The happiness machine

The Matrix, the 1999 film by Andy and Lana Wachowski, posited a machine that was capable of producing in a person hooked up to it the same state of mind as actual experiences, without the actual experiences. It could ensure that you would feel continually happy and would be so convincing that you would not know you weren't actually having the experiences you thought you were.
    David Sosa, a philosopher at the University of Texas at Austin, recently wrote¹ that The Matrix had been scooped twenty-five years earlier. A Harvard philosopher, Robert Nozick, had written in his book Anarchy, State, and Utopia:

Suppose there were an experience machine that would give you any experience you desired. Super-duper 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. [p. 3]

Sound good? Instant, easy bliss. No sweat, no pain.

Sosa says wait a minute. He argues that

There’s an important difference between having a friend and having the experience of having a friend. There’s an important difference between writing a great novel and having the experience of writing a great novel...Plugged in, we would have the sorts of experience that people who actually achieve or accomplish those things have, but they would all be, in a way, false—an intellectual mirage. A drug addict is often experiencing intense pleasure. But his is not a life we admire.
    Now, of course, the difference would be lost on you if you were plugged into the machine—you wouldn’t know you weren’t really anyone’s friend. But what’s striking is that even that fact is not adequately reassuring. On the contrary it adds to the horror of the prospect. We’d be ignorant, too—duped, to boot!...

A former correspondent who went by the Last Judgment eponym "Sheepandgoats" once suggested that my rejection of theistic belief might be motivated by my wishing to avoid being duped. I failed to realize at the time how appropriate the suggestion was. I didn't want to be hooked up to his happiness machine. The Jehovah's Witness brand, in his case. (They're big on separating the sheep from the goats.)
    As Sosa explains,

In refusing to plug in to Nozick’s machine, we express our deep-seated belief that the sort of thing we can get from a machine isn’t the most valuable thing we can get; it isn’t what we most deeply want, whatever we might think if we were plugged in. Life on the machine wouldn’t constitute achieving what we’re after when we’re pursuing a happy life. There’s an important difference between having a friend and having the experience of having a friend.
    ...Happiness is more like knowledge than like belief...Happiness, like knowledge, and unlike belief and pleasure, is not a state of mind.

    No imaginary friends on high for me, thank you very much.²
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1. Once again, I have my more timely read friend Ken to thank for bringing this item to my attention. He wrote me Friday, "Did you see the article 'The Spoils of Happiness' in the NY Times the other day? It raises some points that I think would interest you." Indeed it did.
2. Thanks to Ken for suggesting the analogy between the happiness machine and religion. I can't be certain that the article would have elicited it from me if I hadn't just read his email:
   

   How much like the "happiness machine" are the major theistic religions of the world, given their visions of a blissful afterlife? Do they make their practitioners happy?