A guy in a black jacket and sunglasses shows up at your door one Saturday morning. He explains that there’s been a little snafu. Apparently your brain has been plugged into an experience machine and your entire life so far has been nothing but a computer program. He’s very sorry. Then he asks whether you’d like to be unplugged.
That’s the scenario cooked up by Felipe De Brigard, a philosophy graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. (His paper “If you like it, does it matter if it’s real?” was recently published in Philosophical Psychology. You can read it on his Web site.) It’s a twist on the famous Experience Machine from Robert Nozick’s book Anarchy, State and Utopia, which won the 1975 National Book Award. In Nozick’s book, the reader is asked whether he or she would like to plug into the Experience Machine, which allows users to enjoy great success and happiness, albeit totally fake.
In De Brigard’s version, the person is already hooked up to the machine; the question is whether he or she would like to stay hooked up or return to reality. De Brigard asked that question of undergraduate students “with no previous exposure to philosophy” (which is kind of amazing). In one scenario, participants weren’t told what their real life was like. In another scenario, they were told that in real life they were actually in a maximum security prison in West Virginia. In a third and more exciting scenario, participants were told that in real life they were a multi-millionaire artist living in Monaco.
If they weren’t given any information about their real life, slightly more than half (54-percent) wanted to go back to reality. Among those told that real life was in the maximum security prison, only a small percentage (13-percent) preferred to get unhooked from the machine. Those told that real life was living as a multi-millionaire artist in Monaco were split down the middle -- 50-percent preferred their presumably less luxurious fantasy lives.
So study participants didn’t necessarily prefer reality to fantasy, even when their supposed real selves were more successful. Why not? De Brigard has a theory: “They value their status quo...regardless of the fact that such life may be completely virtual.” Of course there is a fairly small contingent who say they would choose reality no matter what, even if that reality is prison. Personally, I’m with the 87-percent on that one.