Robert Nozick's Metaverse Machine

Lorenzo Buscicchi asks, would you plug into Mark Zuckerberg’s virtual world? He finds that the question has been considered by philosophers for decades.

- By Lorenzo Buscicchi. Photographs by Cameron Gray

At the end of October 2021, Facebook announced its ‘Metaverse’ project, an entire virtual reality world that will be up and running ‘in the near future’. Laymen tend to have a stereotype of philosophers as being techno-sceptic. However, philosophers have been discussing virtual reality since before Mark Zuckerberg was born.

A comparatively recent contribution to the debate was the ‘experience machine’ thought experiment advanced by Robert Nozick in 1974 in his book Anarchy, State and Utopia (though it’s probably based on a short story called ‘The Happiness Machine’ published by Ray Bradbury in 1957). In this thought experiment, Nozick asks you to imagine a machine that can simulate every experience you would like to have until the end of your life. Once you programmed this machine and plugged yourself into it, you would not be aware that the blissful experiences you are having are simulated, and you would live out your fantasies until the end of your life.

Nozick asks: would you plug in? He thinks that the majority of readers would reply ‘no’, and advances a series of reasons for this. First, he says, we want to have a genuine relationship with reality, not live a fictional life that only feels real. The second reason has to do with personal identity/authenticity. According to him, we want to be certain kinds of people, and connecting to the experience machine would make us merely an ‘undeterminate blob’. Finally, the fact that the virtual world of the experience machine is artificial is taken by Nozick to be in itself bad. He believes the experience machine would prevent us from grasping any deeper reality.