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Pessin 1 April 1994
Paper 2 1965 words
Identity and the Experience Machine
In his essay “The Experience Machine,” Robert Nozick hypothesizes a device that manufactures
neuropsychologists,” (Sher, 491) the machine would trick a person into believing he was
experiencing all his preprogrammed desires. While hooked up to the machine, the user’s
consciousness of his role in the electrical process fades, replaced with a consciousness only of the
machinegenerated situation. A stay in this virtual reality could last, say, two years, at the end
years of his life.
Nozick briefly argues that most people, given the opportunity, would choose the real
world over the machinegenerated one, probably because of a desire to do certain things, be a
would interfere with the satisfactory completion of these three goals, the machine provides
pleasure but not fulfillment.
Nozick’s belief that most people would refuse the opportunity to live through the
machine is probably accurate, but he may have concluded this for the wrong reasons. His three
reasons not to engage the machine indicate a strong desire to create an individual identity that
the machine cannot. Identity, for purposes of this discussion, can be considered a person’s way
of defining what is unique about herself, as determined in part by a person’s actions and her
feelings about those actions. When engaging the Experience Machine, a person’s identity
changes, not merely because his actions effectively cease, but because the person’s level of self
consciousness changes.
Nozick seems concerned with issues of identity, although he does not address them
directly. When he asks, “Would you plug in?” (S., 392) he asks whether the reader is willing to
sacrifice her old identity for a new, machinebuilt one. “Plugging into the machine is a kind of
suicide,” he writes (492). Because while plugged into the machine a user forgets her status as
plugged in, she abandons a level of consciousness she had outside the machine, where she was
conscious of being selfconscious. Inside the machine, she would be aware only in the sense we
are selfconscious in our dreams, or even less so. (In dreams, we occasionally become aware that
we are dreaming, but Nozick prohibits that realization in the Machine). Because several layers
of selfconscious figure so heavily in differentiating humans from animals, and humans from
each other, in resisting the Experience Machine, a person defends her identity. The refusal of
the Machine, then, concerns not only living in the real world, but more importantly, establishing
an identity in the world. Similarly, succumbing to the Machine is a denial of one’s value in real
life and the loss of identity.
Many people I spoke with regarding the Machine decided they would not enter it, and
often cited the apparent “artificiality” of the process. That is, they believe an imaginary life,
imagined through the use of manmade device, does not carry the same legitimacy as an active
life, lived without external aid. Yet, none of them hesitate to drive a car, use a computer, or take
Even when pressed, most could not explain their feelings, except to say they wanted everything
to be “natural”.
The idea of artificiality, in the minds of those I spoke with, resembles a virus. What is
finds there. Interestingly, if a person has some idea of how an item works inside the body, that
item is “natural” or “genuine,” but the more mysterious an object, the more “unnatural” and
“artificial” it seems. At the peak of the unnatural scale for many is Nozick’s Experience
Machine, a device that attaches itself to the brain (S., 491). For many, this struggle against the
unnatural validated their identity. “I don’t drink”, “I quit smoking”, “I’m a vegetarian” and
similar refrains often come from the mouths of people asserting the independence of their
system. Others will define themselves by the acceptance of certain items into their body, items
that the nonparticipants often find revolting. Just as an Easterner might have a hard time
convincing a Westerner of a delicacy’s qualities, so might an Experience Machine user have
difficulty conveying the magic of the machine to a skeptic. What is natural for one is unnatural
for the other, and drawing these kinds of distinctions aids in the invention of identity.
Fortunately, the Culture Machine has provided more than just Nozick’s brief, though
significant, essay on lifecontrolling machines. Two notable examples of Machine literature are
E.M. Forster’s short story “The Machine Stops,” and Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of
Electric Sheep (its cinematic counterpart, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner also deals with issues of
machines and identity in ways the book does not). In Forster’s story, a society gives itself over to
a machine that provides for everyone, but keeps the entire population holed up underground
with artificial air and artificial light. Androids opens with the protagonist, Rich Deckard, and his
wife Iran debating which mood they should dial on their Penfield Mood Organs. The novel also
concerns the question of the Experience Machine in that the androids are themselves a kind of
experience machines, acting as humans do, but never having any emotions about those actions.
Blade Runner features an android, who like a human fresh from the Experience Machine, carries
in her mind memories of a childhood that never was.
The androids anticipate (by six years) Nozick’s question, “What matters for people other
than their experiences?” (493). The androids share many of the experiences of humans, some
even come with prenatal memories, but the simple fact of their experience does not, I think,
make them human or even give them a unique identity. What keeps them from being human is
that they have no feelings about any of their actions, and their memories are fabricated.
Furthermore, the androids often lack the selfconsciousness of humans, mistakenly believing
themselves to be human. Despite appearing as a theme in a scifi novel, the question of the
androids can readily apply to Nozick’s questioning the legitimacy of the Experience Machine.
Would users of the Machine reenter reality like the androids, motivated by events that never
happened? Are the memories from the Machine sufficient to construct an identity?
Identity, in my interpretation, marks a person unique in a society and serves as what the
person thinks of when he thinks of himself. Identity need not exist in a society that exists in only
one person’s mind with the help of the Machine, since the person is, of necessity, unique in his
own mind. Second, when the person thinks of himself in the virtual reality, he cannot conceive
indeterminate blob” (S., 492). Forster laments the laziness he saw subsuming society, the same
kind of laziness Nozick lambastes in “The Experience Machine.” The novelist also seems to have
shared Nozick’s idea of the soulsapping effect of Experience Machines on people: “In the arm
chair there sits a swaddled lump of flesha woman, about five feet high, with a face as white as a
fungus” (Forster, 144). The woman complains throughout the story of having “no ideas,” about
herself or anything else, yet she laments the previous civilization (presumably ours) “that had
mistaken the functions of the system, and had used it for bringing people to things, instead of
things to people” (F., 153).
As the woman expects the Machine to provide for her, so do Deckard and Iran in
Androids. With the moodadjusting device at their bedside, the couple interacts almost entirely
through preset moods or threat of changing to a more aggressive mood. The apparent purpose
of the Mood Organ is to electronically cheer them up on days when they feel unproductive, but
Iran eventually feels numb to all of the (at least) 900 moods to choose from. She realizes how
“unhealthy it was, sensing the absence of life,Éand not reacting” (Dick, 3) so she programs a
“sixhour selfaccusatory depression” (D., 3). This absence of life is precisely what a floating
rightfully points out that setting the device for depression “defeat[s] the whole purpose of the
mood organ” (D., 2). Similarly, when the user of the Machine wakes up after a two year rest, he
will be a lump of flesh, realize as much, and become immediately depressed that he is outside
the perfect life the Machine created for him. Almost certainly, he will try to escape that reality as
quickly as possible by returning to the Machine. “Despair like that, about total reality, is self
perpetuating,” Deckard notes.
In this sense, the Experience Machine compares with psychoactive drugs. The addictive
high of certain depressants mirrors fictive reactions to the power of the Machine. Drugs are
powerful simply because they either eliminate or enhance the user’s selfconsciousness. When
they eliminate it, a user is free to do whatever he wishes, without inhibition or even confinement
by the rules of logic. When enhancing selfawareness, drugs are said to heighten the senses,
giving everything a crisper, brighter synesthetic aura. Anything is possible with the right drug;
anything is possible with the right Experience Machine.
Nozick comments in passing that he sees the debate over psychoactive drugs as similar to that
over the Machine. “Some view [drugs] as mere local experience machines, and others view as
avenues to a deeper reality,” he writes, suggesting the way in which the Machine could produce
a longlasting hallucination not unlike one caused by LSD. As with the Machine, however, one
must wonder at the legitimacy of actions performed while under the influence of psychoactive
drugs. Apparently the experiences are in the long term psychologically (though not legally) less
authentic than sober actions. For example, if a drunk driver runs over a child, he suffers the
same or worse punishment as a sober man who did the same, but if he wins an armwrestling
contest his pleasure is fleeting at best, whereas the sober man might remember it for some time
to come. Also, the idea of a dual standard for the intoxicated is pushed by those who aren’t
necessarily drunk themselves. People often say things to the effect of, “Don’t mind him, he’s
drunk” or “He doesn’t know what he’s saying; he’s stoned.” Nor do drunken promises do not
carry the same weight as sober ones, just as imagined deeds won’t have the same gravity as real
ones.
When these deeds have no weight, no actions exist from which one can construct his
identity. And since the individual is stuck in his imagination, or yearning to get back to it, he
has no context in which to place an identity. Like someone perpetually stoned, an occupant of
the Nozick’s Experience Machine would have so little a conception of self, after a few trips, it
would be impossible for him to identify himself, or for anyone to distinguish him from a
swaddled lump of flesh.
Sources:
Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (Blade Runner).
EM Forster, “The Machine Stops” from Collected Tales of EM Forster.
Grolier’s Encyclopedia.
Robert Nozick, “The Experience Machine”.