Desire for truth as insecurity.
There was an apparently famous thought experiment called The Experience Machine by Robert Nozick. And in it the idea of an option is created and the supposed common rejection of that option was the point.
The option is this, if given the chance to plug into an idyllic life wherein you did not know the life was synthetic would you do so?
He believed that most people would reject this option, and I agree, however I don’t agree because of some primitive base desire for reality or actuality or truth in and of itself, but because on a survival level we know that exposing ourselves to a false world would be potentially maladaptive.
The reverse is when synthetic situations lead to enhanced adaptivity. This is called training, like a flight simulator, where we subject a person to a synthetic situation where in the requirements of the person are the same or indeed harder than in reality but with fewer permanent consequences for failure. Indeed dreams could very well serve this purpose. To engender responses which evade threat and maximize opportunity.
In short while Nozick’s attack on hedonism, which is the idea that pleasure is the point, that any facet of life that is not pleasurable does nothing to increase one’s well-being, is valid, the obvious intellectual realization that you must be living to experience pleasure, suddenly makes survival as important as pleasure.
Therefor in my opinion this base desire for “reality” or “truth” is simply an extension of the hedonic demand for pleasure.
I agree, that the motive for this desire to stay “outside” in the “real” world exists, that there is a drive to avoid overt self delusion, religion not withstanding. But I think this comes from insecurity, an insecurity which needs to be overcome, not from some lofty desire for truth. This insecurity is just a manifestation of the pleasure need.
We don’t fear the machine world because it’s “unreal”, we fear it because it could end with us trapped inside. We know that absolute security is a myth. Every structure at our level of thinking beyond axiomatic abstractions and physical laws is destructible. So, we secretly fear, no matter how assured we are, that our dream life will be cut short by an intervention of the “real world,” this coupled with a base egotistical belief that we are in control to some degree of everything, leads to a specific behavior.
Put simply: We reject synthetic happiness, in order to avoid being a deer in the headlights of reality’s assault. (This is partly why it’s safe to legalize all the drugs. People aren’t gonna move en mass to the opium den for this reason.)
We convince ourselves that the methods of reality’s attack are potentially avoidable in some way. The unavoidable attacks which would crush you regardless of your choice are necessarily shunted away, into a land of “not likely.” To fail to shunt them away leads to irrational crippling fear.
This is extremely dangerous because we simultaneously reject, and then make decisions based on, what is ultimately an illusion. This state of affairs is extremely ironic since what got us here was the consideration of living in an illusory reality.
It is also dangerous to us in terms of impact on total happiness and survival. If the ways in which reality can kill you are in the majority uncontrollable, then suffering to avoid the ones you can becomes an act which can quickly become maladaptive.
The classic example is the people who exercise themselves to death. If the goal of life can be defined as enjoyability, which is necessarily coupled with duration, then this attitude is against the goal of life because if you’re most likely to die in a gamma pulse, being flash boiled before you even realize you’re in danger, then wouldn’t it have been better to accept the simulated life to squeeze the most pleasure out of your life as you can?
There can only be one logical answer. In order to make any other sort of answer make sense you have to invent unprovable contexts, such as the will to have a god, or some other judgment mechanism.
The genetic impulse gives us hard and fast rules, but we need to look past them if we want to survive and enjoy that survival over the long term.
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