I am often pleasantly hungry and pleasantly sleepy. One of my greatest pleasures is to be pleasantly thirsty from hard work and then enjoy a beer. So I guess the experience machine can continue to offer me these experiences. It will not offer me toothache, boredom or exhaustion. I don't think there is a conceptual problem with it. The big problem is that my beer will not be a beer and my hard work will be only a simulation. But then I will not be worried about that. Worry will not be an experience the machine is programmed to offer me.

As for truth, if the machine offers me all truth, then I will know amongst other unpleasant things that my life is merely a simulation and that would not be a pleasure. It would hit a contradiction.

Experience machines cannot exist. — Howard

You're argument is valid; nonetheless, I disagree with your conclusion:

"Experience machine" = lobotomy plus a continuous 24/7 morphine drip ... — 180 Proof

Eyes open, sleepwalking, coma aka "junkie heaven". :yawn:

Experience machine" = lobotomy plus a continuous 24/7 morphine drip ... — 180 Proof

Keep it coming!

Good argument OP! Using symmetry, yin-yang, to prove the impossibility of an experience machine is a breath of fresh air in an otherwise done-to-death topic.

I hope I don't have the wrong end of the stick though.

However, I have a different opinion on the definition of the experience machine. According to the definition, people who plug in into the machine can and only can experience pleasure. — Howard

Conclusion： Experience machines cannot exist. — Howard

You mean your version of the experience machine cannot exist?

Still, I think there are many examples of pleasures that are not countering a negative experience. Sex seems like an obvious one.

According to the definition, people who plug in into the machine can and only can experience pleasure. My argument against it would be like the following:

1. The existence of something depends on the existence of something opposite to it.
2. Pleasure is one of these things.
3. Pleasure depends on the existence of its opposite, which is pain.
4. In the hypothetical experience machine, only pleasure exists.
5. In the hypothetical experience machine, pain does not exist, so neither does pleasure.
6. One definition of a thing cannot conflict with another definition of it.

Conclusion： Experience machines cannot exist. — Howard

First, welcome to the forum.

Some thoughts:

1. The existence of something depends on the existence of something opposite to it.
2. Pleasure is one of these things.
3. Pleasure depends on the existence of its opposite, which is pain.

Certainly not true for everything. What things is it true for? Maybe only true for distinctions, comparisons. Anyway - Lao Tzu says (Stephen Mitchell translation of the Tao Te Ching, Verse 2):

When people see some things as beautiful,
other things become ugly.
When people see some things as good,
other things become bad.

Being and non-being create each other.
Difficult and easy support each other.
Long and short define each other.
High and low depend on each other.
Before and after follow each other.

In "The Wisdom of Insecurity" Alan Watts wrote:

...consciousness must involve both pleasure and pain, to strive for pleasure to the exclusion of pain is, in effect, to strive for the loss of consciousness. Because such a loss is in principle the same as death, this means that the more we struggle for life (as pleasure), the more we are actually killing what we love.

4. In the hypothetical experience machine, only pleasure exists.
5. In the hypothetical experience machine, pain does not exist, so neither does pleasure.

This seems true, although I don't know the facts about the physiology of pleasure. It is certainly true for our closest analogs to the experience machine - drugs and alcohol.

6. One definition of a thing cannot conflict with another definition of it.

Sure it can. Definitions are human things. Just hang around the forum for a while. It happens all the time.

Good post. I think this works with many conceptions of meaning. It definetly works for Yin/Yang, or Heraclitus' tension of opposites, as you've demonstrated.

It also works for definitions that rely on negativity. These generally focus on the idea that what defines a thing is what it is not. In this view, cognition, with its separation of objects, entities, causes, etc., is not so much a painter, adding details to a landscape from the paint of sensory data, but a sculptor, chiseling a block of pure, undifferentiated being and sense certainty into a coherent whole.

This makes a certain sort of intuitive sense if you reject solipsism and embrace epistemological realism, because the objects of sensation aren't being created wholly from the mind, they are instead the results of a process of discrimination about things. This also jives with what we see in cognitive science, with a stream of not particularly differentiated sensory data coming in through the sense organs, and then being analyzed into a picture of the world.

If a thing is derived from its negativity, from what it is not, then eliminating its antipodes destroys the ground for its definition. Color blindness is a good example. Lack of discrimination leads to the disappearance of a color from sensory experience, due to an inability to separate, to say that one color is not the other.

In information science, information is normally seen as a reduction in uncertainty about x. For physical, Boltzmann entropy, this means that you have less uncertainty about the possible microstates consistent with a given observed macrostate. Statistical thermodynamics is a long way from the subjective experience of pain and pleasure, but it's a useful analogy because the (relative) simplicity is a good model for how uncertainty can be mathematically abstracted. Something hard to do with pairs of opposites.

Reducing uncertainty is necissarily about eliminating possibilities from consideration. In physics, we're talking about microstates we now know can't be the case based on our information. This parallels the more abstract idea of definition from the negative described above, which in turn synchs up pretty well with the tension of opposites.

I think a problem for the claim might exist though. While the person in the machine isn't experiencing pain, they have memories of pain, and they have a mind with innate faculties for experiencing pain. We know from observation and experimentation that memory is not simply the storage of old sensory data. Rather, this data is compressed. When we try to remember or imagine things, it appears that we use the same systems we use for sense perception.

So, memory is more like running some compressed and abstracted sensory data back through a simulation apparatus. This is why we can feel embarrassed about things decades after they have happened.

Which would suggest that the person hooked up to the machine could still experience pain, unless we knock out their memory. But the role of memory in identity seems fairly essential, so it's hard to see how the person can still be, and be immune from the pain of memory.

In that case, the machine might be able to function in terms of only providing pleasurable stimulus in the immediate sense, although the person can still experience pain to some degree. But perhaps this experience from memory violates the definition of our machine, and so it is still impossible.

This holds regardless of if you think cognitive science actually describes experience. That was just an example. Obviously memories can cause distress, regardless of whence they come.

Conclusion： Experience machines cannot exist. — Howard

I agree they can’t exist, but for slightly different reasons than you have offered. Hedonism isn’t simply the product of a neurohormonally potentiated reflexive system. Pleasure is an achievement, a form of learning and discovery. To produce continuous pleasure is to produce continuous transformative change. This is why the brain adapts to a set dosage of a drug and eventually requires greater concentrations of it to have a pleasurable effect.
Not only is an increase in the amount of a drug or other sort of manipulation necessary over time, but a qualitative change in type of manipulation becomes necessary. Drug users often describe chasing that first high they got from a particular drug the rest of their lives without success. They are never able to duplicate the intensity of the first experience no matter how much of the drug they take. On the contrary, over time
use of the drug increasingly deprives them of experiencing the usual pleasures when not high. The drug is then no longer about pressure but about anesthetizing pain.

So the only sort of ‘machine’ that could successfully render continuous pleasure would be one that is interactive( like the internet for instance). But then we are talking about a subject actively choosing to make use of the machine in such a way as to achieve such hedonic effect, and as you pointed out, hedonism only functions within the context of contrasting textures of feeling. I don’t believe that we necessarily need overt suffering in order to experience pleasure. Rather, I would argue that different colorations of affect are always involved alongside intense pleasure.

Pleasure is an achievement, a form of learning and discovery. — Joshs

I agree. We need reality and activity in order to experience many kinds of pleasure. Virtual reality and passive experience cannot be enough.

If a thing is derived from its negativity, from what it is not, then eliminating its antipodes destroys the ground for its definition. — Count Timothy von Icarus

This must be able to explain the fact that we are capable of sustaining more or less continuous please for finite periods of time. During such periods, where are the antipodes and why are they not subverting the unfolding pleasure? All we would need to do in order to preserve the concept of contrast here is allow that the unfolding pleasure changes its character slightly. By doing so, we could ‘keep out’ unpleasant feeling indefinitely.

I agree. We need reality and activity in order to experience many kinds of pleasure. Virtual reality and passive experience cannot be enough. — Cuthbert

Except I’m not quite sure what the difference between the virtual and the real is. As far as I can see, if it can change and surprise us, then it’s real, even if it’s virtual.

Interesting post. All I would add is that I believe that satisfaction itself can be pleasant. In view of this, we find hunger to be problematic only when our current level of contentment is depleted due to consumption. The same would apply to the desire for water (which comes from a loss of an adequate amount of water in our bodies), the desire to sleep (which comes after we have consumed all our energy doing various things), and the need to have money (which only becomes relevant when one finds their current resources to be insufficient). Therefore, I don't think that one needs harms to cherish pleasant experiences. However, it might be preferable to allow for some harms if they can lead to greater happiness for us. Nevertheless, the minimisation of unnecessary is generally a desideratum for living a fulfilling life. I hope that you and everyone here has a wonderful day/night!

Tough call.

Desideratum: Real Pleasure

Reality: Real, pleasure sold separately

Pleasure/Experience machine: Unreal, pleasure maxed out.

We can have both (in Jannat).

Am I on the right track?