00:00If somebody guaranteed you absolute pleasure for the rest of your life, would you take it?
00:03Of course, there are some conditions.
00:05Welcome to Philosophy in Pocket series and today we are going to talk about this thought experiment
00:08called as the experience mission coined by Robert Knotswick in his book Anarchy, State and Utopia.
00:13Imagine that there is a mission that could give you every single experience that you want.
00:16It would create this elaborate firing of neurons in your brain such that you would feel the absolute
00:20pleasure of writing a novel or handing out with your friends or even meeting the love of your life.
00:24However, the condition is this. None of this is actually happening in your reality.
00:27The entire time you are just in a tank floating with electrodes attached to your brain.
00:30However, when you are experiencing the scenarios, you wouldn't feel like you are in the tank.
00:34Would you take this experiment and say yes to it?
00:36Other things that we would say no because pleasure is not the only thing we care about.
00:39He argues that there are three other things that people care about.
00:41The first is we ourselves actually do these things. That is we want to take action.
00:45The second thing is we care about who we are, not what we just experience.
00:49And the third is we want connection to reality, not just an illusion of it.
00:53There are also some variations of this idea. Imagine that there is a transformation mission.
00:56So instead of just giving you these experiences, it would also give you the transformation associated to it.
01:01So let's say that you want to be a confident and popular person.
01:04This mission would transform your brain in a way that it would make you that kind of person.
01:07Or imagine a results mission. Let's say that you want to save your friend or help your friend with something.
01:11This mission will make sure that your friend is helped.
01:13However, you are still in the tank. You are not directly helping them in any way.
01:17Would you still do it?
01:18This is how I personally say it.
01:20I am sure Nozick thought of this experiment to show us that pressure is not the only thing that humans
01:23care about.
01:24However, with the emergence of virtual reality, we see people living on those worlds or playing on those virtual reality
01:29simulation hours upon end.
01:31And there are also people who actively already believe that we are living in a simulation.
01:34With how hard the world is right now and the amount of struggle that we face wanting to get to
01:39one day to the next,
01:40I feel like people wouldn't care if we are still living in an experienced machine.
01:44And isn't it so sad that that's the society we have built?
01:47So tell me honestly, would you be okay with going inside an experienced machine?
01:50I really want to know your thoughts. And if you like these kind of thought experiments, follow this page along.
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