The way you describe it, it sounds downright appealing!
You could even argue that the quality of life in such an instantiation of the repugnant conclusion is, as far as people’s experiences are concerned, no worse than the quality of life in a eudaimonic paradise. Not everyone will agree with this intuition, but I’d say that the more intense pleasures seem appealing to us because they connect to life goals or to addictive tendencies and thrill seeking, which we’d no longer bother with if all our life goals were taken care of and we were permanently in a calm and restful state where everything feels fine.
That said, I don’t think evaluating lives purely based on the experiences they contain is of much use in most contexts. For instance, many people wouldn’t want to enter solipsistic experience machines (whether they’re built around eternal contentment or a more adventurous ideal life) if that means giving up on having authentic relationships with loved ones.
To elaborate more on the theme of “contentment as equally good as intense pleasure,” here some excerpts from my article on tranquilism:
In the context of everyday life, there are almost always things that ever so slightly bother us. Uncomfortable pressure in one’s shoes, thirst, hunger, headaches, boredom, itches, non-effortless work, worries, longing for better times. When our brain is flooded with pleasure, we temporarily become unaware of all the negative ingredients of our stream of consciousness, and they thus cease to exist. Pleasure is the typical way in which our minds experience temporary freedom from suffering. This may contribute to the view that pleasure is the symmetrical counterpart to suffering, and that pleasure is in itself valuable and important to bring about. However, there are also (contingently rare) mental states devoid of anything bothersome that are not commonly described as (intensely) pleasurable, examples being flow states or states of meditative tranquility. Felt from the inside, tranquility is perfect in that it is untroubled by any aversive components, untroubled by any cravings for more pleasure. Likewise, a state of flow as it may be experienced during stimulating work, when listening to music or when playing video games, where tasks are being completed on auto-pilot with time flying and us having a low sense of self, also has this same quality of being experienced as completely problem-free.
7
Such states – let us call them states of contentment – may not commonly be described as (intensely) pleasurable, but following philosophical traditions in both Buddhism and Epicureanism, these states, too, deserve to be considered states of happiness.
Whether meditative tranquility or flow are called hedonically neutral or not is a matter of interpretation. To most people, they may feel pleasurable in a way, or very positive somehow, though perhaps in a different sense than e.g. orgasms feel positive. This makes perfect sense according to tranquilism, where there is no neutral range for experiences to begin with and where conscious states completely free of cravings should thus elicit very positive associations when we think of them. The important difference between tranquilism and hedonism is whether all of these states free of cravings are equally positive, or whether they form a scale of increasing value, with some such experiences being distinctly worse than others.
8
According to hedonism, where the optimal state corresponds to the highest possible pleasure, states of contentment would fall short: they would be judged (heavily) suboptimal because there could be richer states of pleasure in their place. By contrast, tranquilism proposes that all of these states are in a relevant sense flawless – different in their flavor from intense pleasure, yet equally perfect with respect to the immediate evaluation that occurs internally. While pleasure has great instrumental value according to tranquilism as one way to ensure that everyday conscious experience is problem-free, maximizing pleasure does not constitute an end in itself.
Edit: I decided that endnote 8 is worth quoting here, too:
8 Thomas Metzinger makes the interesting point that what we envision when we think of “neutral” sates of conscousness may often be “slightly negative” in reality, and that this mistake could reinforce the assumption that pleasure is decidedly better than mere freedom from cravings:
“Almost all negatively valenced states involve only a mild emotional sense of preference frustration – perhaps some weak impairment of bodily wellbeing or a diffuse background feeling of boredom, possibly accompanied by an unspecific, generalised worry about the future plus a subtle phenomenology of uncertainty. In addition, as it is plausible to assume that these frequent and much more subtly negative states are forming the majority of our conscious self-model moments, most of us may have long ago begun to perceive them as inescapable and uncontrollable. We may therefore operate under a “domain-general” version of learned helplessness with regard to our own suffering: we become unable or unwilling to avoid subsequent encounters with such inner situations, because on a deep functional level we already believe that we cannot effectively control the total probability of their occurrence. Consequently, we do not take action to avoid more subtle forms of negative everyday phenomenology. Therefore, what we prematurely report as “neutral” states may often actually be the inner experience of subtle preference frustration plus learned helplessness. We report “neutral”, but what we actually mean is “default”. If one introspects carefully, truly neutral moments are something very rare, because some sort of affective valence accompanies almost all of our conscious moments.”
See Thomas Metzinger’s “Suffering” in The Return of Consciousness, eds. Kurt Almqvist & Anders Haag (Stockholm: Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation, 2017) 221-262.
Thanks for the link! I knew I had heard this term somewhere a while back, and may have been thinking about it subconsciously when I wrote this post.
R.e. > For instance, many people wouldn’t want to enter solipsistic experience machines (whether they’re built around eternal contentment or a more adventurous ideal life) if that means giving up on having authentic relationships with loved ones.
I just don’t trust this intuition very much. I think there is a lot of anxiety around experience machines due to: - Fear of being locked in (choosing to be in the machine permanently) - Fear that you will no longer be able to tell what’s real
And to be clear, I share the intuition that experience machines seem bad, and yet I’m often totally content to play video games all day long because it doesn’t violate those two conditions.
So what I’m roughly arguing is: We have some good reasons to be wary of experience machines, but I don’t think that intuition does much to generate a believe that the ethical value of a life necessarily requires some kind of nebulous thing beyond experienced utility.
I agree that some people don’t seem to give hedonism a fair hearing when discussing experience machine thought experiments. But also, I think that some people have genuine reservations that make sense given their life goals.
Personally, I very much see the appeal of experience machines. Under the right circumstances, I’d be thrilled to enter! If I was single and my effective altruist goals were taken care of, I would leave my friends and family behind for a solipsistic experience machine. (I think I do care about having authentic relationships with friends and family to some degree, but definitely not enough!) I’d also enter a non-solipsistic experience machine if my girlfriend wanted to join and we’d continue to have authentic interactions (even if that opens up the possibility of having negative experiences). The reason I wouldn’t want to enter under default circumstances is because the machine would replace the person I love with a virtual person (this holds even if my girlfriend got her own experience machine, and everyone else on the planet too for that matter). I know I wouldn’t necessarily be aware of the difference and that things with a virtual girlfriend (or girlfriends?) could be incredibly good. Still, entering this solipsistic experience machine would go against the idea of loving someone for the person they are (instead of how they make me feel).
I wrote more experience machine thought experiments here.
but I don’t think that intuition does much to generate a believe that the ethical value of a life necessarily requires some kind of nebulous thing beyond experienced utility.
I don’t think there’s such a thing as “the ethical value of a life,” at least not in a well-defined objective sense. (There are clearly instances where people’s lives aren’t worth living and instances where it would be a tragedy to end someone’s life against their will, so when I say the concept “isn’t objective,” I’m not saying that there’s nothing we can say about the matter. I just mean that it’s defensible for different people to emphasize different aspects of “the value of a life.” [Especially when we’re considering different contexts such as the value of an existing or sure-to-exist person vs. the value of newly creating a person that is merely a possible person at the time we face the decision.])
The way you describe it, it sounds downright appealing!
You could even argue that the quality of life in such an instantiation of the repugnant conclusion is, as far as people’s experiences are concerned, no worse than the quality of life in a eudaimonic paradise. Not everyone will agree with this intuition, but I’d say that the more intense pleasures seem appealing to us because they connect to life goals or to addictive tendencies and thrill seeking, which we’d no longer bother with if all our life goals were taken care of and we were permanently in a calm and restful state where everything feels fine.
That said, I don’t think evaluating lives purely based on the experiences they contain is of much use in most contexts. For instance, many people wouldn’t want to enter solipsistic experience machines (whether they’re built around eternal contentment or a more adventurous ideal life) if that means giving up on having authentic relationships with loved ones.
To elaborate more on the theme of “contentment as equally good as intense pleasure,” here some excerpts from my article on tranquilism:
Edit: I decided that endnote 8 is worth quoting here, too:
Thanks for the link! I knew I had heard this term somewhere a while back, and may have been thinking about it subconsciously when I wrote this post.
R.e.
> For instance, many people wouldn’t want to enter solipsistic experience machines (whether they’re built around eternal contentment or a more adventurous ideal life) if that means giving up on having authentic relationships with loved ones.
I just don’t trust this intuition very much. I think there is a lot of anxiety around experience machines due to:
- Fear of being locked in (choosing to be in the machine permanently)
- Fear that you will no longer be able to tell what’s real
And to be clear, I share the intuition that experience machines seem bad, and yet I’m often totally content to play video games all day long because it doesn’t violate those two conditions.
So what I’m roughly arguing is: We have some good reasons to be wary of experience machines, but I don’t think that intuition does much to generate a believe that the ethical value of a life necessarily requires some kind of nebulous thing beyond experienced utility.
I agree that some people don’t seem to give hedonism a fair hearing when discussing experience machine thought experiments. But also, I think that some people have genuine reservations that make sense given their life goals.
Personally, I very much see the appeal of experience machines. Under the right circumstances, I’d be thrilled to enter! If I was single and my effective altruist goals were taken care of, I would leave my friends and family behind for a solipsistic experience machine. (I think I do care about having authentic relationships with friends and family to some degree, but definitely not enough!) I’d also enter a non-solipsistic experience machine if my girlfriend wanted to join and we’d continue to have authentic interactions (even if that opens up the possibility of having negative experiences). The reason I wouldn’t want to enter under default circumstances is because the machine would replace the person I love with a virtual person (this holds even if my girlfriend got her own experience machine, and everyone else on the planet too for that matter). I know I wouldn’t necessarily be aware of the difference and that things with a virtual girlfriend (or girlfriends?) could be incredibly good. Still, entering this solipsistic experience machine would go against the idea of loving someone for the person they are (instead of how they make me feel).
I wrote more experience machine thought experiments here.
I don’t think there’s such a thing as “the ethical value of a life,” at least not in a well-defined objective sense. (There are clearly instances where people’s lives aren’t worth living and instances where it would be a tragedy to end someone’s life against their will, so when I say the concept “isn’t objective,” I’m not saying that there’s nothing we can say about the matter. I just mean that it’s defensible for different people to emphasize different aspects of “the value of a life.” [Especially when we’re considering different contexts such as the value of an existing or sure-to-exist person vs. the value of newly creating a person that is merely a possible person at the time we face the decision.])