dependable options of flesh-and-blood contact and physical activity.

The retreat from the real to the virtual has become a major theme in popular culture. Ready Player One offers a caricature of the present as a tale of the near-future: young people, trapped in a broken real world with little opportunity or hope, find escape in the frictionless, protean wonders of a virtual reality simulation. The Matrix has spawned a host of sequels and claimed a prominent place in our cultural imagination by offering an even broader caricature: everything we think is real is in fact just a collective electronic dream, as humans have been plugged into experience machines and reduced to organic batteries. The idea that we are living in a simulation pops up all the time these days — is it really so surprising that such a predicament now seems plausible? The rising cultural currency of the idea of the multiverse — featured in this year’s big Oscar winner Everything Everywhere All at Once — bespeaks the same sense that reality isn’t what it used to be: since everything that could possibly happen ends up happening somewhere, how could anything we do in our little patch of infinity really matter? Such are the anxieties that now nag at us in the uncanny valley we have chosen to settle.

What has diffused into the culture as vague unease manifests as acute dysfunction among those members of our society most in thrall to our new experience machines: young people. Mental health problems are up dramatically for adolescents in the U.S. and around the world – a disturbing trend that’s tracked the increasingly ubiquitous presence of social media in their lives. I’ve linked in the previous sentence to work by Jean Twenge and Jonathan Haidt, two of the experts at the forefront of drawing the connection between living online and going off the rails. But nothing I’ve read captures what’s going on more poignantly and movingly than an essay from Freddie deBoer titled “You are You. We Live Here. This Is Now.”

The essay starts with a screenshot from a New York Times focus group with young teenagers, which I’ll reproduce here:

Here’s deBoer’s reaction to that image:

I find it very very bleak! Here you have kids talking about why they prefer online life and identifying precisely the conditions that make me despondent: they like being online more than living their real lives because their online lives serve as an intermediary and distraction from what they don’t like about themselves and their world. They’re too young to know that you’re not supposed to admit that the point of being very online is to avoid the self. They say the quiet part out loud. Online life is more “peaceful and calming” because online you’re permitted to be a vegetable. Online you can mute yourself, render yourself an unperson, remove yourself from existence and in so doing avoid the pain of being alive. The attitudes here are indicative of young people who have been failed by the adults around them, who in addition to the responsibility to keep them alive should be forcing them to contend with the inevitability of sadness and the need to come to terms with themselves. Someone has to tell these kids, “wherever you go, you’ll find yourself there, and you have to start to do the work of accepting who you are, as much as you may not like yourself.” The stakes are high. I don’t mean to get dark here, but a kid who fantasizes about the ability to mute himself in real life is a kid I worry about someday muting himself permanently in real life.

And deBoer connects the pathos of young people’s retreat to online existence with larger trends in society:

All across our culture, you’ll find people eager to abandon the fundamental task of our lives, fostering and maintaining human connection, so that they can fall deeper into a pit of hedonistic distraction forever. You send an email a large language model wrote for you to spare yourself a minute of mental activity at the end of a long day working from home driven by Adderall you got via Zoom from a pill-mill doctor, you order dinner through an app (so that you don’t have to talk to an actual person on the phone), masturbate to online porn, watch several dozen videos on YouTube, none of which you’ll remember even three days later, then take two Xanax to put yourself to sleep. That’s progress now, the steady accumulation of various tools to avoid other human beings, leaving people free to consume #content that is by design totally, existentially disposable, throw-away culture that asks nothing of us and which we don’t remember because neither creator nor audience wants to invest enough for remembering to make sense.

Finally, let me share the essay’s spirited conclusion:

That’s the existential question for humanity in the 21st century. That’s the challenge in front of all of us. Will you shoulder the risk of pursuing real human connection, as hard and intimidating and discouraging as that can be? Or will you hide in your room forever, comforted by fast food and porn and opiates and therapy and TikTok, risking nothing? It’s up to you. I don’t pretend that it’s easy to choose the former. I don’t pretend that I always choose it or will always choose it, or that I’ve chosen it well, or that choosing it hasn’t cost me a great deal, at times. I know it’s not easy. A lot of people reach out to another and have their hand slapped down. And that’s scary. But to keep trying is to declare to the universe that you will have the courage to be human, when everyone and everything tempts you to be otherwise. Remember: you are you. We live here. This is now.

How do we get off this wrong path? How do we halt and reverse the retreat from reality? “Touch grass” has become a common rebuke offered to those of our fellow online denizens who have seemingly lost their grip on reality. But all of us could use the advice, as our collective cultural grip on reality has loosened considerably. And with ever more immersive experience machines offering augmented or virtual reality looming on the horizon, it’s a matter of genuine urgency. Again, the problem isn’t with experience machines per se: when their use is appropriately restricted, they can enrich our lives with new realms of experience. The problem lies in our lack of anchoring in the baseline reality of people and projects. No culture or society can truly flourish without such an anchor — but how do we rebuild ours?