Close your eyes. Imagine a life filled with the very best kind of experiences. What counts as “the very best”? That’s up to you. Maybe you conjure a scene in the Rockies: breathing in the fresh mountain air, a well-worn flannel shirt warding off the chill, the steam from a cup of cowboy coffee mingling with the early morning fog. Or maybe you imagine a family reunion: cousin Tess flown in from her Peace Corps assignment; a meal catered from the best rib place in town; Aunt Maria’s Black Forest cake for dessert; grandma and grandpa soaking it in at the head of the table. Or maybe something a bit deeper: an extremely satisfying experience in prayer; a Mass said reverently by a favorite priest; an hour of uninterrupted meditation. You get the idea. Pick some longed-for or well-savored or long-past experiences that count as your favorite. Then dream them up in all their nostalgic or longed-for details.
Have some experiences in mind? Good. Now, imagine a machine that can replicate all of them. Down to the last detail, a perfect simulator. Its name: The Experience Machine. How does it work?
Start by telling the operator about the experiences you’d like to have. She works at a computer console for a few minutes, typing furiously to capture the details. Next, “plug in.” The process begins with zipping into a full-body suit, placing a souped-up VR helmet over your head, and the operator placing brain stimulators that send signals directly to your nervous system. The operator then powers up the Experience Machine, and you are fully immersed in the worlds you’ve conjured.
A few notes: first, once you are in the Experience Machine, you are in it for good. No backing out. Second, once the Experience Machine is powered up, you are clueless that the experiences you are having are simulated. You instead think they are really happening. Yes, the Experience Machine is that good. A nice touch. Third, by some stroke of engineering genius, the Experience Machine is incredibly low-cost. Subscribing to the Experience Machine costs almost nothing. So you needn’t worry about the price of plugging in. Finally, if your friends and family want to join you, there’s nothing stopping them. Everyone who wants to use the Experience Machine can use it.
All this brings us to a crucial question initially posed by Robert Nozick, the philosopher who first dreamed up the Experience Machine: would you plug in? Given the opportunity to live out your life in the Experience Machine, would you do it? There’s no middle ground here—no option for a casual Sunday afternoon spin. The choice is all or nothing: do you live your life in the Experience Machine, or keep things as they are?
If you are like most people, your answer is a resounding “no.” Given the opportunity to plug into the Experience Machine, nearly everyone turns it down. When I teach Nozick, one or two students per class say they would plug in. The rest are horrified by it. Why? We’ll explore some possible answers in what follows. All these answers move us further down the road we have started down in previous chapters, a road that moves us away from the view we could call Gnosticism. How we react to the Experience Machine, in short, pushes us away from attractive yet flawed views of human nature and toward a more satisfying way of understanding ourselves. Toward a view of human nature that will allow us to stay human in an era of AI.
Nozick’s No
Robert Nozick invented the idea of the Experience Machine, but it horrified him. His reaction probably aligns with yours: most people find the Experience Machine repulsive. But it is fair to ask: why? The Experience Machine, after all, delivers the very thing most of us spend our lives trying to attain: a rich life full of the very best experiences. When we slog through our nine-to-five, saving money for a trip to Europe; when we plan the year around an annual fishing trip; when we practice prayer daily, yearning for a deeper connection with God: in all these activities, we seek fulfilling experiences. And that, it would seem, is precisely what the Experience Machine delivers. Without all the hassle. So why are we nearly universally repulsed by it?
Nozick had some ideas. First, he claims, we don’t merely want to have the feelings associated with living out our dreams—we want to live them. When I dream of fishing in Ontario, I don’t merely long for the feeling that comes with reeling in a northern pike. I want to catch a northern pike. Which of course, in the Experience Machine, I don’t. Second, Nozick suggests, we don’t merely want to have a certain set of experiences. We also want to be certain kinds of people. When I long for certain experiences in prayer, it isn’t just that I want the feeling of connecting with God. More importantly: I want to be someone who has a close connection with God. The Experience Machine may deliver the feelings but skips over the actual reality. Finally, claims Nozick, a fulfilling life includes a deeper contact with reality, not merely superficial pleasures. Part of what we want out of the world is a deeper dive into it. Not flight from it, as the Experience Machine offers.
Plenty more has been written about the Experience Machine and our near-universal reaction to it. Maybe you find Nozick’s diagnoses helpful. Maybe not. Either way, we should pay attention to our revulsion at plugging in. Like a canary keeled over in a coal mine, our gut reaction to Nozick’s hypothetical device reveals something deeply inhuman at the heart of the Experience Machine. And it also helps point us toward a satisfying self-understanding.
The Experience Machine in Everyday Life
The overlap between the Experience Machine and virtual, augmented, and simulated realities should be obvious. Yet there are differences. One difference: VR and AR, as they stand, are glitchy, beta, cheesy. The Experience Machine is shiny, glossy, perfected. Another difference, pointed out by David Chalmers: “Ordinary VR is not entirely preprogrammed. In interactive virtual worlds, you make real choices rather than simply living out a script.” Chalmers believes this difference is big, since it allows us to make genuine choices and forge relationships using VR and AR in a way we simply could not in the Experience Machine.
These differences noted, however, the Experience Machine and VR/AR technologies clearly align in many ways. Like VR and AR, the Experience Machine replicates a world then lets us live it. And all ultimately aim at the same thing: a life of pleasure, mediated through virtually-created sensory inputs. Nozick himself sees little difference between currently available simulation technologies and his Experience Machine—in a 2000 piece at Forbes magazine, he says: “The pleasures [of VR and AR] may be so great that many people will choose to spend most of their days and nights that way. Meanwhile, the rest of us are likely to find that choice deeply disturbing.” Maybe you are among “the rest of us.”
Maybe you would turn down an afternoon in goggles just as quickly as you would turn down the Experience Machine. Maybe you think that makes you immune to its pull. Not so fast. While the Experience Machine itself is an exercise in philosophical science fiction, the basic idea motivating it—the possibility of a simulated life of pleasure and fulfillment—lurks just below the surface of our social and individual lives. In fact, once you know what to look for, you’ll start seeing it everywhere. And start to understand its allure. Maybe even feel some of that allure.
Video Games
Video games are big money. According to Statistica, “In 2023, the global online gaming market generated approximately 26.14 billion U.S. dollars in revenues.” Forbes puts that number much higher, reporting that “the 2021 global games market will generate revenues of $175.8 billion and is projected to generate $200 billion by the end of 2023.” The difference in these numbers may seem inconsistent, but both figures suggest the same conclusion: video games are no niche hobby. They are a behemoth of an industry, one that rivals legacy entertainment like movies and professional sports.
You probably didn’t need me to tell you this. Even if you are not a gamer, you know people who are. Twenty-first-century people love their video games. Sometimes, excessively so. Consider, for example, the phenomena of hikikomori—“A form of severe social withdrawal [that] has been frequently described in Japan and is characterized by adolescents and young adults who become recluses in their parent’s homes, unable to work or go to school for months or years.” The cause of hikikomori? Like most forms of mental illness, the answer is complicated. But according to one proposal, excessive attachment to video games should be included. Not just as a cause of the affliction, but in its very definition: “The person . . . often spends time using the internet, reading, or playing video games.” Of course, most gamers are not afflicted by hikikomori. Yet the phenomenon emphasizes the impact of video games: many cannot resist their allure. And part of this draw is the industry’s overlap with the Experience Machine. Why play video games in the first place? In part, because they offer a platform for social connection, relationship building, and a feeling of adventure. But also because they promise a simulated world, one often much more fulfilling or exciting than our seemingly dull offline lives. Facing a choice between an evening doing the dishes, or one spent with swashbuckling space pirates? No contest. Power up the PC. Plug in. And enjoy the ride.
The Magic Kingdom
I have three young children. Which means: I spend a fair portion of my time surrounded by kids, my own and others’. At kid-friendly restaurants, backyard barbeques, the local pool. One inescapable hazard of these environments: talking about Disney World.
If you pause to think about it, the pitch for theme parks is deeply strange. Fly to a location somewhere in a warm climate. Pay an absurd entry fee. And then, enter a curated world that replicates somewhere else: maybe a princess’s castle; maybe Hogwarts; maybe Jurassic Park. But don’t let things get too real. In Jurassic Park, you want the winding rivers and rustling bushes. Not the stench and fangs of real, living animals. In the princess’s castle, you want the glitter of the crown jewels. Not the medieval plumbing. In short, you want a simulated reality of dreamed-up or yearned-for experiences, minus all the nasty parts that attend those experiences in real life. You want a weekend plugged into the Experience Machine.
The theorist Jean Beaudrillard offers a memorable take on this desire. According to Beaudrillard, the theme park does not deliver the allure of some niche fantasy so much as provide a window into contemporary society as a whole: “Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact . . . the America surrounding it [is] no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation.” In other words: theme parks caricaturize twenty-first-century escapist tendencies. They are so obviously motivated by the desire to escape reality in favor of a simulated one—so obviously motivated by the saccharine pull of the Experience Machine—they make us ignore the ways in which this escapist dream oozes into much of contemporary life. Twenty-first-century life outside the Magic Kingdom, Beaudrillard wants us to notice, is also powered by the desire to cover up the messy parts of reality with a sanitized simulation of it. From shopping malls to cosmetic surgery to cable television to social media influencers. All promise that we can escape reality or replace it with a glossier version. The Experience Machine doesn’t reside in Orlando. It has taken to the streets.
The Villages
The Villages bills itself as “Florida’s Friendliest Active Adult 55+ Retirement Community.” The community boasts forty-two executive golf courses, over three thousand activities and clubs, and nearly 80,000 residents. Want to pick up pickleball, break a sweat at Zumba, or have a go at disc golf? The Villages has you covered. Ukulele lessons? Pick between a 10:00 a.m. or 2:00 p.m. time slot. Catch a performance by the Texas Tenors? Tomorrow night at 7:00. Grab a meal at your favorite chain, or opt for something local? Take your pick. Saunter around buildings that channel the Old West? A Spanish mission? A New England resort town? Check, check, and check. It can be easy to dismiss The Villages as a strange wonderland for retirees. But are they that far removed from the rest of contemporary life? In an average day, I may spend some time mowing the non-native grasses that grow on my lawn, take my kids to a spaceship-themed story hour at the library, listen to beachy music at the city pool, and then grab some poorly cooked spaghetti at a Tuscany-themed restaurant. Throughout our days, contemporary life seeks to nudge us away from reality to someplace else. The message: vanilla reality isn’t good enough. It would be better in Tuscany or Bora Bora. Or outer space. But of course, not any of those places in their messy details. Just the good parts, washed free of the unattractive bits.
The Villages represents the apex of this flight from reality. But plain old suburban life channels the same spirit. And lest you urban and rural dwellers imagine yourselves immune, take a moment to think through how much of your day you spend imagining yourself someplace else. From our music selections (Early twentieth-century jazz! Club hits! Mississippi blues!) to our wardrobe choices (Hawaiian shirts! T-shirts emblazoned with travel destinations or prestigious colleges!) to our entertainment selections (Travel shows! Celebrity TV! Espionage adventures!), twenty-first-century life beguiles us away from experiences we are having into those we wish we were having.
The promises of VR and AR, it turns out, are just the latest, most high-tech way the Experience Machine has infiltrated everyday life. Nozick saw Apple Vision Pro coming from miles away. And while most of us find ourselves repulsed by the Experience Machine, at the same time, we feel its allure. We have, if we are to be truthful, been chasing its promises for years.
Another Blow to Gnosticism
Don’t get me wrong. I’m no naysayer to modernity or its conveniences. I own a VR headset. I have visited theme parks, and forged friendships over the glow of Xbox games. There’s clearly something good about having pleasurable experiences, simulated or not (they are pleasurable, after all!). I can, moreover, build relationships through digital platforms, grow closer to my family at cheesy theme parks, and enjoy themed restaurants in the sprawling Chicago suburbs. As Chalmers wants us to note, simulated experiences still are experiences, and we ought not ignore the good things they offer. The Experience Machine is not all bad. And if we engage with simulated realities in the right ways, these experiences may even do us some good. But Chalmers glosses over what we know in our guts.
That simulated reality is not the real deal. That a trip to a Disney chateau does not match exploring Edinburgh Castle. That my friendship with @VRSteve, forged in the metaverse, can never replicate an evening around a bonfire with real-life Greg. And that Nozick was right on track: we’re right to be repulsed by the Experience Machine. Why? Nozick does identify some reasons. We want to actually live our lives. We want to be certain kinds of people. We want to connect deeply with reality. The Experience Machine offers none of that.
Yet Nozick’s diagnosis doesn’t go deep enough. The real reason the Experience Machine fails to satisfy is that its false allure grows from a mistaken view of who we are as human beings. The same misleading view of ourselves that blinds us to the dangers of AI. The view that we can call Gnosticism.
If the danger isn’t clear, think about what a full-hearted endorsement of simulated experiences would really mean. To accept that a day sipping simulated mojitos poolside is as good as the real thing, you first need to accept that we are the kinds of beings who can be satiated through purely simulated experiences. That what matters—what really matters—is the experiences we have, not the bodies or environments in which we have them. That we are, in other words, immaterial beings who flourish in purely immaterial conditions. In short: Gnosticism.
Consider an analogy. Angels, traditionally understood, are purely immaterial. They don’t have bodies. They are, rather, pure intellects. Now, for the sake of this analogy, it doesn’t much matter if you believe in angels (though I hope you do!). Instead, reflect on this: if angels exist, their nature determines what a satisfying angelic life looks like. Not feasting from a fully stocked buffet or dancing at the club or working up a sweat hiking through an old growth forest: those are, after all, bodily pleasures, and angels are purely immaterial. Misidentifying these pleasures as angelic pleasures would turn on misunderstanding what angels are in the first place.
Likewise, assuming simulated experiences can satiate humans does not merely miss what humans enjoy—it grows from misunderstanding what humans are. The idea that a flourishing human life need not include embodied connection with other humans and with our environments grows from the deeper assumption that humans are not tethered to their bodies at all. It grows from Gnosticism.
The fact, then, that we are not satisfied with the simulated version of reality—that something seems missing from the superficial experiences offered by VR goggles and the Apple Vision Pro—adds another nail to Gnosticism’s coffin. And if we wisely choose to bury Gnosticism, we bury it in all its forms. Gnosticism, lies not only behind a misguided understanding of simulated experiences. It also lies behind an inflated view of AI, one that places artificial intelligences on par with you and me. The Gnostic view gives rise to the Turing Test and to functionalism and to the idea that a Zoom meeting can stand in for real life. The Gnostic view, in short, compromises our self-understanding. And the compromise is significant: Gnosticism is no stale academic theory—its misperception of what makes us human has infiltrated twenty-first-century culture and crept into modern intuitions. If we are to stay human in an era of AI, we must therefore bring it into the open and identify its problems. We have started that work already. So far, however, our skirmishes with the Gnostic view have been just that: skirmishes. Enough skirmishing. Let’s take on Gnosticism outright!
EDITORIAL NOTE: This article is excerpted from Staying Human in an Era of Artificial Intelligence by permission of New City Press, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
