Trapped in the Experience Machine with David Foster Wallace

Wallace's prescient essay "E Unibus Pluram" cautions us about the consequences of mediated experience and makes a case for the importance of sincere Literature.

If science is the “view from nowhere,” as Thomas Nagel called it, then literature is the view from everywhere.

~Erik Hoel, “Fiction in the Age of Screens”

Robert Nozick, an eminent 20th century philosopher, devised a thought experiment which has come to be referred to as the Experience Machine. This machine can provide any desiderata or experience at any intensity imaginable. Nozick further stipulates that the experience machine would be so effective that the stimuli would be indistinguishable from reality. In other words, it is entering The Matrix of your own creation with it subject to your every whim. He then asks, if given the choice, would we prefer the machine to reality? Would we ever unplug? Nozick argues that if pleasure is the only intrinsic value (i.e. ethical hedonism), then people would all have overwhelming reason to be hooked up to an experience machine. Back in 1974 Nozick thought that humanity’s overwhelming preference would be for the red pill (reality) - that no one w…