Chapter 17
Experience Machines And Designed Consciousness
Imagine a device that could feed any sequence of sensory signals directly to your brain, bypassing your eyes, ears, skin, and all other sense organs. This device, which Ixperiencit Theory calls a sensepaducer, could make you experience anything: a tropical beach, the surface of Mars, a world that has never existed, a body that is not your own.
From the inside, the experience would be indistinguishable from reality. Your brain would process the artificial sensory signals exactly as it processes real ones, because it has no way to tell the difference. A signal from a sensepaducer and a signal from a real eye hit the same neurons, trigger the same cascades, produce the same conscious experience.
And the implications for understanding consciousness, identity, and immortality are significant.
The sensepaducer is a thought experiment, but it is also a technology that is approaching reality. Virtual reality headsets already deliver artificial visual and auditory signals to the brain. Brain-computer interfaces are beginning to deliver signals directly to neural tissue. The full sensepaducer — controlling all sensory input to the brain — is a matter of engineering, not of principle.
The Experience Machine Thought Experiment
The philosopher Robert Nozick proposed a famous thought experiment in 1974: the Experience Machine. [12] Imagine a machine that could give you any experience you desired. You could experience being a great artist, a beloved leader, a tireless explorer, whatever you choose. While connected to the machine, you would have no idea you were connected; the experiences would feel completely real.
Would you plug in?
Nozick expected most people to say no, and he used this intuition to argue that we value more than just subjective experience; we value actually doing things, actually being things, actually living in the real world.
What the Sensepaducer Reveals
The sensepaducer thought experiment is not primarily about whether you would choose to plug in. It is about what the possibility of a sensepaducer tells us about the nature of consciousness.
Lesson 1: Consciousness depends on brain processing, not on external reality. If a sensepaducer can produce indistinguishable experiences, then your conscious experience is not directly caused by the external world. It is caused by your brain's processing of signals — and those signals can come from the real world or from a machine. What matters for consciousness is the brain's internal state, not its external cause.
This reinforces what we established earlier: consciousness is an internal state of the brain, not a direct report on external reality.
Lesson 2: "Real" experience and "artificial" experience are the same experience. If you cannot tell the difference from the inside — if the sensepaducer experience and the real experience produce identical brain states — then they are, in terms of consciousness, the same experience. The distinction between "real" and "simulated" is meaningful from the outside but meaningless from the inside.
This expands the scope of superimmortality enormously. Your future existences need not be limited to the kinds of experience that current human biology can produce. With sensepaducer technology, the space of possible conscious experiences becomes, for practical purposes, infinite.
Awarepaducers: Designing Consciousness from Scratch
The sensepaducer concept is grounded in technology that already exists in primitive form. The awarepaducer, which we turn to now, is a much larger leap; it describes a technology that does not yet exist and may be generations away. But the concept follows logically from the same premises, and thinking through its implications now helps clarify what the theory actually predicts.
Ixperiencit Theory goes beyond the sensepaducer to propose an even more powerful concept: the awarepaducer. While a sensepaducer controls the inputs to a brain (the sensory signals), an awarepaducer controls the entire state of a brain-like system — its structure, its functioning, and therefore its consciousness.
• Creating enhanced consciousnesses. An awarepaducer could produce consciousnesses that are smarter, more perceptive, more emotionally rich, or more creative than any natural brain has ever produced.
An awarepaducer doesn't just give you a new experience. It gives you a new self. By controlling the structure and functioning of a brain-like system, an awarepaducer can produce any ixperiencitness — any conscious experience, belonging to any possible being.
• Merging consciousnesses. An awarepaducer could produce a consciousness that combines aspects of two or more different ixperiencitnesses, blending elements of multiple identities into a single experience. This could allow a form of shared identity that is currently impossible.
The Ethics of Designed Experience
The technology of designed consciousness raises ethical questions that humanity has never faced before.
Who decides what consciousnesses to create? If awarepaducer technology becomes available, someone must decide how to use it. The potential for creating positive, enriching, fulfilling conscious experiences is matched by the potential for creating suffering, confusion, or horror. The ethics of consciousness design is one of the most important problems that future generations will face.
This does not mean we should all plug into experience machines. There are good reasons to value engagement with the real world: the unpredictability, the challenge, the connection to other conscious beings. But these reasons are about the kind of experience that engagement with reality produces, not about some metaphysical distinction between "real" and "fake" experience.
What This Means for Your Future
If the premises hold and the technology develops along the trajectory outlined above, the implications for your future existences are transformative. We are now in the most speculative territory of this chapter, but it is speculation that follows directly from the argument, and I think it is worth following to its conclusion.
The technologies of designed consciousness, sensepaducers and awarepaducers, are among the most important developments that could shape the future of superimmortality.
Without these technologies, your future existences depend on the natural or coincidental production of brains similar to yours — a process that is uncertain and largely beyond anyone's control.
The sensepaducer and awarepaducer are more than thought experiments. They are blueprints for the future of consciousness, technologies that could transform superimmortality from a cosmic accident into a deliberate act. With them, the reproduction of your consciousness becomes a matter of science and engineering rather than chance. But before we look forward, we need to look back — at the strongest objections to everything we have argued so far, stated as powerfully as possible, and answered honestly.
Key Terms in This Chapter
Read the rest of this chapter
The remaining text (examples, counter-arguments, and longer connective passages) is in the book.