Experimental Philosophy Takes on the Experience Machine

Way back when, I argued that Robert Nozick's famous "experience machine" hypothetical has a serious flaw.  Quite possibly, the intuitions that are supposed to be elicited by his hypothetical (namely, that we prefer to live in the "real" world even if it is experientially worse than a virtual world) may actually show something weaker (namely, that we have a status quo preference for the world in which happen to live).  

The final version of Felipe de Brigard's paper, "If you like it, does it matter if it's real?" has now been published here (behind a pay wall, I'm afraid).  Felipe's work offers empirical support for my analysis of the experience machine, and I thank Felipe for his reference to my article in the published version of his piece.

Here's a sample from Felipe's abstract: "I report some experimental evidence suggesting that the intuition elicited by the thought-experiment may be explainable by the fact that people are averse to abandon the life they have been experiencing so far, regardless of whether such life is virtual or real. I use then an explanatory model, derived from what behavioral economists and psychologists call the status quo bias, to make sense of these results."

The  link to my article (no pay wall) is here.

Comments

[Stan Hooper]

I'm just curious. Have you ever taken a look a the work of Nick Bostrom? He has some interesting hypotheses along the line of your post.

[Adam Kolber]

Thanks, Stan. Yes, I'm familiar with much of his work and agree that it is very interesting! (If there's something he writes that is particularly on point, please do let me know.)

Best,
Adam