[Edit: Halstead made some very similar points already, didn’t read them before.]
Independent of the moral realism connection, I’m curious if you think anti-experience machine intuitions plausibly survive reflection when it comes to suffering in particular, i.e., if a hybrid of tranquilism with hedonism is more defensible. When I imagine having the choice between (1) living my life as it would be by default, and (2) having my consciousness enter a pain-free experience machine while my body does all the same things it would have done regardless, including fulfilling my altruistic goals, option 2 seems clearly better. I think I would be making a serious moral mistake by choosing 1, selfishly condemning my future self to unnecessary bad experiences just because of my current self’s gross feelings about The Matrix.
(To be clear, a non-SFE hedonist could agree with my choice here. My point is that your experience machine case compares two lives that are both perfect from the tranquilist perspective, so I don’t think they get at the heart of my intuitions about hedonics being uniquely morally important. I share your intuition that symmetric hedonism is too “demanding,” in the sense that I don’t have a prudential obligation to pursue super-pleasures.)
I still think some people would object to this for essentially similar reasons. I wouldn’t call it “grossness feelings about the Matrix.” That may apply to some people, but I think a more forceful point here is that someone could care a great deal about having close personal relationships with real people, who continue to exist when the “main character” doesn’t interact with them. People whose reactions to how you behave hold you accountable and like you for who you are, rather than (“hollow” versions of) people who are destined to like/accept/admire you no matter what.
So it’s less about the Matrix being gross/bad somehow. Instead, it’s about how potentially there’s something really valuable and personally meaningful in the outside world, depending on how a person relates to things there.
Yeah, I personally would love to live in a simulated utopia. I just think that would be very different, morally speaking, from an experience machine. I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference from the inside of course.
Hm, okay I can grant that there can be less shallow reasons for not entering the machine than my caricature claimed. But those reasons still strike me as trivializing the suffering, and, in your words, “reifying intuitions they have about [the external world] as intrinsic components to [the external world].” It seems pretty clear that we would expect ourselves to have intuitions about “hollow” experience machine relationships being bad even if we wouldn’t endorse them upon reflection, because such intuitions are confounded so heavily by how hollow relationships work in reality. i.e., people have negative experiences when you try to force them into loving you.
and, in your words, “reifying intuitions they have about [the external world] as intrinsic components to [the external world].”
In the case of hedonist moral realists, I think they are treating their personal intuitions about pleasure as components of pleasure, in the sense that they’re thinking everyone should value pleasure the same way they do.
When I say that some people may not want to enter the experience machine because they see their life’s meaning primarily in their closest interpersonal relationships, the claim is not that everyone should value relationships that way. People think about relationships in different ways. But those who value their relationships more than other things and place a lot of value on features related to “authenticity/Contact with reality”, those people may not want to enter the experience machine. Not because they have something against the machine per se, but because entering the experience machine would mean losing their existing relationships.
I made the last sentence bold because it seems like you shift to talking about people being put off by features of the experience machine, whereas the intuition I want to convey is one of losing something specific that one currently values. (Edit: My last comment didn’t make this clear, I see now.) (Compare: Would people want go to the most awesome job imaginable if it meant moving to a different country where your girlfriend or boyfriend [or husband/wife] can’t follow? People can say no to this for reasons related to their relationship; it doesn’t mean they dislike something about the job description or the country they’d be moving to.)
If you’re in a point in life where you don’t care about any of your ongoing relationships particularly much, then the experience machine becomes a lot more attractive!
Alternatively, if you’ve internalized hedonist axiology, and so have your loved ones, you could all rejoice in finding new loved ones in your respective experience machines. So I’m not saying that hedonists necessarily care less about the people they’re in relationships with. It just gets awkward if one person in the relationship is a hedonist and the other person isn’t.
When I say that some people may not want to enter the experience machine because they see their life’s meaning primarily in their closest interpersonal relationships, the claim is not that everyone should value relationships that way.
Sure, but I am expressing skepticism that such people really value authenticity or contact with reality intrinsically, or at least that they would endorse doing so if they engaged with the debunking argument. Which is that outside of Thought Experiment Land, there are obvious and strong hedonic disadvantages to “fakeness.” It feels really bad to realize someone never really loved you, for example, and was just using you for their own purposes. It feels bad to think of yourself as replaceable to your loved ones. And so on. Ditto for having contact with reality — and to the extent that delusions are blissful for the delusional person in the moment, almost always they are malign eventually to themselves or to others.
There’s a strong correlation between beliefs in authenticity and happiness in the real world with evolved brains, and that correlation breaks in the experience machine thought experiment. (I don’t think every moral intuition people have can really be cashed out in terms of hedonism, to be clear — some of them I would explain as being naturally selected on a basis that has ~nothing to do with what people would care about pursuing upon reflection. Others I don’t have a good explanation for at the moment, but to me the intuitions in favor of (suffering-focused) hedonism are more compelling.)
I don’t think it matters if the machine per se is judged as especially bad here, or if the “real” relationships and such are judged as especially good. My debunking argument applies just as well either way, since it’s the relative evaluation that matters.
If you’re in a point in life where you don’t care about any of your ongoing relationships particularly much, then the experience machine becomes a lot more attractive!
While you do later say, “I’m not saying that hedonists necessarily care less about the people they’re in relationships with,” I think this quote is not accurately representing the hedonist position. I do care about my relationships plenty—the point is that I care about them instrumentally. Not just for my own hedonics but for others’. Clearly when I spend time with loved ones, I don’t frame it as something ultimately instrumental to hedonics, but that’s not in tension with hedonism because the framing itself is hedonically unproductive in that context. (Well, it’s clearly unproductive if it’s framed as just about my hedonic good, but I’m not so sure about the framing as something that is mutually hedonically beneficial. I find the idea of making my loved ones’ lives less painful while they do the same for me actually pretty inspiring.)
[Edit: Halstead made some very similar points already, didn’t read them before.]
Independent of the moral realism connection, I’m curious if you think anti-experience machine intuitions plausibly survive reflection when it comes to suffering in particular, i.e., if a hybrid of tranquilism with hedonism is more defensible. When I imagine having the choice between (1) living my life as it would be by default, and (2) having my consciousness enter a pain-free experience machine while my body does all the same things it would have done regardless, including fulfilling my altruistic goals, option 2 seems clearly better. I think I would be making a serious moral mistake by choosing 1, selfishly condemning my future self to unnecessary bad experiences just because of my current self’s gross feelings about The Matrix.
(To be clear, a non-SFE hedonist could agree with my choice here. My point is that your experience machine case compares two lives that are both perfect from the tranquilist perspective, so I don’t think they get at the heart of my intuitions about hedonics being uniquely morally important. I share your intuition that symmetric hedonism is too “demanding,” in the sense that I don’t have a prudential obligation to pursue super-pleasures.)
I still think some people would object to this for essentially similar reasons. I wouldn’t call it “grossness feelings about the Matrix.” That may apply to some people, but I think a more forceful point here is that someone could care a great deal about having close personal relationships with real people, who continue to exist when the “main character” doesn’t interact with them. People whose reactions to how you behave hold you accountable and like you for who you are, rather than (“hollow” versions of) people who are destined to like/accept/admire you no matter what.
So it’s less about the Matrix being gross/bad somehow. Instead, it’s about how potentially there’s something really valuable and personally meaningful in the outside world, depending on how a person relates to things there.
Yeah, I personally would love to live in a simulated utopia. I just think that would be very different, morally speaking, from an experience machine. I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference from the inside of course.
Hm, okay I can grant that there can be less shallow reasons for not entering the machine than my caricature claimed. But those reasons still strike me as trivializing the suffering, and, in your words, “reifying intuitions they have about [the external world] as intrinsic components to [the external world].” It seems pretty clear that we would expect ourselves to have intuitions about “hollow” experience machine relationships being bad even if we wouldn’t endorse them upon reflection, because such intuitions are confounded so heavily by how hollow relationships work in reality. i.e., people have negative experiences when you try to force them into loving you.
In the case of hedonist moral realists, I think they are treating their personal intuitions about pleasure as components of pleasure, in the sense that they’re thinking everyone should value pleasure the same way they do.
When I say that some people may not want to enter the experience machine because they see their life’s meaning primarily in their closest interpersonal relationships, the claim is not that everyone should value relationships that way. People think about relationships in different ways. But those who value their relationships more than other things and place a lot of value on features related to “authenticity/Contact with reality”, those people may not want to enter the experience machine. Not because they have something against the machine per se, but because entering the experience machine would mean losing their existing relationships.
I made the last sentence bold because it seems like you shift to talking about people being put off by features of the experience machine, whereas the intuition I want to convey is one of losing something specific that one currently values. (Edit: My last comment didn’t make this clear, I see now.) (Compare: Would people want go to the most awesome job imaginable if it meant moving to a different country where your girlfriend or boyfriend [or husband/wife] can’t follow? People can say no to this for reasons related to their relationship; it doesn’t mean they dislike something about the job description or the country they’d be moving to.)
If you’re in a point in life where you don’t care about any of your ongoing relationships particularly much, then the experience machine becomes a lot more attractive!
Alternatively, if you’ve internalized hedonist axiology, and so have your loved ones, you could all rejoice in finding new loved ones in your respective experience machines. So I’m not saying that hedonists necessarily care less about the people they’re in relationships with. It just gets awkward if one person in the relationship is a hedonist and the other person isn’t.
Sure, but I am expressing skepticism that such people really value authenticity or contact with reality intrinsically, or at least that they would endorse doing so if they engaged with the debunking argument. Which is that outside of Thought Experiment Land, there are obvious and strong hedonic disadvantages to “fakeness.” It feels really bad to realize someone never really loved you, for example, and was just using you for their own purposes. It feels bad to think of yourself as replaceable to your loved ones. And so on. Ditto for having contact with reality — and to the extent that delusions are blissful for the delusional person in the moment, almost always they are malign eventually to themselves or to others.
There’s a strong correlation between beliefs in authenticity and happiness in the real world with evolved brains, and that correlation breaks in the experience machine thought experiment. (I don’t think every moral intuition people have can really be cashed out in terms of hedonism, to be clear — some of them I would explain as being naturally selected on a basis that has ~nothing to do with what people would care about pursuing upon reflection. Others I don’t have a good explanation for at the moment, but to me the intuitions in favor of (suffering-focused) hedonism are more compelling.)
I don’t think it matters if the machine per se is judged as especially bad here, or if the “real” relationships and such are judged as especially good. My debunking argument applies just as well either way, since it’s the relative evaluation that matters.
While you do later say, “I’m not saying that hedonists necessarily care less about the people they’re in relationships with,” I think this quote is not accurately representing the hedonist position. I do care about my relationships plenty—the point is that I care about them instrumentally. Not just for my own hedonics but for others’. Clearly when I spend time with loved ones, I don’t frame it as something ultimately instrumental to hedonics, but that’s not in tension with hedonism because the framing itself is hedonically unproductive in that context. (Well, it’s clearly unproductive if it’s framed as just about my hedonic good, but I’m not so sure about the framing as something that is mutually hedonically beneficial. I find the idea of making my loved ones’ lives less painful while they do the same for me actually pretty inspiring.)