The Spoils of Happiness | Hacker News Reader

The Spoils of Happiness

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com

21 pointsricaurte11 comments

To me it seems not wanting to plug in has very little to do with what we believe about happiness.

The most obvious reason of all to not plug in: That one actually cares about something in the external world. Sure, the machine could give the experience of parenting, but you know when choosing to plug in or not, that no child will actually exist in the real world as a result. If anything you experience in the machine will have no real world effects, then if you care at all about the real world, that should be reason enough not to plug in.

Perhaps he is considering a somewhat harder case where the world within the machine is "real" in the sense that anything you produce in the machine lives on in the machine. So if you have a child in the simulation, that child is not just in your simulation, but will live on after you are gone, just like a real child. Then the question becomes more: Do you trust that the simulated world is better than the real one? I wouldn't be an early adopter, but I'm sure some people would be willing to make that jump.

The "Suppose there was a" conversations get kind of annoying when they start to talk about things that are not likely to exist anytime in the near future, like a perfect virtual simulation of the world.

Hmm, I'm not sure about that logic.

'Suppose we are currently in such a simulation' - does your objection still hold?

My objection to the claim that we are in a perfect simulation of reality is that that's not falsifiable.

Falsifiability is a really really interesting concept. It's not particularly popular among mystics because it sort of invalidates the whole religion thing.

The claim that we are in a perfect simulation of reality isn't a scientific claim, hence falsifiability is not strictly relevant.

I think what I don't like about the "simulation of reality" proposition is it implies that death does not have its normal negative consequences and thus causes values to be not the same as they normally would be under not "simulation of reality" circumstances.

Death has the exact same empirical consequences--people you observe to die are never seen again alive. The subjective consequences of death are impossible to know whether or not reality is simulated.

>because it sort of invalidates the whole religion thing

No, it clearly demonstrates that religion is outside of the realm of science as many other things are as well (Philosophy, for instance. Or do you care to argue that Philosophy has no value?)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russells_teapot

The interesting thing with Nozick's experience machine isn't what you would do if one existed. It's trying to explain why plugging in feels like the wrong choice, even when there aren't any obvious flaws in the nature of the experience you could quickly point to.

The answer to this question and its implications will quite possibly have relevance to choices we can expect to face in the near future, even if they will not feature a fully functional experience machine.

Sometimes when I am feeling punky while talking to a creationist, I will tell them that my belief is similar to theirs.....I believe we were all created ten minutes ago, with all our memories.

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