En The Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations
Entradas relacionadas:We care about things in addition to how our lives feel to us from the inside. This is shown by the following thought experiment. Imagine a machine that could give you any experience (or sequence of experiences) you might desire. When connected to this experience machine, you can have the experience of writing a great poem or bringing about world peace or loving someone and being loved in return. You can experience the felt pleasures of these things, how they feel "from the inside". You can program your experiences for tomorrow, or this week, or this year, or even for the rest of your life. If your imagination is impoverished, you can use the library of suggestions extracted from biographies and enhanced by novelists and psychologists. You can live your fondest dream "from the inside". Would you choose to do this for the rest of your life? If not, why not? (...) The question is not whether to try the machine temporary, but whether to enter it for the rest of your life. Upon entering, you will not remember having done this; so no pleasures will get ruined by realizing they are machine-produced. Uncertainty too might be programmed by using the machine´s optional random device (...).
Notice that this is a thought experiment, designed to isolate one question: Do only our internal feelings matter to us? (...) [T]he machine example must be looked at on its own; to answer the question by filtering it through a fixed view that internal experiences are the only things that can matter (so of course it would be all right to plug into the machine) would lose the opportunity to test that view independently. One way to determine if a view is inadequate is to check its consequences in particular cases, sometimes extreme ones, but if someone always decided what the result should be in any case by applying the given view itself, this would preclude discovering it did not correctly fit the case. Readers who hold they would plug in to the machine should notice whether their first impulse was not to do so, followed later by the thought that since only experiences could matter, the machine would be all right after all.
Few of us really think that only a person's experiences matter. We would not wish our children a life of great satisfaction that all depended upon deceptions they would never detect: although they take pride in artistic accomplishments, the critics and their friends too are just pretending to admire their work yet snicker behind their backs; the apparently faithful mate carries on secret love affairs; their apparently loving children really detest them; and so on. Few of us upon hearing this description would exclaim, "What a wonderful life! It feels so happy and pleasurable from the inside." That person is living a dream world, taking pleasure in things that aren't so. What he wants, though, is not merely to take pleasure in them; he wants them to be so. He values their being that way, and he takes pleasure in them because he thinks they are that way. He doesn't take pleasure merely in thinking they are.
We care about more than just how things feel to us from the inside; there is more to life than feeling happy. We care about what is actually the case. We want certain situations we value, prize, and think important to actually hold and be so. We want our beliefs, or certain of them, to be true and accurate; we want our emotions, or certain important ones, to be based upon facts that hold and to be fitting. We want to be importantly connected to reality, not to live in a delusion.
