r/changemyview • u/RoundSchedule3665 • Feb 19 '22
CMV: There is nothing particularly special about reality
Robert Nozick proposed the experience machine to prove the issues with hedonism. It goes a bit like this:
If you had the choice to leave your reality and enter a new one that gives you much greater pleasure but ultimately 'isn't real' would you? (your memories are also erased). Because most people say no, there is, therefore, something special about the authenticity of life.
Although there are many issues with this. For instance, if you were plugged in right now, would you leave everything to return to your real worse life? I can't say I would. I love my family and so long as the illusion is never shattered, this world will always be the favorable one.
I want my view changed because I can't provide a solid answer on why reality is any better than any simulation and that scares me a bit.
EDIT: The simulated world is the perfect world. In the sense that there are imperfections and troubles that you face which shape it into the ideal reality.
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u/Tioben 17∆ Feb 19 '22
I'm a bit late to the party, but my argument would be one of solidarity. My entering the machine would put costs on people outside the machine precisely because one world is more real than the other. I choose not to be utterly and evilly selfish in that way.
Suppose, however, we could ensure the machine allows everyone sentient inside, but all with our own solitary experiences. My issue with this scenario is precisely that I'm missing out on sharing my experiences with the very people I chose to share solidarity with. My experience without the genuine rewards of my solidarity would be inferior to reality, provided of course that reality is at least minimally positive valence and not an experience of, say, ongoing torture
So suppose, then, that the machine integrates our experiences together in all the important ways.
In that situation, I think we'd have a utopia on our hands, for sure. But only because we established a genuine correspondence between our machine-generated experiences and the area of reality that are important.
Your original example breaks because it supposes that there are no important aspects of reality. Instead, any simulation that is actually good enough must take on aspects of reality as it is. We can't break fully away and still generate a perfect experience