The Experience Machine And Psychiatric Drugs

Emil Asplund & Erik Gustavsson try to find the truth about medication.

- Emil Asplund & Erik Gustavsson

Imagine a device which will give you any experience you desire. This is what Robert Nozick asks us to do in his Anarchy, State and Utopia. The only thing you need to do is to let some neuropsychologists put you (or just your brain) in a tank and work their magic. Whatever pleasant experiences you are looking for, the machine will provide them, and they would feel completely real.

To plug into the experience machine will provide you with the greatest possible amount of happiness. Yet there is something deeply counter-intuitive about the idea that plugging into the machine is the best life you can have. Perhaps the debate is captured best in the argument between Trinity and Cypher in The Matrix (1999), when Cypher claims, “If I had to choose between that [the depressing real world] and the Matrix… I choose the Matrix.” Trinity then stresses the fact that “The Matrix isn’t real.” This seems also to be Nozick’s guiding thought as he gives us three reasons why we would not plug into his experience machine. First, he says that people want to do things, not only have the experience of doing them. For example, most people would agree that something is lost if you are only experiencing what it is like to make a friend without actually making one. Second, we want to be a certain way. Once you’ve plugged in, there is no reality to who the person in the machine is; it’s just a brain floating in a tank experiencing pleasant things. You have turned into an “indeterminate blob” as Nozick puts it. Third, if you plug into the machine you would only be able to experience a man-made reality. As a blob in the machine you have “no actual contact with any deeper reality” (p.44, 3rd Edition) as Nozick puts it. These three points explain why it would be deeply counter-intuitive to plug into the machine.