The American political philosopher Robert Nozick (1938-2002) introduces a thought experiment in ‘Anarchy, State and Utopia’ (1974). It involves the notion, fantastical for the 1970’s, of an ‘experience machine’. “Suppose there were an experience machine that would give you any experience you desired. Superduper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book. All the time you would be floating in a tank with electrodes attached to your brain. Should you plug into this machine for life, pre-programming your life’s experiences?’ Nozick of course, does not elaborate regarding what one could do immersed totally alone in a domain of infinite possibility but preliminary questions of a philosophical hue can be asked – ‘how do we know what we know?’ How do we know whether we are awake or deeply asleep in a dream state? One will have heard the famous dictum ‘Cogito ergo Sum’ – I think, therefore, I am’ where the French philosopher Rene Descartes (1596 – 1650) wrestled with this question. This is a question concerning ‘Epistemology’ from the Greek word episteme meaning knowledge. In studying philosophy one will come across many Greek words (logic, epistemology, metaphysics, ethics ) and many Greeks, (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle) and philosophical bodies of thought originating from Greece ( Stoics, Epicurean’s, Materialists, Idealists etc). Those of us living outside of a vat, live in the natural world and ‘metaphysics’ is its focus of concern and furthermore of what may lie beneath or beyond it that is beyond the limits or bounds of our understanding and experience. Akin to the fact that we can see objects in the light portion of the electromagnetic spectrum and yet there is a realm of ultraviolet light beyond our senses which bee’s can perceive. Therefore our minds ‘apprehend’ the external reality around us sensorily through our bodies and these senses are limited and bounded. This results in a philosophical problem relating to how the mind and body are connected. Is this mind – body problem a ‘monism’ unity or a ‘duality’. And what of our relations to ourselves and other minds, of our existence and essence? For instance is a baby born as a ‘tabula rasa’ – a blank sheet of paper, shaped by nature and nurture. This concerns ‘ontology’ relating to the question of Being including questions relating to the existence of a supreme Being or God. Returning to Nozicks vat, one can imagine more salacious and less cerebral activities than reading or writing a book. Utopian or hellish, saintly or depraved. In such an isolated state with a fantasised connection to the world and society, consequences would be causally disconnected from actions. What would therefore be ‘immoral’ for such a disembodied subject indulging in, and acting out any fantasy no matter how disturbed, bizzare or depraved. The unfettered and unbounded subject could pursue a life of cerebral pursuits such as Immanuel Kant or sadistic and degrading pursuits such as the Marquis de Sade with no ‘victims’ because the other subjects are merely ghost participants. In many respects the subject could be the author of their personal ‘fundamental fantasy’ – the unifying theme and goal of their life pursuits by pre-determining the ‘mise en scene’ the storyboard and pre-determined algorithm of their vat based life. Nozick’s vat was a hypothetical thought experiment in the 1970’s, but today we can see the reverse shadow cast backwards from a technologically augmented and enabled future. A hellish or a utopian future, or is that a matter of individual choice. At the final tally would a virtually embodied life akin to Kant’s be adjudged superior to the life of Marquis de Sade. Such a thought experiment when considered deeper involves deeply ethical questions regarding who we are in relation to our relationships with others and whether we somehow shape ourselves as persons through the nature of these interactions. This judgement is a philosophical ‘ethical’ question regarding what is good and what is the good life. So we’ve approached a situation of the ‘brain in a vat’ where anything is possible. Let’s alter the technological scenario. What if it were possible to employ a technology such as that in Kaufmann’s film ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’ (2004), where neuroimaging technology enables both parties of a relationship to erase, happy and sad, painful and pleasurable memories of one another to move beyond the pain of breakup by bypassing the neural areas of the brain which store the memory of that pain and the neural pathways involved in its recall and processing connected to mood? What if technology enabled not merely the erasure of uncomfortable memory, but enabled the overwriting of painful memory with ‘good, pleasurable or happy memories. It all begins to become labyrinthine but suffice to say what was science fiction in the 70’s for Robert Nozick is fast becoming not merely a possibility but a reality for swathes of the online populous. This little somewhat rambling foray opens a number of philosophical questions regarding the nature of persons. The limits of happiness and pleasure. The nature of what Is thought and reality. This analogy of Nozick’s ‘experience machine’ has been employed exstensively in the following decades, but surely it can be argued that the point of engaging in the arduous process of therapy is not a pre-programming of one’s life experiences but (sticking with the computer metaphor) a “re-programming’ of life’s experiences. A reconfiguration of our past, history, memories, traumas, external relationships to people, places and things and our internal bodily mediated existence. Is that internal reprogramming to be done neurochemically by changing our neural connections or by addressing the linguistically contoured neurological structures shaped by experience and language – what psychoanalysis terms the symbolic with the emphasis on the signifier. Perhaps it is not helpful in an age mediated by digital media and technology to use the analogy of the computer, a technology which appears to be eclipsing and perhaps surpassing human capabilities in a myriad of domains. We cannot move beyond ‘the meat’ as William Gibson the cyberpunk sci-fi author describes the messiness of the human condition in Neuromancer (1984). Philosophy is therefore the discipline which addresses these questions of: -procedures of rational thought and argument (logic) -knowledge (epistemology) -the nature of reality (metaphysics) -Being and existence/essence (ontology) – the good and the good life (ethics) -Beauty (Aesthetics)
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