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This is very similar to Robert Nozik's argument that revolves around a thing called "The Experience Machine."
"Suppose there were an experience machine that would give you any experience you desired. Superduper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book. All the time you would be floating in a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain. Should you plug into this machine for life, preprogramming your life experiences? [...] Of course, while in the tank you won't know that you're there; you'll think that it's all actually happening [...] Would you plug in?"
Nozik argues that it is unreasonable to plug one's self into such a machine. Here is some different links regarding the matter:
Link 1
Link 2
Link 3
Anyway, this is tough, really, because it is framed in a sort of utopian sense: if you could exist in the perfect existence of whatever makes you happy, then would you? What I wonder, because I'm disturbed, is what if we already exist in such a state (there's a thread about this in the Laboratory, eh?). I mean, what if we are actually a being or beings from some other culture where there is only pleasure and such, and we are so bored that we've made machines to hook up to in order to experience strife, conflict, and so on?
There is another philosopher, umm...Hilary Putnam, argues we can't be Brains In Vats. But this argument seems to turn on a semantic point, and not something I think really states we are not brains in vats (or people dreaming, or inside an experience machine).
So, the question seems to turn on identity: would you give up being the person you are to be a different person?
I can't answer this question because I don't feel that I know myself or my Self, or the being that is me, well enough to give it up to be a different being, self, or whatever. Indeed, I sometimes think that the person that any one of us is, is merely the tip, or an appendage, of a more complex being that the individual ego tries to prevent us from knowing--or perhaps functions to shield us from knowing...
But now I've really digressed, and into realms of religious/spiritual sort of narratives.
I'm sorry for blathering on like this, Persephone, I'm not trying to hijack your thread...this is merely what has crossed my mind while thinking about it!
In short, no, I don't feel that this is any easy question in the slightest!
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