Reverse Experience Machine

Everyone remember the Experience Machine? It is used as a rebuttal of pure-hedonism in value theory, or to evaluate the pleasure principle as a primary drive in a person. The weak form (what minimum conditions must be met to plug in) is becoming increasingly interesting to me. It shows what values you hold to be important, other than pleasure and reality.

I have been thinking a lot about inverses lately, and when you invert the Experience Machine, you get a rebuttal of pure-truthism. In its' weaker form, you get to see how people gamble as well ^.~

The Reverse Experience Machine (weak form):

1. You are given indisputable proof that you are living in a simulated reality
• Yes, sort of like "The Matrix"
2. Everyone else is a computer simulation, including all the people you know
3. You have always lived in this virtual reality
4. You can get "unplugged" and live in reality, but you can never plug back in if you do
5. You are not told what unplugged reality is like

So far, many people seem willing to take this chance. You might wake up burning to death, you could wake up as a church mouse, or you could wake up in a fantastic utopia. You don't know, you'd just have to risk it.

Several questions are raised by the weak formulation:

• Do you value your lived experiences as authentic?
• Could continue to do so?
• Do you value all that you have invested in the virtual reality?
• Relationships
• Education
• Way of life
• To what degree is actual reality valued?
• This directly correlates to the probability that someone would unplug
• How motivated are you by curiosity? (yes, this one is common)
• How much of a gambler are you?
• 49.999% chance it's better, 49.999% chance it's worse, 0.002% chance it's the same

The Reverse Experience Machine (strong form):

1. You are given indisputable proof that you are living in a simulated reality
• Yes, sort of like "The Matrix"
2. Everyone else is a computer simulation, including all the people you know
3. You have always lived in this virtual reality
4. You can get "unplugged" and live in reality, but you can never plug back in if you do
5. You are given indisputable proof that unplugged reality is dystopian

Most people probably use mixed values and strategies, so the weak forms of the thought experiment actually tell you more about an individual, whereas the strong forms are clear enough to make a point.

The bias that both of these reveal about the original and reverse Experience Machine is that people many simply choose what is familiar. You're already used to the reality/unreality that you know, and "if it's not broken, don't fix it."

I'm interested in what people would do in both formulations of the Reverse Experience Machine. Please tell me what you'd do in the comments section if you are so inclined!

Checksum Values

One argument that keeps coming up against me in conversation against my line of thought is that we have some biological imperative. To address this, I'm going to respond directly to hundun's comments on one of my posts.

The argument summarizes thus:

• The mammalian brain is imperfect due to the lack of refinement form evolution
• Our minds are "like a crapware-saddled virus-ridden Vista-running laptop brought back in time to 1973"
• Human cognition is fundamentally irrational
• Biological drives (survival, reproduction, etc) constitute our basic impulses
• The human mind is not unified
• We are no different from other mammals

Okay, great, I agree with all of this except for the irrational part (to some degree). But I would argue that this model is incomplete. While I am a determinist, I still think that we have the illusion of free will (the experience of the processors chugging away). We have biological drives, but we also effectively (though not actually) have choice. In the words of Sartre, "[people] are condemned to be free." I can choose to rebel against all of my biological drives, stop eating, isolate myself, or commit suicide. I can die for a cause, or make huge sacrifices for the sake of an idea.

Yes, we absolutely have irrational biological drives, but we also have a rational cogito. Our mind is divided, hence why we can feel so divided. The pull of all these parts determines action, as if on a voting system. Your Freudian superego was installed (experimentally and by accident via evolution) to make you a social animal, but went haywire and now you can possess values that are counterproductive to evolutionary reproduction.

You do have choices over your biological drives. You can madly lust after someone, yet never act on your desire, even if given the opportunity to get away with it. Yet another person would take advantage of the situation. Why is that? The cogito portion of the democracy that is your mind can have a pretty strong say in your actions. Often these cogito functions are programmed by the indoctrination of children by their caregivers. This tends to lend itself to the realm of ethics on a social scale. However, as individuals, how can we justify wanting this or that, or valuing what we've learned through authority. Taking authority at face-value can be a very dangerous thing.

My existential crisis was born out of a number of factors that led me to recognize the value nihilism of nature: that existence precedes essence. My body gives me biological rewards by making me feel pleasure when I do certain things that I am programmed biologically to do. But is feeling good the point? Are we mere slaves to our passions? Clearly not, or at least not all of us.

Values essentially sweep through as a diagnostic of our actions. "Is this right?" is what our drives are always asking. It performs a checksum on each part of our being. But when you turn the diagnostic against itself, it can't checksum because it has nothing to check against. All the other people have different values. Our OS was installed without the ability to check if our diagnostic tool is functioning, and everyone is running different plug-ins, so we can't compare to each other.

I think there's a good chance that Douglas Adams was right, and the checksum is 42.

Can't Handle the Truth

Disclaimer

This post deals with a fine detail about truth, which I feel has significant implications for the theory of values that I am assembling here. Some may find it massively redundant.

Preamble

Playing a card game with some friends the other say, I brought up the example of the Experience Machine thought experiment. It was well received, and the votes added up thus: 2 would absolutely not plug into the machine under any circumstances (including myself), 2 were unsure, and 1 would definitely do it. The interesting thing about one of the two that were unsure was that she would given specific conditioner about incorporating real people into the scenario with you. We have termed this "multiplayer." It seems that asking people what minimum conditions would have to be met in order to plug in is actually a fascinating way to explore what a person values.

This lead me to question why I value truth so strongly. Is it reasonable? My intro to philosophy textbook states that "the philosopher's faith is that Truth is good and worth pursuing for its own sake." That's one heck of an assumption. It is, of course, a useful assumption if you're a philosopher, because without it, what are you doing? But that is little solace, because a priest assumes the existence of god to justify their lines of thought too.

In my various searches for a basis for values, I have actually had to overturn most of what I based by identity on. I'm dismantling, but hoping for reconstitution through rigorous application of - and deduction from - the most certain axioms: the a priori. Kant tried the very same thing, but I don't think that he dug nearly deep enough, and I find many of his axioms to be unsatisfying. Nietzsche refuted (many times) many of Kant's assumptions. The existentialists tried to find a solution, but ultimately deferred the question. They all also toss around this concept of "truth" as if it were an assumption as mentioned above.

I can't seem to find anything online written on the ontology of truth. There is quite a lot on theories of truth (which do touch on my question), but I'm looking at it from a more fundamental level. What is the ontology of truth, and to what degree should we pursue it? Is it worth sacrificing happiness as in not entering the Experience Machine?

Definition Derivation

It is reasonable to say that existence must true. But which is prior? Truth must exist, and existence (material or ideal) must be true. But that is contradictory, as something cannot precede its' own ground.

The negative of existence is nothingness. Both are true. However there cannot be an untruth in an objective reality (material or ideal). Untruth does not correspond to either existence or nothingness, as both are true, and the objective world is thus always true. Untruths can only be expressed through language as lies, and are thus only part of the mind and language. Art does not constitute untruth because a work of art is a true thing in itself, even if it "uses lies to be the truth." And even lies have an element of truth to them, as it is true that they do not express the truth.

Truth is inescapable. So where is it? We can only look at it through other things, never directly. It's always in the corner of your eye, but you can't see it directly. Truth seems to function linguistically as a way of asserting that something exists or not. It is a function of the mind to compare our understanding (an idea image) to the external reality (original image).

It is a function in the mathematical sense f(x), where we compare x to the array of reality (existence and nothingness), and return a true if x is a subset of the array, and return false if it does not. I suppose it would return a partial truth if some of the elements of x correspond to the reality array. I will call this truth-as-operation or the Truth Function. It also falls under the correspondence theory of truth.

Truth-as-Operation

f(x): iff image(x) ⊆ [[being] ∪ [nothingness]] = true;

The Truth Function is deeply troubling to me as opposed to truth as a fundamental ontological category. Truth does not exist independently, it is merely a property of ideas. If truth were a fundamental ontological category, it could be used as a part of the basis of an a priori value theory. It cannot be used as a justification of valuing reality, because it relies on a valuing of the reality-image. It is yet another evaluative tool that requires a ground. To value truth requires valuing reality for its' own sake, unless supported by some other morality hereto unknown to me. To say that you value reality because it is true is a tautology, or even possibly absurd. You're really saying "I value what is real because I have this way of comparing my ideas to it." It's like saying that you like the Mona Lisa because you can buy a print and compare it to the original in the Louvre.

That's not to say that this operation isn't extremely useful. The usefulness of our senses - and in fact our very survival - is dependant on the Truth Function (or so we are led to believe). This is debatable on skeptical grounds, but that is a conversation that I do not have space for here.

It's quite amazing how many terms are truth-as-operations. Words such as "because," "therefore" or anything else dealing with justification including causality are all the Truth Function. All of rationalism relies on it. What is our justification for justifying something? Remarkably, we can actually ask this question because truth is not an ontological category, but a function, and can chain: f(f(x)) AKA (f o f)(x).

The expression f(f) of course does not return anything as the function does not exist independently of of an analytical subject, so truth-in-itself does not exist, which is counterintuitive to our way of thinking. We cannot justify justification unless applied to a subject.

Functionally this requires some adjustment in language and thought. To say that "it is true that I think therefore I am" is a tautology because a self-evident statement is an expression of direct reality, and contains collapsed truth in its' self-evidency. Evidence is truth-as-operation, so the requirement is already met within the statement itself. Things that we know with certainty (a priori) do not need to be run through the Truth Function for this reason.

Rationality Bias

This entire endeavour of trying to find justification for values assumes that one should find values that are rational. Schrödinger Imperative demands that we resolve this crisis, so that is not called into question. But need it being found on a rational basis? Why do I value certainty in values? How do you justify rationality over irrationality? The Truth Function is a tool that I can use here, but should I? How do I evaluate if a Truth Function is worth using? I may need to accept it for reasons of coherence.

Outline:

1. "Truth" is an evaluative tool

• Compares an idea to reality
• Truth is a property of ideas
• Is not a fundamental ontological category
• Being and nothingness are independent of truth
• Truth is dependant on ideas and existence and nothingness as it is a function
• Truth is not a candidate for a ground for values
• One can only value reality, not truth
• Self-evident statements contain truth already