Aquinas, Vanilla Sky, and Nozick’s experience machine

I’ve been meaning for about fifteen years now to write up something on the movie Vanilla Sky (a remake of Open Your Eyes).  It’s a better movie than it seems -- which is fitting, since the flick is all about the unseen reality lurking beneath the sea of superficiality (moral and metaphysical) that is the life of the Tom Cruise character.  Alas, this isn’t quite the article I’ve been meaning to write, since it’s not primarily about the movie, though I’ll have reason to say something about it.  Rather, it’s about a famous philosophical thought experiment that might as well have inspired the movie even if (as far as I know) it didn’t -- Robert Nozick’s “experience machine” (from Anarchy, State, and Utopia).

Nozick considers a scenario in which we could be plugged into a machine which would give us any set of experiences we desired for the rest of our lives.  Should you plug in?  Would you?  What reason could there be not to do so, since (Nozick asks rhetorically) “what else can matter to us, other than how our lives feel from the inside?” (p. 43).

Yet Nozick does not think most people would plug in, and suggests three reasons why they wouldn’t.  First, what we really want is to do certain things, and wanting the experience of doing them is a consequence of wanting to do them, rather than the experience being something we are seeking in itself.  Second, we want to be a certain way, and again, wanting the experience of being that way is a byproduct of wanting to be that way.  Third, we want contact with reality, rather than merely with some man-made simulacrum. 

The message of Vanilla Sky, or one of the messages anyway, seems to be the same (spoilers to follow).  David Aames (Tom Cruise) is about as shallow a man as you can imagine -- a spoiled heir who leaves others to attend to running the company he inherited from his father while he burns through money, parties, and women.  One of these women, Julie (Cameron Diaz), so as to ensure that she can keep his attention, pretends that their relationship is purely sexual and without commitment -- a pretense Aames is happy to go along with -- even though they both know she is deeply in love with him.  Even after Aames himself falls in love with another woman, Sofia (Penelope Cruz), and decides to break things off with Julie for good, he opts for one last hop into bed with her.  That is a mistake he pays dearly for, as the spurned Julie’s invitation was merely a ruse to get him into her car, which she proceeds to drive off a bridge in order to kill the both of them.  He survives but ends up horribly disfigured and in constant pain, his good looks -- and with them his life of superficial pleasure-seeking -- now gone forever, as are his chances with Sofia.

Or so it seems.  But suddenly, Sofia appears interested in renewing things with him after all, he is told by his doctors that his face can be repaired, and it appears that he will live happily ever after.  Yet there’s another twist.  As a series of increasingly surreal events unfold, Aames seems to be losing his sanity.  It is revealed that the life he has thought he was living from the point Sofia returned to him onward has all been a mere virtual reality generated by a computer to which he had voluntarily had himself hooked up, making sure that his memory of having done so was erased.  The aim was to realize artificially the life with Sofia and the restoration of his good looks that he knew would never be achieved in reality.  A breakdown in the program had led to the series of surreal experiences and the need to let him in on what was really going on.  He is told by the company that runs the virtual reality machine that the problem has been fixed, and asked whether he wants to re-start the virtual reality.  But he decides not to: “I don't want to dream anymore.  I want a real life.”  Having, in effect, plugged into Nozick’s experience machine, even a superficial man like Aames decides it wasn’t such a great idea.

So, even in a hedonistic age in which people are addicted to electronic entertainments of various sorts, contemporary philosophy and pop culture alike give expression to the idea that there is something unsatisfying and unworthy about seeking pleasurable experiences as an end in themselves and divorced from the objective actions and circumstances with which they are normally associated.

And yet… there is a reason people often confuse happiness with pleasure.  It would certainly be bizarre to think that if someone had a solid marriage, a good job, good health, well brought up children, many friends, a good moral character, was deeply religious, and so on -- but somehow still generally felt miserable and rarely took pleasure in any of these things -- that he could nevertheless intelligibly be said to be happy.  And most people find off-putting dour moralizers who regard even natural and innocent pleasures with suspicion.  (Recall Mencken’s definition of Puritanism: “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”)  Pleasure clearly has something to do with happiness, even if (as those who, in some inchoate way, find the experience machine repellent rightly perceive) it is not identical with happiness.  But what, then?

For Aquinas, happiness is the possession of some good, where the good is to be defined in terms of the realization of a natural end.  For example, the natural end of eyes is seeing, so that it is good for us when the eyes are able to realize this end and bad for us when (as in poor vision or blindness) they are unable to do so.  Hence, insofar as they are able to realize it we will, to that extent and all things being equal, be happy; and insofar as they are unable to do so we will, to that extent and all things being equal, be unhappy.  Of course, seeing is only one part of human life, and there are many other ends that our nature directs us to pursue.  And some of those ends are more important than others.  That is why a blind person can still be happy overall, and a sighted person might still be unhappy overall.  The blind person can still realize many other ends, and higher ends, whereas the sighted person may fail to do so.

But what, specifically, these various natural ends are, how they are ordered in terms of importance, and how they relate to our overall happiness is not to the present point.  (Aquinas considers the issue in some detail, e.g. here.)  What we want to know is how pleasure is related to happiness.  Aquinas answers as follows:

[E]very delight is a proper accident resulting from happiness, or from some part of happiness; since the reason that a man is delighted is that he has some fitting good, either in reality, or in hope, or at least in memory.  Now a fitting good, if indeed it be the perfect good, is precisely man's happiness: and if it is imperfect, it is a share of happiness, either proximate, or remote, or at least apparent.  Therefore it is evident that neither is delight, which results from the perfect good, the very essence of happiness, but something resulting therefrom as its proper accident. (Summa theologiae I-II.2.6)

Pleasure or “delight,” then, is a “proper accident” of happiness.  Now, a “proper accident” or “property” of a thing, in Scholastic jargon, is not the essence of the thing, but rather something which flows or follows from the essence, as a natural consequence.  To take a stock example, the capacity to find things amusing is not the essence of human beings, but it does flow from our essence as rational animals.  Now, this “flow” can be “blocked,” as it were, which is why things don’t always manifest their proper accidents.  But they will be manifest in the normal and healthy instances of a thing of a certain kind.  A normal and healthy dog will have four legs, for example, even if some dogs will, as a result of injury or congenital defect, fail to have four legs.  (See pp. 191-92 and 230-35 of Scholastic Metaphysics for more detailed discussion of properties or proper accidents.)

What Aquinas is saying, then, is that although pleasure or delight is not the essence of happiness, it is nevertheless the natural or proper consequence of happiness, and will in the normal case be associated with it.  In that sense he takes pleasure to be necessary for happiness even if not sufficient for it:

One thing may be necessary for another… as something attendant on it: thus we might say that heat is necessary for fire.  And in this way delight is necessary for happiness.  For it is caused by the appetite being at rest in the good attained.  Wherefore, since happiness is nothing else but the attainment of the Sovereign Good, it cannot be without concomitant delight.  (Summa theologiae I-II.4.1)

Or as Aristotle puts it in Book 10 of the Nicomachean Ethics, pleasure “perfects” the activity of our natural faculties and is in that way part of happiness even if it is not itself happiness. 

Now, the distinction between the essence of a thing and its proper accidents has, like so many important distinctions and theses in Aristotelian-Scholastic thought, gone down the memory hole in modern philosophy.  And here we have an excellent example of how an error concerning what might seem to be an abstruse question of metaphysics can have catastrophic moral consequences.  Some people, rightly perceiving that there is some necessary connection between happiness and pleasure, make the mistake of reducing happiness to pleasure.  That is the error of hedonism.  Others, rightly perceiving that pleasure is not the essence of happiness, make the mistake of separating the two entirely, and thereby suppose that pursuit of the good has nothing at all to do with pleasure.  We might call that the error of puritanism (in Mencken’s sense).  Each error tends to feed off the other, which is why individuals and societies sometimes veer wildly between hedonism and puritanism, falsely supposing that to reject the one requires embracing the other.  The correct, middle ground position is that pleasure is not the essence of happiness and is therefore not that which should be pursued for its own sake, but that it is also nevertheless a natural consequence of happiness and in that way completes or perfects it.

Nozick makes nothing like the Scholastic distinction just summarized -- nor, needless to say, does the Tom Cruise flick -- but I would suggest that both reflect an inchoate recognition that this is the right way to understand the relationship between pleasure and happiness, which is why both are by no means negative toward pleasure and yet at the same time are skeptical of the notion that a series of pleasurable experiences could by itself constitute happiness.  They perceive that the idea that plugging into an “experience machine” could generate happiness reflects the error of hedonism, or reducing happiness to pleasure.

Interestingly, Nozick -- though a libertarian with the usual libertarian position on drug legalization -- sees in the “experience machine” thought experiment a way to understand hostility to drug use:

[P]lugging into an experience machine limits us to a man-made reality, to a world no deeper or more important than that which people can construct.  There is no actual contact with any deeper reality, though the experience of it can be simulated.  Many persons desire to leave themselves open to such contact and to a plumbing of deeper significance.  This clarifies the intensity of the conflict over psychoactive drugs, which some view as mere local experience machines, and others view as avenues to a deeper reality; what some view as equivalent to surrender to the experience machine, others view as following one of the reasons not to surrender! (pp. 43-44)

Nozick suggests here that some of those who are favorable to psychoactive drug use are motivated by the idea that such use might open the door to perception of otherwise inaccessible aspects of objective reality (where a desire to maintain access to objective reality is precisely why we find plugging into the experience machine repellent).  But Nozick recognizes that someone might draw the opposite conclusion, viz. that such drug use is precisely a way of cutting oneself off from objective reality, and is repellent for precisely the same reason the experience machine is.

I would say that that is indeed exactly why many people find such drug use repellent, even if they cannot articulate their revulsion the way a traditional natural law theorist would.  They have an inchoate grasp that there is something contrary to the realization of what is good for us in separating sensory pleasure from the objective circumstances and actions that are its normal source, and making of it an end in itself.  That such drug use can be so addictive only underlines its “experience machine”-like character.  The user becomes locked into a world of pleasure-seeking and can no longer rightly perceive what is truly good for him.  He has become fixated on what is really only the proper accident of happiness, and loses sight of happiness itself.  This is why addiction is typically frustrating and miserable even apart from the physiological damage it often causes.

Needless to say, this is for the traditional natural law theorist also part of the reason why pornography and masturbation are immoral.  On a traditional natural law analysis, sexual desire is naturally directed outward, toward another human being, and the pleasure associated with its fulfillment is the proper accident of this other-directed end being realized.  Sexual pleasure is thus of its nature something to be shared between the partners; that is its natural teleology, qua the perfection of an act whose natural end is to unite the partners corporeally and psychologically.  The less perfectly the pleasure is a shared one, the less perfect is the act itself. 

Now, pornography and masturbation involve the deliberate seeking of this pleasure in a way that is not directed toward another person.  They are “experience machine”-like in the way psychoactive drug use is.  In fact, at least in one respect, they are worse than that.  The natural teleology of sexual pleasure is interpersonal, so that the pursuit of such pleasure in an “experience machine”-like way is perverse in something like the way that an archer’s directing an arrow back at himself rather than toward the target is perverse.  By contrast, the pleasures the user of psychoactive drugs is seeking might not all be of their nature interpersonal.  (For example, ordinary visual experiences -- seeing the tables, chairs, rocks, trees, etc. around you -- are not interpersonal but have as their end merely the provision of information to the person doing the seeing.  The psychoactive drug user seeking unusual visual hallucinations is thus not perverting his faculties in the specific way that the person seeking sexual pleasure apart from another human being is.)

Just as the drug addict becomes so fixated on what is only the proper accident of happiness that he loses sight of the true nature of happiness itself, so too, from the traditional natural law point of view, does habitual pornography use and masturbation make it more difficult to perceive the true, essentially interpersonal nature of sexual fulfillment.  The quest for gratification becomes so inward-looking that, even in sexual encounters with other actual human beings, the other tends to be reduced to a means to self-gratification, rather than a partner in something shared. 

Naturally, then, whatever is conducive to such self-gratification will come to seem to the self-gratifier to be good at least in principle, and that there is an objective, natural teleology of the sexual act -- and thus objectively good and bad kinds of sexual behavior -- will become increasingly difficult to see, and certainly something the person will be very reluctant to see.

Might pornography use be not only an effect but also a cause where hostility to traditional sexual mores is concerned?  Gee, ya think?  What we have here is a spiral, as the “onanization” of sex makes people more unwilling and unable to see the natural ends of the sexual act, which in turn makes them more inclined to “onanize” it, which in turn makes them even more unwilling and unable to see its natural ends…   And it’s bound only to get worse when virtual reality pornography takes off.  (More on natural law and sexual morality, the effects of sexual vice, the teleology of sexual desire, etc. in the posts collected here.)

As all of that indicates, it may be that the revulsion toward the “experience machine” idea that one finds in Nozick and in Vanilla Sky, though reflective of an inchoate grasp of what is naturally good for us, is a revulsion that might decrease as Western society becomes increasingly “onanized” and otherwise addicted to electronic gadgets and entertainments of every kind.  In a future remake of the remake of Open Your Eyes, Aames might decide to plug back in after all.