Terrorists + Heathrow + Wittgenstein + Experience Machine + Whaa?

I don't think Wittgenstein's proclivities changed altogether as much as people make them out to have. That is, his Tractarian views are something like more unrefined post-Tractarian views. It was his masterpiece. (In the original sense of the phrase, the piece on which he worked to end his apprenticeship and gain the title of master.) He makes a curious statement late in the book.

There must indeed be some kind of ethical reward and ethical punishment, but they must reside in the action itself. (6.422)

And I got to thinking.

--I'll ignore for the moment how to translate this sentiment into later Wittgenstein. How exactly does the reward and punishment reside in the action itself?

--You've already asked and answered this question. You said that the reward/punishment lay in a sort of coherence to other peoples; i.e., that your actions would make sense to other people. Your action qua action avoids incomprehensibility. And since being understood is paramount in being accepted and loved, then the coherence of your actions is paramount.

--But what if you grew up in the dirty south during the beginning of the 18th century? If you owned slaves your actions were coherent and understandable. They may even have been lauded.

--How now! Then the reward/punishment cannot be a social consequence. It must illumine or darken your insides, as it were. Is Foucault, then, wrong to speak of the social ramifications of punishment? Was he treating of ethics? Ethics in a vacuum?

--What a queer concept. Does ethics exist without other people?

And things got off topic. I often lead myself astray. The point is this: The Wittgenstein passage got me thinking about reward as well as punishment. The ethical life, as I characterize it, is a life of both prohibition and encouragement. Reward and punishment are meted out with equal ardor.

The idea of reward clicked with the idea of terrorist attacks. E.g., the one being reported on today. Would a suicide bomber be correct in acting if he were in the Experience Machine? He can take in the cultural baggage that he wants; and this would hamper him, I dare say, even more than it would hamper whomever Nozick was imagining entering the EM. Imagine the suicide bomber is offered the chance to hook up to the EM and have the ability to suicide bomb ten, a thousand or a ka-jillion people. He would be confident his plan would work, and he would be certain he was going to heaven. (Or, you know, whatever it is that people think they'll get from suicide bombing.) It could even be set up in a way like Bill Murray's Groundhog Day, in which he could suicide bomb every day, or every hour.

The rub is that he would have to agree to enter the machine knowing that he would only be fooling himself into thinking he was suicide bombing all the time. He would actually die an old, hobbled man who had been hooked up to the EM for most of his life. But during that life...oh what a life.

1) The EM cuts you off from religious incentive to do good.

2) The EM cuts you off from political incentive to do good.

3) Actually, all social interactions as a piece are taken away from your influence.

But the question is coaxed from me (never begged): What of the ethical reward/punishment residing in the act itself? I know I've waffled on this, but this Tractarian Wittgenstinian ethical proposition sounds like the Kantian model of the ethical will. And damn if I don't think that the EM is a fine--maybe even perfect--tester of that will. The suicide bomber, if he were a secular Kantian, would hook up to the EM.

The Experience Machine + Descartes

I love the word 'parlay'.

This morning I was riding my bike to work. As I was high on sanctimony, looking at unwashed, smog-dogged autos, I realized I could parlay the Experience Machine (EM) for my Wittgenstein project. That is, hook up Descartes and Wittgenstein with the EM in order to talk about epistemology, ethics and Lebensform.

In the EM there are no ethical ramifications to having no emissions standards. I could drive a fucking Hummer. Could I? If everything were exactly the same then wouldn't I think, maybe, that I shouldn't be driving a Hummer? I should like to parlay an answer, but does a second-order reality really elude the problems of a first-order reality: I think not. [Descartes disappears.] I need to find the hinge.

The Experience Machine

Yesterday during breakfast my friends brought up the Experience Machine (EM). I thought the EM was some sort of new Jimi Hendrix-based roller coaster or something that the kids are into; but it's actually a thought experiment, which Nozick inaugurated in Anarchy, State, and Utopia.

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's desires?...Of course, while in the tank you won't know that you're there; you'll think it's all actually happening. Others can also plug in to have the experiences they want, so there's no need to stay unplugged to serve them. (Ignore problems such as who will service the machines if everyone plugs in.) Would you plug in? What else can matter to us, other than how our lives feel from the inside? (43)

The EM was brought up in a political context, but as things developed (i.e., my friends and I ate our food and sobered up) things got more punchy, and we tried to figure out what people would really do and what the differences are between the EM and reality?

I have a friend who's a total dork; and he thinks the EM is perfect, like the perfect video game. He wishes it upon his family and friends. He seems to think that experience is experience of phenomena, i.e., mental states. And I think this commits him to a Berkleyan-type idealism. For the move Kant makes seems to require something actually there, objects about which we can never know absolutely everything; and Husserl's method requires the human to give meaning to already present objects, both historically and personally; and neither idealist wants to go as far as Berkeley. I think my friend wants to say, though, that rather than human understanding imposing a meaning upon the necessarily-given world, the human understanding simply creates the given world. For he says there's no difference between the EM and reality, and in fact, the former is better than the latter.

This answer to the thought experimentseems to defy tradition, so I'm down with it. But I think my friend is rather callous and inhuman. Under the way I was thinking about things, speaking about the EM is a different language-game than speaking about reality as such. Speaking about the EM is a different language-game than speaking about video games, or reading realistic, Zola-esque novels. I.e., you would want to say that it's OK to kill people in the EM because they're not really people--you're not creating any victims (in the hotshit parlance of whatever). Even though there's no epistemic difference, there is an ontological difference. And that difference in language-game means that something is different. If the words themselves are the same, and the meaning is different, then you can be certain that the context, use or practice is different. This difference in action is the difference between the EM and reality.

Is it OK to kill someone in the EM? Why don't skeptics commit more atrocious crimes? (Or become priests, mediums to the other world of which ours is a poor reflection.) In another world in which, say, there is no ethics, can you act in whatever way you want? How would your actions be different in this non-ethical world and our (supposedly) ethical world?

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