Philosophy 313 Readings: Jan 5, 2014: "The Experience Machine" and others

Material covered: 

"Ethics," by Bonhoeffer, pages 30-39
"Letter to Menoeceus," by Epicurus
"The Experience Machine," by Robert Nozick
Selections from "Utilitarianism," by John Stuart Mill
Selection from "Brave New World," by Aldous Huxley

"Ethics

• "The life and activity of men is not at all problematic or tormented or dark: it is self-evident, joyful, sure and clear." 
• "The Pharisee is not an adventitious historical phenomenon of a particular time. He is the man to whom only the knowledge of good and evil has come to be of importance in his entire life; in other words, he is simply the man of disunion. Any distorted picture of the Pharisees robs Jesus's argument with them of its gravity and its importance. The Pharisee is that extremely admirable man who subordinates his entire life to his knowledge of good and evil and is as severe a judge of himself as of his neighbour to the honour of God, whom he humbly thanks for this knowledge." 
• "These men with the incorruptibly impartial and distrustful vision cannot confront any man in any other way than by examining him with regard to his decisions in the conflicts of life. And so, even when they come face to face with Jesus, they cannot do otherwise than attempt to force Him,too, into conflicts and into decisions in order to see how He will conduct Himself in them." 
• "Just as the Pharisees cannot do otherwise than confront Jesus with situations of conflict, so, too, Jesus cannot do otherwise than refuse to accept these situations."
• "Already in the New Testament there is no single question put by men to Jesus by which Jesus answers with an acceptance of the human either-or that every such question implies." 
• "Jesus often seems not to understand at all what men are asking Him. He seems to be answering quite a different question from what has been put to Him. He seems to be missing the point of the question, not answering the question but addressing Himself directly to the questioner." 
• "Jesus replies evasively to all the clear questions which are intended to determine His position once and for all. All this means that, for the Pharisee, He is a nihilist, a man who knows and respects only his own law, an egoist and a blasphemer of God." 
• "The freedom of Jesus is not the arbitrary choice of one amongst innumerable possibilities; it consists on the contrary precisely in the complete simplicity of His action, which is never confronted by a plurality of possibilities, conflicts, or alternatives, but always only by one thing. This one thing Jesus calls the will of God. He says that to do this will is His meat. This will of God is His life. He lives and acts not by the knowledge of good and evil but by the will of God. There is only one will of God." 
• "'Judge not, that ye be not judged' (Matt. 7.1). This is not an exhortation to prudence and forbearing in passing judgment on one's fellow-men, such as was also recognized by the Pharisees. It is a blow struck at the heart of the man who knows good and evil. It is the word of Him who speaks by virtue of his unity with God, who came not to condemn but to save (John 3.17)."
• "Judgment passed on another man always presuposes disunion with him; it is an obstacle to action." 
• "It is precisely when a man discerns his own foible in another man that he is impelled to condemn him with particular severity; in other words the spirit of judgment brings forth particularly poisonous fruit when it springs from the soil of inward mendacity, desperate indignation and resigned laxness with regard to a man's own weakness." 
• "The will of God is not a system of rules which is established from the outset; it is something new and different in each different situation in life, and for this reason a man must ever anew examine what the will of God may be. The heart, the understanding, observation and experience must all collaborate in this task." This sounds too much like Divine Command Theory for my tastes. 

"Letter to Menoeceus"

• "Let no one be slow to seek wisdom when he is young nor weary in the search thereof when he is grown old. For no age is too early or too late for the health of the soul." 
• The youth should study philosophy so that, 'while he is young, he may at the same time be old, because he has no fear of the things which are to come." 
• "Accustom yourself to believe that death is nothing to us, for good and evil imply awareness, and death is the privation of all awareness; therefore a right understanding that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life enjoyable, not by adding to life an unlimited time, but by taking away the yearning after immortality. For life has no terror; for those who thoroughly apprehend that there are no terrors for them in ceasing to live." 
• "Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not." 
• "The wise person does not deprecate life nor does he fear the cessation of life." 
• "Even as people choose of food not merely and simply the larger portion, but the more pleasant, so the wise seek to enjoy the time which is most pleasant and not merely that which is longest." 
• "Much worse is he who says that it were good to be born, but when once one is born to pass with all speed through the gates of Hades. For if he truly believes this, why does he not depart from life? It were easy for him to do so, if once he were firmly convinced. If he speaks only in mockery, his words are foolishness, for those who hear believe him not." 
• "We must remember that the future is neither wholly ours nor wholly not ours, so that neither must we count upon it as quite certain to come nor despair of it as quite certain not to come." 
• "For the end of all our actions is to be free from pain and fear, and, when once we have attained all this, the tempest of the soul is laid; seeing that the living creature has no need to go in search of something that is lacking, nor to look anything else by which the good of the soul and of the body will be fulfilled." 
• On the prudent man: "Who, then, is superior in your judgment to such a person? He holds a holy belief concerning the gods, and is altogether free from the fear of death. He has diligently considered the end fixed by nature, and understands how easily the limit of good things can be reached and attained, and how either the duration or the intensity of evils is but slight. Destiny which some introduce as sovereign over all things, he laughs to scorn, affirming rather than some things happen of necessity, others by change, others through our own agency."
• "Exercise yourself in these and kindred precepts day and night, both by yourself and with him who is like to you; then never, either in waking or in dream, will you be disturbed, but will live as a god among people. For people lose all appearance of mortality by living in the midst of immortal blessings." 

"The Experience Machine" 

• Robert Nozick uses the word "superduper" here. I am clapsclapsclaps. 
• "What does matter to us in addition to our experiences? First, we want to do certain things, and not just have the experience of doing them... But why do we want to do the activities rather than merely to experience them?"
• "Plugging into the machine is a kind of suicide. It will seem to some, trapped by a picture, that nothing about what we are like can matter except as it gets reflected in our experiences. But should it be surprising that what we are is important to us? Why should we be concerned only with how our time is filled, but not with what we are?" 
• "Plugging into an experience machine limits us to a manmade 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 " 
• "We can continue to imagine a sequence of machines each designed to fill lacks suggested for the earlier machines. For example, since the experience machine doesn't meet our desire to be a certain way, imagine a transformation machine which transforms us into whatever sort of person we'd like to be... So something matters in addition to one's experiences and what one is like." 
• "We shall not pursue here the fascinating details of these or other machines. What is most disturbing about them is their living of our lives for us... Perhaps what we desire is to live (an active verb) ourselves, in contact with reality. (And this, machines cannot do for us)." 
• "Some wouldn't use the transformation machine at all; it seems like cheating. But the one-time use of the transformation machine would not remove all challenges; there would still be obstacles for the new us to overcome, a new plateau from which to strive even higher. And is this plateau any the less earned or deserved than that provided by genetic endowment and early childhood environment?"

"Utilitarianism"

• "The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness." 
• "When thus attacked, the Epicureans have always answered, that it is not they, but their accusers, who represent human nature in a degrading light; since the accusation supposes human beings to be capable of no pleasures except those of which swine are capable. If this supposition were true, the charge could not be gainsaid, but would then be no longer an imputation; for if the sources of pleasure were precisely the same to human beings and to swine, the rule of life which is good enough for the one would be good enough for the other." 
• "Utilitarian writers in general have placed the superiority of mental over bodily pleasures chiefly in the greater permanency, safety, uncostliness, &c., of the former-- that is, in their circumstantial advantages rather than in their intrinsic nature."
• "Of two pleasures, if there be one to which all or almost all who have experience of both give a decided preference, irrespective of any feeling of moral obligation to prefer it, that is the more desirable pleasure. If one of the two is, by those who are competently acquainted with both, placed so far above the other that they prefer it, even though knowing it to be attended with a greater amount of discontent, and would not resign it for any quantity of the other pleasure which their nature is capable of, we are justified in ascribing to the preferred enjoyment a superiority in quality, so far outweighing quantity as to render it, in comparison, of small account." 
• "Few human creatures would consent to be changed into any of the lower animals, for a promise of the fullest allowance of a beast's pleasures; no intelligent human being would consent to be a fool, no instructed person would be an ignoramus, no person of feeling and conscience would be selfish and base, even though they should be persuaded that the fool, the dunce, or the rascal is better satisfied with his lot than they are with theirs." 
• "A being of higher faculties requires more to make him happy, is capable probably of more acute suffering, and is certainly accessible to it at more points, than one of an inferior type; but in spite of these liabilities, he can never really wish to sink into what he feels to be a lower grade of existence." 
• "Men lose their high aspirations as they lose their intellectual tastes, because they have not time or opportunity for indulging them; and they addict themselves to inferior pleasures, not because they deliberately prefer them, but because they are either the only ones to which they have access, or the only ones which they are any longer capable of enjoying." 
• "What means are there of determining which is the acutest of two pains, or the intensest of two pleasurable sensations, except the general suffrage of those who are familiar with both? Neither pains nor pleasures are homogenous, and pain is always heterogenous with pleasure. What is there to decide whether a particular pleasure is worth purchasing at the cost of a particular pain, except the feelings and judgment of the experienced?" 
• "The only proof capable of being given that an object is visible, is that people actually see it. The only proof that a sound is audible, is that people hear it: and so of the other sources of our experience. In like manner, I apprehend, the sole evidence it is possible to produce that anything is desirable, is that people do actually desire it." 

"Brave New World"

• "Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand." 
• "If ever, b some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there's always soma to give you a holiday from the facts. And there's always soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training. Now, you swallow two or three half-gramme trablts, and there you are. Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your morality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears-- that's what soma is." 
• "But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want sin... I'm claiming the right to be unhappy. Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen to-morrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind... I claim them all."