by Joe Miller
Last week, my son Matt asked me to review his writing sample. The paper is part of the packet of materials he’ll use to apply for graduate school, where he hopes to pursue a PhD in philosophy.
Everything about that last paragraph conjures up some Very Intense Feelings.
I’m flattered that he’s chosen the same career I pursued. I’m proud that he’s better at philosophy than I was when I was applying to grad school. I’m humbled that he trusts me to review his work. I’m intrigued that his approach in the paper is one I hadn’t seen before.
I’m also a little worried. The job market for academic philosophers was terrible when I was in the midst of it 25 years ago. In any given year, there were twice as many applicants as there were jobs. That market has, by all accounts, gotten significantly worse since then.
I was also reminded that a lot of philosophical problems are (a) incredibly interesting and (b) deeply weird.
Matt’s paper is about a thought experiment known as the experience machine.
The problem comes from Robert Nozick’s book, “Anarchy, State, and Utopia.” Nozick asks us to imagine a perfectly realistic virtual reality machine. Once you plug into the machine, you have experiences that are indistinguishable from the real world.
Inside the machine, you can have any experience you like. Choose whatever you think is an ideal life and that’s what you’ll get.
You can even choose to erase your knowledge that you’ve plugged into the machine. That means that once you’ve plugged into the machine, you won’t be able to tell that you’re in a machine at all.
Nozick then asks whether or not people would choose to plug into the machine.
If this all sounds a little bit like the plot of “The Matrix,” well, you’re not wrong to think that. Lots of philosophy professors (including me, once upon a time) use the film as an entry point for discussing knotty philosophy problems.
Nozick argues that most of us would refuse a life spent plugged into the experience machine. The writers of “The Matrix” pretty clearly share that intuition. The film’s heroes, after all, all unplug from the matrix and spend the remainder of the series fighting against the machines who try to keep humanity plugged in.
Indeed, the film’s secondary villain is also the sole human who wants to return to the matrix.
Nozick argues that almost everyone prefers real experiences to fake ones, even if the fake ones are, by some measures, more pleasurable than the real ones.
Matt’s objection is that Nozick frames the experience machine example as a choice between your current real life and an imagined different life inside the machine.
Suppose instead that we turn it around. You’re living your normal life and all of a sudden, you wake up in a room somewhere. You are told that you’ve spent the last 10 years inside the experience machine and now it’s time to choose between returning to the machine or returning to the real world. You don’t know what the real world is like – only that it’s not at all like the one you’ve spent the last 10 years living.
Now the case for unplugging looks much different. My wife, Matt, my entire life here in Marlinton – they all go away in favor of…something. I’m pretty sure that I would plug right back in.
In short, our intuitions about the experience machine are highly dependent upon the exact framing of the problem.
Examples like the experience machine demonstrate the limits of moral intuitions.
In his book “Thinking, Fast and Slow” psychologist Daniel Kahneman introduces a distinction between what he calls System 1 and System 2 thinking.
System 1, Kahneman says, is fast, instinctive and emotional. That’s the type of thinking that we use most of the time. It’s the sort of thinking that keeps us from getting hit by a bus, that allows us to understand small talk or recoil from something gruesome.
It’s also the source of what we sometimes call “common sense.” And the source of moral intuitions.
System 2 thinking is slower, deliberate and more logical and analytical. It’s the type of thinking we employ when we’re trying to spot a particular person or pay attention to a conversation in a crowded room or comparison shop.
Slow thinking requires more effort, so we mostly don’t apply it unless we have to.
Philosophy thought experiments will often pit our everyday intuitions – System 1 thinking that we mostly rely on – against System 2 types of complex reasoning.
The goal of these sorts of problems is to help determine whether the set of intuitions we rely on for less exotic problems are in fact the right intuitions to have.
Much of moral philosophy, then, boils down to what John Rawls calls reflective equilibrium, in which we test moral theories against moral intuitions, then decide where to tweak the theory to accommodate an intuition and where to adjust an intuition in light of a theory.
That the process often involves the use of thought experiments straight out of science fiction is an added bonus.
joe.miller@fountaindigitalconsulting.com
