Opening page…
A perfect life that never happened
A machine can give you a lifetime of love, achievement, and happiness that feels completely real. You will never learn it was simulated. Would you plug in for good?
Imagine that the experiences are guaranteed. What matters, if anything, about actually doing things and meeting people rather than feeling as though you did?
Your answer
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A little context
Imagine the pitch. Every love goes well, every project succeeds, and nothing feels fake, because once you are inside you won't remember choosing it. It isn't pleasure instead of a life. It's the experience of a better life than you will ever actually have. Put that way, many people turn it down at once, and the interesting part is explaining why.
Nearby questions
- Is it right to bring a child into a world like this?A child can't agree to being born, and inherits whatever the world becomes. David Benatar argues that coming into existence is always a harm; most parents would call it the best thing they ever gave.
- If you had to choose, would you take a happy life or a meaningful one?Raising children, caring for the dying, making something difficult: the things people call most meaningful are often not the ones that make them happiest day to day.
- Does life have a meaning?The universe will not notice when you are gone, and in a million years nothing you did will show. Camus thought you could still be happy.
- Is the work Chippus were given worth doing?A task can be worth doing for what it makes, for whom it serves, or for what it does to whoever does it.
- Would you want to live forever?Bernard Williams argued that an endless life would end in boredom, because you would outlive every reason you had to go on. Others think there would always be another book, another friend, another morning.
