Would you plug into the experience machine?

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even since I saw "brainstorm" back in 1982 I wondered when something like that would be invented for real.

That theoretical machine sounds very much like a strong narcotic in the way it works and would create addicts of its users.

grist for much sci fi.

Star Trek!! !

To quote The Matrix for my thoughts on this,

"You know, I know this steak doesn't exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy, and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss."

Bring on the simulated reality. While other people spurn it for "ethical" reasons, I'm going to revel in it.

Perhaps the OP didn't make it clear, but once connected, you wouldn't know you were connected.

I see what you mean--your experiences would be meaningless; you wouldn't be interacting with any actual people (directly or indirectly), but you wouldn't know it, because the machine would fool you into thinking your experiences were meaningful.

That makes it even less appealing. Not to have meaning in your life is bad enough--not even to know your life is meaningless, is worse.

I get the idea that technically, the world around me could be just such an "experience machine" and that I wouldn't know if it were (brain in a jar and all that), but odds are that it's not--in multiverse theory, for there to be an "experience machine" there has to be a universe for it to exist in. Because experience machines are both possible and impossible, if experience machines exist, there are more universes in total, than there are universes with experience machines. Odds are that I exist in a universe either without an experience machine, or outside an experience machine in a universe where one exists. Therefore, odds are that this world is as real as it gets.

Granted, the experience machine could be simulating a set of physics where this would be true, but it's more logic than physics, and by the time you start doubting logic, reasoning becomes useless anyway. So my best bet is that the world's real and the things I do matter.

But let's say for the sake of argument that the chance that the world is real is only very, very small--that it exists, but probably isn't the case. Life would still have meaning, even though you could not determine whether or not you were in an experience machine, because of the small chance that you aren't. Take an action that is 99% likely to be meaningless because you are in a machine, and 1% likely to be meaningful because you are not: Even that 1% chance is enough to make that action meaningful. We do things all the time without knowing whether they will have a meaningful effect. We don't need certainty for meaning--we just need possibility.

I seem to remember another philosopher who used the logical reasoning method of the experience machine.

And these examples seem to use the assumption of egoism, that only my own quality of life matters.

The philosopher Derek Parfit used a character called 'Temporus' who only cared about his immediate future.  And logical arguments of why he 'should' care about his more distant future fell flat.

And what I take from this is that the 'Temporus' approach is just as irrational, just as limited as the egoist approach.

And to the rescue comes utilitarianism or any other form of other-regarding ethics who say the quality of life of other sentient beings matter for their own sake.  Utilitarianism does have all kinds of problems, but it tends not to be as crappy as its critics say it is.

And/or sentient beings have rights. Now to the question, how can the structure of the universe have something as strange and as unusual as a right? The answer might be, emergent properties.

More fully the answer might be, once a living creature such as a dog or a cat is advanced enough to have its own personality separate and distinct from others of its own kind, and humans are clearly past this point, and even more 'primitive' animals have probably reached this point, then as an emergent property . . .