1 Monitoring Thoughts

The idea that we could monitor thoughts in this way presupposes that different mental states are correlated with different states of the brain. This is the working assumption of much psychology and neurophysiology, but it is controversial. We cannot be certain what future scientific work will show, and we are probably in for many surprises before the brain is fully understood. Yet there is already much suggestive work showing that electrical stimulation of particular points of the cortex can evoke highly specific memories, or that seeing particular patterns involves the firing of specific neurons in the cortex. In the scientific context, the working assumption, even if by no means impregnable, seems plausible. Some philosophers have argued that there could not exist comprehensive and detailed psychophysical laws, while others disagree. These arguments will not be gone into here. The plan is to consider the implications of a technology based on monitoring brain activity, with deliberate casualness about current opinions as to which way the neurosciences will develop.

But there is a question which cannot be shelved here. What does it mean to task of monitoring someone's thoughts and feelings? In a way, we all know what it is to have thoughts, and in most cases it seems absurd to suggest that someone does not know what thought he is having. Yet, despite this, there is a real problem in saying what having a thought consists in. And this problem causes difficulty for the idea of monitoring thoughts. What is the problem about thoughts? Some thinking is in words, but sometimes we have a thought not formulated in words, where, if we are aware of anything, it is perhaps only some image. When I am struck by the thought that I have forgotten to telephone for a taxi, it may be that no words cross my mind. Perhaps I simply have a mental picture of a taxi. In such cases, images do not just come to mind on their own, but come with an interpretation. If I tell someone else that I have a mental picture of a taxi, he will not know what thought I am having, though I may be in no doubt at all that my thought is about the phone call. This process of interpretation, which applies to words as well as images, is something we know almost nothing about. This is why psychological studies of thinking, which can tell us so much about the strategies people use for solving problems, have so far told us so little about what our ordinary 'background' stream of consciousness consists in.

Because the process of interpretation is so important, even where the thought has embodiment in words or images, someone monitoring simply those words or images passing through my mind will have an incomplete knowledge of what I am thinking about. We can imagine a device that would decode the brain's activity and project on to a screen images corresponding to those in the person's mind. (We might need two screens: one for experiences involved in seeing, and one for visual imagination.) Thoughts which take place in words could be reproduced on a soundtrack, and images which are not visual or auditory could be reproduced by similar devices. But it is much less clear what it would be to give public embodiment to the process of interpreting these words and images. For this reason it seems better to discuss monitoring only words and images. It has to be recognized that a technology letting us do this would not give us perfect knowledge of people's mental lives. Let us suppose that these devices are developed, and that they are produced in conveniently portable form. You come into the room holding what looks like a small portable television. The next thing I know is that I hear coming from it the words that are running through my mind, and see my accompanying visual images on the screen. This technology will make people's minds largely transparent. Despite the problems about interpreting words and images, we will often have a fairly good idea of what others are thinking.

Will this be the end of privacy? In one way, the answer is clearly 'yes'. For, as the onion layers of privacy are peeled away, if there is a centre it must surely be the contents of the mind. But the machines so far described will leave us with an intermittent privacy of a kind. For, while the contents of a mind would always in principle be open to inspection, for much of the time it would not be under scrutiny. This is because of our limited powers of attention. Even with several thought-reading machines going at once, I could only attend to the thoughts of one or two people at a time. Some television enthusiasts have more than one set, so that they can watch programmes on different channels at the same time. The limitations on how far this could go are obvious. And, apart from problems of limited attention, most of us would want to spend most of the time doing other things, or thinking our own thoughts, and would probably not spend long tuned in to the minds of others. (Though artists and writers might find their thoughts constantly monitored by people doing courses about creativity.)

A society or a government determined to eliminate privacy could overcome these difficulties by developing a central monitor and memory store, where everyone's thoughts could be recorded and stored, so that they would be available for scrutiny when desired. At this point, systematic thought policing would be possible.

In our present world, governments and other organizations can destroy or hamper the freedom to express thoughts, but at least thought itself is always free. The introduction of thought-policing would make many people's lives scarcely worth living. It would also give governments complete power to block new ideas and social change, if only by killing or locking up people as soon as they had the ideas. Thought-policing is so appalling that there is a lot to be said for the view that work on developing thought-reading machines is immoral, merely because it helps to make it possible.

2 Transparency in a Free Community

Much of the horror of devices to make our minds transparent to others has to do with their uses in an authoritarian society. We are surely right to fear these potential uses, but some of our deepest anxieties about privacy come from other sources. This can be seen by a thought experiment in which we eliminate misuse by the authorities. Imagine a community of free and equal people. (It is not clear what this comes to, but imagine the nearest we can get in practice to an anarchist utopia.) Even here, the general availability of thought-reading machines can be seen as a terrible threat.

Why should we be disturbed if our thoughts become transparent to others? Some explanations that come to mind involve particular projects, or particular kinds of thought, which generate their own reasons for secrecy.Ifwe are trying to give someone a surprise, bargaining with him, or trying to swindle or cheat him, the project will collapse if our thoughts are publicly available. A society transparent in this way will be one in which bargaining and swindling are impossible, which will no doubt have repercussions on our economy. But most of us will see little reason for being appalled. More personal anxieties are stronger. Some of our thoughts would seem discreditable, or at least embarrassing. Peelings of jealousy or resentment, sexual fantasies, or Walter Mitty day-63dreams of a self-flattering kind would all be sources of embarrassment. And, less selfishly, we are glad to keep some thoughts about other people secret so that we do not hurt them.

But these reasons, although psychologically powerful, may not go to the heart of the matter. They concern particular kinds of thoughts and feelings. We can imagine a society in which bargaining and swindling did not exist, and in which daydreams and sexual fantasies were no longer a matter for embarrassment. In that society, people might still feel a resistance to their mental lives being made transparent to others. There is a case for saying that the value of privacy depends on something deeper than the embarrassing or hurtful aspects of particular thoughts and feelings. It may be bound up with the nature of relationships, and with our sense of our own identity.

3 Relationships

On one view, the fact that we have an area of privacy is more important than which particular activities or thoughts are included in it. (This is suggested in a particularly perceptive discussion of these issues by Charles Fried.1. An Anatomy of Values, Harvard, 1970. chapter 9.) The claim is that privacy is necessary for different kinds of relationship. We choose how far to admit people to friendship or other relationships with us partly by controlling how much of what is private we reveal to them. As Fried puts it,

Love or friendship can be partially expressed by the gift of other rights - gifts of property or of service. But these gifts, without the intimacy of shared private information, cannot alone constitute love or friendship. The man who is generous with his possessions, but not with himself, can hardly be a friend, nor - and this more clearly shows the necessity of privacy for love - can the man who, voluntarily or involuntarily, shares everything about himself with the world indiscriminately.

But is it certain that gradations of intimacy are necessary for differences of relationship? In a world of transparent relationships, there would still be room for people being generous with themselves to different degrees. We would continue to give people different amounts of our concern and our time. We would respond to people with varying degrees of warmth, and this would be more obvious than it is now. Close relationships would64 consist in choosing to be together, and in the way people would feel about each other. There would no longer be the mutual lowering of the barriers of privacy. Closeness would be different from now, but not so different as to be non-existent.

It does seem that some of the pleasures of relationships involve talking about things that otherwise would be private. We like to do things together and to talk about our responses. (Part of the appeal of films and, especially, novels is that they often portray people from the inside, and so give us comparisons to use in trying to capture and articulate our own fugitive private experiences.) In talking to each other, and so learning to express (and sharpen) our experiences, we are doing something similar to what a novelist does. If we were transparent to each other, some of the things we now say would not need to be said. But it does not follow that all such conversation would be eliminated. This is because our conversation does not just report responses, but shapes them. We often only get clear about our own thoughts and feelings by trying to express them to someone else, and by listening to their thoughts in return. So transparency would not destroy conversation, though we might just think together without having to talk.

But another aspect of relationships might be threatened by transparency. In our present state, privacy gives a special quality to the times when it is waived. Other people can seem like medieval fortified towns. We can climb the hill and walk round outside their walls. But if they open the gate and let us in, we have the pleasures of exploration, seeing squares and houses and churches, sometimes like those we know and sometimes quite different. And while you are showing me round your town, r am showing you round mine, so that we are each at the same time explorer and host. A world without privacy would be a world in which the gates of all towns would always be open, so the excitement of the first admission would be less.

If these changes in relationships are for the worse, they provide a reason for rejecting, not only the thought-reading machine, but also any voluntary general lowering of the barriers which protect privacy. The changes are equally likely whether our privacy is invaded from outside or whether it is given away freely.

But the value placed on gradations of intimacy need not be a reason against a much greater degree of transparency than we have now. We hide behind so many different layers of defences. There are barriers65 created by context: you can't mention that here. And there are barriers of manner and style, created perhaps because we feel threatened, signalling that we are unapproachable about this, or will not talk about that. (Sometimes the threat turns out to be imaginary. Tolstoy describes this in Anna Karenin:

Levin had often noticed in discussions between the most intelligent people that after enormous efforts, and endless logical subtleties and talk, the disputants finally became aware that what they had been at such pains to prove to one another had long ago, from the beginning of the argument, been known to both, but that they liked different things, and would not define what they liked for fear of its being attacked. He had often had the experience of suddenly in the middle of a discussion grasping what it was the other liked and at once liking it too, and immediately he found himself agreeing, and then all arguments fell away useless. Sometimes the reverse happened: he at last expressed what he liked himself, which he had been arguing to defend and, chancing to express it well and genuinely, bad found the person he was disputing with suddenly agree.

When we do not feel threatened, we are more willing to take down the barriers, and less timid people sometimes take them down even when they do feel threatened.

It may be that already, as the result of innumerable individual decisions, we are moving towards greater transparency. These things are bard to establish, and no doubt vary from culture to culture. But it seems to me that in our century, there has been a strong trend towards greater honesty in relationships, with greater openness about things which used to be private, and that this is part of a beneficial transformation of our consciousness and social life. (If taking down the barriers is starting to transform us, the obstruction of this process is another charge, to add to the familiar ones, against political systems where people fear the authorities, and so need the barriers.) This change could go a long way further, and still leave us room for different degrees of privacy and intimacy.

The effects of transparency on relationships would be in several ways beneficial. Deception, with its resulting erosion of love and friendship, would be impossible. And relationships now are obscured, not only by deception, but also by our limited ability to express our thoughts and feelings, and by our lack of perception about other people. The thought-reading machine, because of the problems about interpretation, would66 not abolish these limitations, but it would greatly reduce their obscuring effects. As we understood more about each other's mental lives, we would form more realistic pictures of each other, and it seems plausible that this would make relationships better rather than worse. And a stronger sense of community might result from the barriers of privacy coming down, together with the ending of a sense of loneliness and isolation which some people feel because of their inability to share their experiences. Sometimes a society of transparent relationships is held up as an ideal. In a fine interview on his seventieth birthday.3. "Sartre at Seventy: An interview, New York Review of Books. August 1975. Jean-Paul Sartre was asked, 'Does it bother you when I ask you about yourself?' He replied:

No, why? I believe that everyone should be able to speak of his innermost being to an interviewer. I think that what spoils relations among people is that each keeps something hidden from the other, something secret, not necessarily from everyone, but from whomever he is speaking to at the moment. I think transparency should always be substituted for what is secret, and l can quite well imagine the day when two men will no longer have secrets from each other, because no one will have any more secrets from anyone, because subjective life, as well as objective life, will be completely offered up, given… There is an as-for-myself (quant-a-soi). born of distrust, ignorance, and fear, which keeps me from being confidential with another, or not confidential enough. Personally, moreover, l do not express myself on all points with the people l meet, but l try to be as translucent as possible, because l feel that this dark region that we have within ourselves, which is at once dark for us and dark for others, can only be illuminated for ourselves in trying to illuminate it for others… One can't say everything, you know that well. But I think that later, that is, after my death, and perhaps after yours, people will talk about themselves more and more and that this will produce a great change. Moreover. I think that this change is linked to a real revolution. A man's existence must be entirely visible to his neighbour, whose own existence must in tum be entirely visible to him, in order for true social harmony to be established.

There is obviously a big difference between Sartre's ideal and the world of the thought-reading machine. Sartre envisages people voluntarily abandoning their own secrecy of thought, rather than having the power to invade that of others. His transition period would involve no loss of autonomy, and might involve relatively little distress. The introduction of the thought-reading machine would not respect people's autonomy, but would strip them of secrecy against their will, it is hard to see how67 the process could fail to cause great unhappiness, both to those losing protective secrecy and to those who would be hurt by the thoughts of others. Resistance would be so strong that there might develop an arms race of offensive and defensive technology: devices to jam the thought-reading machines, devices to jam the jammers, and so on. But if, after the horrors of the transition period, the world of the thought-reading machine became established, the effect on relationships might be much the same as that of voluntarily lowering the barriers. And it is not obvious that transparent relationships would be worse than opaque ones.

4 Identity and Individuality

In our present world, the sort of people we are is to some extent the result of our own choices. (The question of the extent to which our choices could have been different raises the problems about determinism and free will, which will not be discussed here. But, whatever the solution to those problems, most of us prefer to have our identity modifiable by our decisions.) It may be that privacy contributes to this control. Charles Fried has said that we often have thoughts we do not express, and that only when we choose to express them do we adopt them as part of ourselves. If the end of privacy is the end of any distinction between thoughts being endorsed and merely being entertained, then we may lose some control over our identity. It may have been some view of this kind which led Justices Warren and Brandeis to argue that a legal right to privacy is independent of more general property rights: 'The principle which protects personal writings and all other personal productions, not against theft and physical appropriation, but against publication in any form, is in reality not the principle of private property, but that of an inviolate personality.'4. 'The Right to Privacy', Harvard Law Review 1890.

In suggestions of this kind, there is something obscure about the idea of personality or identity. For what a person is depends on all his features, including those concealed from others. A sufficiently subtle thought-reading machine would detect the difference between thoughts merely coming to mind and thoughts being endorsed. All that would be lost is concealment of thoughts only entertained. But it is part of me that I do entertain those thoughts, and my identity is not changed because68 this aspect of it comes to light. So when people say that transparency might threaten our freedom to choose our identity, they may not have in mind 'identity' in the sense of being a particular kind of person, but 'identity' in a sense closer to 'image of ourselves projected to other people'. It is obviously true that the abolition of privacy will reduce the control we have over the pictures other people have of us. But this seems more of a threat to our reputation than to our identity. Our freedom to define ourselves, when not just a matter of manipulation of image, is our freedom to choose between beliefs and attitudes, and to opt for some kinds of actions and ways of life rather than others. And this is not destroyed by others knowing what different ideas we have also considered.

Perhaps the threat posed by transparency is more oblique. It may be that public scrutiny of my mind does not in itself change my identity, but rather has effects which will inhibit the development of individuality. You will know when I am contemplating the ideas and actions you disapprove of, and I will know at once of your attitude. This may create very strong pressures to conform. John Stuart Mill wrote in 1859 of the social pressures towards respectability and conformity: 'In our times, from the highest class of society down to the lowest, everyone lives as under the eye of a hostile and dreaded censorship.'5. On liberty, chapter 3 One result of transparency might be to extend the social censorship inwards, so that there would be the same pressures for conformity of thought and feeling as there are for conformity of behaviour. We have only partial control over our thoughts and feelings, but the social censorship might persuade us to tum away from lines of thought which we knew might lead us into dangerous areas, as well as not to act on ideas arousing disapproval.

Privacy is necessary if we are not to be stifled by other people. Even in our present world, without the thought-reading machine, being permanently observed, as in some prisons, can destroy individuality. (Sartre, in an earlier phase, talked in Being and Nothingness with an almost neurotic horror of being observed by other people, and vividly presented the awfulness of permanent scrutiny in Huis Clos, where hell for three people is being locked for ever in a room together.) To be observed by other people can build up a feeling of pressure to justify what we are doing and how we are doing it, or to justify doing nothing. For many people, happiness, and perhaps creativity and originality, flourish where there are long stretches free from critical appraisal.

Perhaps we have the potential to grow more robust, and in a world of transparent relationships we might grow stronger in our resistance to pressures to conform. But it is hard to see how the extra pressures could be avoided, with their obvious threat to individuality.

5 The Two Perspectives

I have suggested that transparency would not in itself threaten our identity, and that its effects on relationships might, after a transition period, be beneficial. But it is plausible that it would allow new and powerful social pressures for conformity. If this account is accepted, our view of any proposed steps towards the transparent world will depend on how we weigh these different gains and losses. Any appraisal is difficult because it is bard to imagine relationships so transformed. If the threat to individuality seems much more clear than the benefits to relationships, many of us will be very cautious in our attitude to the dismantling of the barriers of privacy.

Yet it may be that our horror at the thought of entering the transparent world is nothing to the horror with which people in the transparent world will look back at our lives. They may think of us as biding behind barriers of mutual pretence, like the inhabitants of a suburban street hiding behind fences and hedges. They might be far more concerned to avoid the reinstatement of the barriers of privacy than we are to avoid them being dismantled. The conflict between their perspective and ours, which will reappear in other contexts, raises a deep theoretical difficulty in deciding what sort of world we should aim for.

1 The Objection to Social Quietism

If a man with a large family becomes unemployed, he may become sufficiently depressed to seek medical help. His doctor may put him on anti-depressant drugs. There is not much else the doctor on his own can do. His other patients leave him little time for transforming society, and the drug will probably relieve the depression. But when, in different cases, we see this decision repeated over and over again, we may start to ask questions. We may question the adequacy of leaving these problems in the 'medical' category, to be dealt with by doctors on an individual basis. Perhaps some people have such a strong genetic predisposition to depression that it would come whatever happened in their lives. But it seems likely that what happens to people plays an important part. An effective attack on depression might need social changes. We would probably have to change our economic priorities, taking seriously the eradication of unemployment and of family poverty. We might need to72 encourage people to take more control over their working lives, and to transform the nature of work. We might need to stop housing people in unsuitable buildings, and to create a less ugly environment. Perhaps most of all (and this would need deeper and more elusive changes than political ones) we would need to change the attitudes that cause neglect and loneliness.

These social changes are all bard to bring about, and take a long time. Where drugs can give immediate help, it is natural that they are used. But it is disturbing that they may be used, not just as first aid, but as a substitute for tacking the real problems. In a city or country hit by economic disaster, the political or social response may be for people to organize themselves to create work, to demand changes of policy or of government, and to plan how future disasters can be avoided. This contrasts favourably with an alternative response, where the members of a decaying community lose hope of reversing the disaster, and escape by using drugs to change their states of consciousness. This political or social objection to the psychological approach to problems is clearly important. A central feature of the objection is that the social problems, being left unsolved, are left to trouble others. Despite its importance, this does not go to the deepest level of our resistance. For the objection could be met by leaving society as it is, and making mood-changing drugs available to all. That way, no one would be left distressed by the unsolved problems. Many of us have doubts which go beyond the objection that drugs only tackle problems on an individual basis.

2 Appropriateness

In the normal run of things, our moods are usually roughly appropriate to the things that happen to us. People are cheerful when about to go on holiday, depressed on failing examinations, irritable when stuck in a traffic jam. Our responses are no doubt also influenced by our chemical state. But in general we can give reasons for our moods that are intelligible to people with no knowledge of our chemistry. Moods are perhaps the most primitive part of our emotional life. As we go up the scale to more complex emotional states we find that their sophistication is bound up with more subtle distinctions between the circumstances to which they are appropriate responses. Grief is not just a free-floating mood in73 the way depression or anxiety can be, but is tied to bereavement or other loss. The difference between such states as embarrassment, shame and guilt is not a difference between introspectible sensations, but depends on social conventions and on our beliefs about what we have done. The more complex emotional states involve beliefs, but also depend on the presence of some of the feelings and dispositions involved in the more primitive moods. In this way, mood-changing drugs can alter our more sophisticated emotions too. Suppose I hear the news of the death of someone close to me just after I have taken a dose of a very powerful drug for inducing a mood of cheerfulness. However many of the appropriate beliefs I have (about how awful it is, how there will be a gap that can never be filled), I cannot be said to be in a state of grief if my underlying mood is of irrepressible cheerfulness. My whole emotional state is inappropriate to what has happened.1. There are links between complex emotions and more primitive moods, which arc at least as responsive to our chemistry as to our beliefs. These links set severe limits to Spinoza's attractive programme of eliminating subjection to unwanted emotions by realizing the irrationality of the beliefs they are bound up with. And part of our resistance to the massive and widespread use of mood-changing drugs is their tendency to weaken the link between what happens to a person and his emotional response. At the extreme, emotional states become no more justifiable or unjustifiable than the weather is.

This is not to deny that our normal, appropriate, emotional states also depend on our chemistry. No doubt the things that make an emotional impact on us trigger off chemical changes. And if humans had a different set of neurochemical systems, our emotional responses might naturally be like those that would now result from some drug. So why are we disturbed at the thought of drugs changing our responses from those which, being standard, are now considered appropriate? Two reasons suggest themselves, one to do with membership of the human community, and the other to do with our sense of identity.

We do not always have the same responses to the same things. But sympathy, friendship and love depend on our emotional reactions only varying within a limited range. Like molecules made to hook on to each other, we can make psychological contact only because at least some of our responses fit together. (Think of someone, perhaps a Charles Addams character, irrepressibly cheerful at funerals, and highly amused at news of air crashes or kidnappings.)

The importance of shared responses is a good reason for a single person being reluctant to embark on any drastic course of mood-changing. But this is not the whole story. If a whole community went on mood-changing drugs, everyone might be changed in the same way, with no resulting loss of sympathy and understanding. Yet we may still resist the change. Our emotional responses are too central to our sense of who we are for us willingly to accept sudden changes. If you tamper too drastically with my emotions, friendship may still be possible with people similarly altered, but it may be unclear to what extent it will be me who has the friends. My sense of identity is at stake. The sort of person I am, the sort of emotions and attitudes I have, depend on such factors as my chemistry and my experiences. These may change over time, and after forty years I may be a very different person with a very different outlook. But, in the normal course of things, the changes will be gradual, and depend a lot on my decisions and on my interpretation of what happens to me. The gradualness allows me to see myself as a continuous person despite the changes. And the active role of my choices and outlook makes my life one of continuous self-creation, rather than just a sequence of passive changes of mood independent of my beliefs.

Suppose a man hears that the political party be supports has just lost an election. He may feel depressed for a bit, and this mood change is no doubt bound up with changes in his chemistry. The fact that his depression has a chemical basis is in no way undermining of his autonomy. For these chemical changes are dependent on the beliefs he has. If. before the election, reflection bad led him to switch his support to the opposing party, his mood and chemical state would now be different.

On the other hand, some chemically based mood-changes are a threat to autonomy. The same man may work in a car factory. If the managers have decided that 'a happy person makes a better worker', and have, without his agreement, put mood-changing drugs in the water used for making tea, his emotional changes are independent of his own beliefs and outlook. Frequent changes in the drug used may produce a kaleidoscope of different emotional states which are in no way related to his underlying character. To that extent, his control over the sort of person he is has been undermined.

3 The Superdrug

We can imagine a drug programme which would not be vulnerable to any of the objections raised. Suppose a superdrug is developed for altering mood, which has no side-effects involving any risk or impairment to health, and which is in no way addictive. It does not lead to any blurring of awareness or to lethargy. Its effect, on the contrary, is to make people more alert and invigorated. Although it induces a good mood and a sense of well-being under normal conditions, its effect is not so overriding as to rule out different emotional responses where they are appropriate to the person's beliefs about what happens. It induces no tendency to social quietism.

Let us also suppose that the superdrug is never used to influence others' behaviour, but is only used by people to affect their own mood. Everyone in the community is fully informed about its effects, and it is only taken knowingly and voluntarily. (This last condition raises familiar problems. But assume that taking the drug involves some complicated procedure which will virtually never be gone through inadvertently. Also assume that no one puts any pressure on anyone else to take it, and that it is not available to children or to the mentally disturbed or subnormal.)

The superdrug is a test case of how deep someone's objections to mood-changing drugs go. I can see nothing wrong with it at all, l have already outlined my own sources of resistance, ranging from obvious surface objections to do with bad side-effects, to deeper concerns with identity and autonomy. The superdrug has been deliberately specified in a way that meets those objections.

Some people will have more stubborn resistance, and they will reject the superdrug. I am sure I have not thought of all conceivable objections. But one plausible source of further opposition has to do with the unnaturalness of altering psychological states by means of drugs, and is perhaps bound up with the thought that we ought to change the world to suit us as we are, rather than change ourselves to be more cheerful in the world as it is. In part this objection has been met by the stipulation that the superdrug does not induce quietism. But there is a residual objection about the unnaturalness of changing the sort of people we are, which will be discussed in more general terms in Chapter 12. Although the superdrug is unobjectionable, its beneficial effects on our emotional life seem likely to be confined to a single dimension. Mood76 is at the primitive end of our emotional life. We are cheerful or depressed, relaxed or anxious, calm or irritable, and these moods matter to us and to people we live with. But it is a feature of moods that, while they can be triggered off by particular experiences or thoughts, they are often rather diffuse and poorly focused. Within this dimension, the superdrug could be very valuable. It is better to feel cheerful or exhilarated than to feel anxious, depressed or irritable, and because of this, many of us would take the drug. And if large doses of it would give us ecstatic feelings of well-being, or a deep, 'mystical feeling of being in harmony with the universe, we might feel greatly enriched by such experiences.

But, however intense the experiences it gave, a drug limited to these general effects on our diffusely focused moods would have only oblique effects on what is perhaps a more interesting dimension of our emotional life. Mood, compared to the more complex parts of our emotional life, Is relatively independent of relationships and beliefs. The contrast here is with the process by which primitive emotions become more diverse and subtle as people have new and shared experiences, talk to each other, and learn to see and think about things in new ways. In a single person's life, simple feelings of early childhood, like anger and fear, liking and hostility, may develop into an emotional life of Proustian gradation and subtlety. And, although we have to be very cautious in our interpretation here, it is perhaps possible to see the outlines of a similar process in the history of the human race. The reasons for caution are obvious. We have in general only the evidence of letter-writers, poets, novelists and painters about the emotional life of people at other times. It is hard to separate limitations of experience from limitations in the skill of a writer or painter, or from limitations in what has been selected for portrayal. And a crude belief in emotional 'progress' will make us think that we are more perceptive about people than Rembrandt or Tolstoy. It is also true that a more ramified and subtle consciousness may involve losses as well as gains. Peasants and primitive tribesmen may have a directness and warmth lost to many readers of Proust. But, when all these warnings are kept in mind, it is hard not to see at least a fitful development in the direction of wider sympathies and more subtly discriminated states of consciousness.

As with scientific progress, what is gained at one time can be lost again. And, just as many people alive now have far less grasp of science than Newton had, so we have emotional primitives among us now. But perhaps there is also, as with science, a kind of progress, so that some77 of Proust's readers have a more developed consciousness than any of Chaucer's contemporary audience.

Many readers will be out of sympathy with the historical speculations vaguely gestured at in the last two paragraphs. Perhaps they are right to be sceptical. But, even if changes in relationships and emotional life do not come near the progress we have made in our intellectual understanding of the world, it still seems that many of the most interesting emotional developments come because people live differently, and because they see things differently. The things we do together, and talk to each other about, change the less primitive parts of our emotional life. Drugs operating only on diffuse moods may give us certain kinds of intense and valuable experience. But, if they are to bring radical changes along other dimensions, they will have to affect our beliefs and our way of seeing things.

Other objections to mood-changing drugs apply more generally to all techniques for influencing and controlling people.

1 Some Questions

Conditioning techniques, certain drugs, and perhaps some kinds of brain stimulation, all alter behaviour by altering desires. Because of this, they are alarming and controversial. But all sorts of uncontroversial activities also alter people's behaviour by altering their desires. To marry someone, to employ someone, to send someone to school, are all likely to generate in them new desires. Why are brain stimulation and behaviour therapy more disturbing than marriage and education? is it because the new techniques are more powerful? Or is it that they are open to new and different kinds of abuse? Or is it that there is something about them which is objectionable in principle, independent of particular ways in which they could be abused?

Some methods of influencing people are more objectionable than others. Persuasion by offering a reward or other positive inducement is better than coercion by threat. A rational person would not choose to have his options altered by someone else's threats, but he might choose to have them altered by some positive inducement. Aversion therapy of the kind used to cure Alex's aggression can be seen as a kind of coercion: 'Be good or feel sick.' In this way it is worse than conditioning by means of reward. 2. These points come from Robert Nozick: 'Coercion·. In S. Morgenbesser et al. (eds.). Philosophy. Science and Method: Essays in Honor of Earnest Nagel. New York. 1969, and P. S. Greenspan: 'Behavior Control and Freedom of Action.' Philosophical Review 1978. 81

Other differences in our response to different methods have a less clear basis. Although many widely used drugs have drastic effects on behaviour, there is a greater sense of horror at the thought of people being manipulated by brain stimulation. In part, this may be because drugs have to be re-administered, which gives the person some opportunity to resist or escape, while the implanted electrode can be stimulated almost regardless of the person's activity. But it is hard to believe that this fully explains the different responses we have, although it is not clear what further reason there could be. It would be bizarre to object specifically to electricity, so that brain stimulation would be acceptable when electrodes were replaced by chemi-trodes. An alternative would be to distinguish between unacceptably applying chemicals directly to the brain, and acceptably doing so indirectly by an orally administered drug. There seem no plausible reasons to support this position.

The aim of this chapter is to separate out some of the different reasons for objecting to present or possible future technology of behaviour control. The objections come at different levels, like the layers of an onion. The outer layers are the most important now and in the near future. They concern the relatively immediate and very serious dangers of unscrupulous misuse. The inner layers are objections even to the benevolent use of these techniques. In the world as it is, they are less urgent, but they raise the deeper philosophical questions.

2 Abuse by the Authorities

One obvious reason for fearing the development of behaviour control is the near certainty that governments will abuse it to make people obey them. To take just two examples: we know how psychiatric drugs have been used in Russia, and we know how knowledge of the effects of sensory deprivation has been applied in Northern Ireland. But there is a case for saying we have nothing further to fear from the invention of more methods of the same kind. For these are crude techniques, which manipulate their victims by inflicting horrors on them, and manipulate other people by fear. The available array of tortures and horrors is so great that adding to it may not increase the world's misery. A victim may be relatively indifferent between newer sensory deprivation and old-fashioned electric shocks.

It is the development of more subtle techniques which might enlarge the powers of evil governments. From the point of view of these governments, rule by fear and torture must be a messy a!Tair, generating problems of its own. It would be much simpler if techniques existed to make people want to behave in the desired way. For this reason, the development of e!Tective and painless ways of moulding desires will raise the danger of ruling groups vastly extending their power over populations. There is the consoling thought that some techniques (such as those involving the implanting of electrodes in the brain) could only be applied to people virtually enslaved already. But this reassurance may not apply to all techniques developed for manipulatory desires. Where it does not, the possibility of governmental abuse raises doubts whether research on such techniques could be justifiable.

3 Benevolent Control by the Authorities

The drawbacks of behaviour control in the bands of an ill-intentioned government are obvious. The drawbacks of it in the hands of a benevolent government are less obvious, and are not the immediate problem. But the more subtle anxieties start to emerge only when we consider the benevolent use of techniques of control.

We can conceive of the authorities, in the distant future, deciding to eliminate conflict, and to increase happiness, by controlling the desires people have. (Imagine a technique for stimulation of particular sites in the brain without any apparatus being implanted there.) The temptation to damp down or eliminate desires which lead to violent crime is clear. So is the temptation to eliminate the desire not to live next door to people of another race. It would soon be seen how many problems and conflicts could be solved by changing people's desires, and an enthusiastically benevolent government could find itself becoming in this respect increasingly interventionist. This thought is horrifying to most of us, despite the prospect that a community manipulated in this way might be without the major social sources of unhappiness. Why is the prospect so disturbing?

The first objections involve doubts about whether we really would find the resulting world an improvement. Can we rely on the effectiveness of the controllers in making us happier? So many well-intentioned social83 plans depend on predictions that tum out to be mistaken, that it is hard to feel optimistic about handing such power to a government. There is also the anxiety about whether we could trust in the controllers' continued benevolence. To know that they have the power to give us self-destructive desires is to doubt whether any evidence about their present good intentions would be sufficiently reassuring about the future. And handing over this power would be irreversible unless the controllers decided otherwise. They could switch off any desires we later had to re-assert our own control.

Other objections could be made from our present standpoint, independent of whether life under a system of behaviour control would seem satisfying at the time. Social harmony might be purchased at a great cost in regimentation and uniformity. We now value having a huge variety of different kinds of people with very varied patterns of life. The prospective loss of this may now seem a serious drawback, despite the fact that no regrets may be felt later because the preference for variety could be eliminated.

Another objection concerns equality. Why should they control us? In our present world we can dislike someone being in a position to make us do things, even if what we are made to do is only what we would have done in any case. If we dislike inequalities of power, this is another drawback, even if our preferences are later going to be manipulated so that we will no longer object.

These objections to the benevolent use of behaviour control are perhaps enough to show that any scheme likely to be devised would at least have to have formidable countervailing advantages to stand any chance of being acceptable to those of us who hold them. But there are objections at a deeper level, which can be brought out by imagining a system designed to meet those raised so far.

4 Voluntary Submission to Democratically Programmed Control

Suppose the members of a community are considering a 'democratic' version of behaviour control. The idea is that their desires will be monitored, and sometimes altered, by a machine. But this machine will itself be programmed in advance by the members of the community. The84 machine will have fed into it a huge amount of information about the psychology of each person, so that it knows more about them all than any one of them does. And the instructions they give it are to alter their desires where this will lead to greater happiness.

The alterations to desires could take several forms. Some would only involve matters internal to a single person. The person wanting to be a painter, but who would be much more successful as an engineer, would have his desires changed accordingly. (Assume that, while the machine can alter desires, it cannot alter abilities.) Other changes would be in people's relationships. The machine would ensure that love was always mutual, and that parents' wishes for their children always harmonized with children's wishes for themselves. And, if technology had not eliminated all unpleasant jobs, they would start to seem pleasant to people given the right desires. Those now bored by accountancy would start to find it as interesting as some find stamp collecting.

A system of this kind could be guided by various different principles, according to the outlook of those setting it up. The aim could be the greatest total happiness, regardless of whether some people are much happier than others. Or. questions of distribution could also be brought in. The aim might be equality of happiness, or else some arrangement where no one fell below a certain level. Whatever system was chosen, a lot of present misery and frustration would be eliminated. Conflict would be replaced by harmony, both within each person and between people. It is likely that everyone would feel some benefit.

If a lot of communities opted for behaviour control of this kind, we might start to compare the kinds of life they had with those of other societies. No doubt cross-cultural comparisons pose many problems, but we might get some idea of the strengths and weaknesses of the two patterns of life. The difficulties might be of the same order as comparing the success in India of western-style marriages and of those arranged by parents in the traditional way. It is bard to imagine how a programmed society would strike us. But the elimination of conflict and frustration are large gains which might not easily be outweighed.

This democratic system of behaviour control would bring these benefits without being open to the objections against versions where some people control others. There would be no inequality of power. No one would be at the mercy of anyone else's changes of outlook. If the machine was given enough knowledge of people's psychology,85 its plans would not turn out wrongly. And sufficiently many fail-safe devices would remove anxieties about the machine itself going wrong. If the people setting up the system disliked regimentation and uniformity, they could draw up a programme to favour the widest variety of desires and ways of life. And, above all, it would be voluntary. There would obviously be problems where a majority wanted the system and a minority did not. But suppose it is only adopted where it has unanimous support.

Perhaps the democratic version can be designed in a way which meets the previous layer of objections to behaviour control. Yet a great deal of resistance remains. We can recognize that we might all be much happier in such a society, and yet still feel that, from our present standpoint, there is something repugnant about the scheme. We have another layer of objections.

5 A Closed Society

One source of our reluctance may be the value we place on keeping open the possibility of change. We do not want to rule out fundamental change in human life, or in our ways of seeing it. The changes of belief and outlook in the history even of a single culture make us see the future as unpredictable and open. Some of the pleasure of being human is to be part of this open-ended development of our species. The unpredictable unfolding of human consciousness can seem the most remarkable process we know.

An anxiety about a community submitting to behaviour control, even of the most benevolent or democratic kind, is that this might end the further development of consciousness. New kinds of life, and new ways of seeing things, may depend on allowing free play to desires which, at least at first, are socially disruptive. A benevolent machine, lacking an omniscient grasp of all possible future ways of thought, would probably play safe, and damp down desires and attitudes of disruptive originality. In handing ourselves over to it, we might be opting to stay forever within the limitations of our present outlook. At the most fundamental level, life and thought might become static.

It may be thought that we could programme the machine to favour fundamental changes of outlook. But it is then not clear how far this would86 differ from ordinary life, or. even worse, how far it differs from handing over to a machine that we have not programmed at all.

6 Identity

The desires we have are a central part of our picture of who we are. This is why behaviour control, even of the most benevolent kind, can threaten our identity. If I am told that I will be happier after a radical transformation of my desires and outlook. I may wonder to what extent the happier person will be me. The new desires may be ones that I now would disapprove of. Or they may be so different from any I have now that the main plans and projects of my life arc changed unrecognizably.

This is not to say that all our present desires are important to our sense of identity. Some are too trivial to matter. And others, although they play an important role in my life, may be ones I do not identify with. People who seek behaviour therapy to rid themselves of their addiction to smoking or their deviant sexual tastes arc indicating that they do not identify with these desires, and would prefer to be without them. But for most of us there is a central core of desires and attitudes with which we identify. In this central region, these desires and attitudes to a great extent determine our picture of ourselves, and any attempt by other people to bring about substantial changes here would be seen as a threat to our identity.

It may be objected that this makes our identity a more rigid matter than it usually is. Our desires and attitudes can conflict with each other and, more importantly, they often change over time. The facets of my outlook that I now look on as part of the central core may seem much less important in ten years' time, and in twenty years may all have been abandoned.

But the fact that the central core changes docs not make its defence less important to our identity. We know our desires and outlook may be very different in twenty or thirty years, but it matters to us that this should come about by a gradual evolution of a relatively self-directed kind. In part, the changes will result from external factors: if I go and live in Canada, this will alter the way my outlook evolves. But it matters that the resulting outlook will come from my responses to Canada, and87 also that the decision to go or stay is mine. Living our own lives involves being able, at least in part, to mould ourselves. It would be an absurd exaggeration to say that we can be any type of person we choose. Our desires do not have such power over our nature. But it would be equally wrong to deny that our present decisions have an important influence on the sort of people we will be in future. Although we rarely think of it except when it is threatened, this project of continuous self-creation is a central one in our lives. This is what we give up when we hand over to others, or to a machine, the power to wipe out our present desires and to create new ones.

7 Self-Modification

Suppose people were given the ability to switch on and off their own desires, by electrical or chemical stimulation of particular sites in their brains. One danger would be of other people taking control of the stimulating equipment, and so gaining overwhelming power over them. But if, for theoretical purposes, we ignore this possibility, or imagine it somehow guarded against, would giving us this power of self-modification be a good thing?

It is hard to be sure what the impact on our life would be. One possibility is that people's emotional lives would become trivial and shallow. Another is that people would have a stronger sense of being self-directed, and find it easier to realize their deeper commitments. Everything would depend on the extent to which the person had developed a stable outlook, with a relatively permanent central core of desires strong enough to dominate the decisions about the use of the self-modifying techniques.

Using brain stimulation to switch desires on and off would itself always be determined by other desires. A person who wants to be healthy or lose weight might switch on a desire to take some exercise, or switch off a desire to eat. A man who wants to be faithful to his wife might switch off a desire for another woman. In these cases the desires representing stable, long-term commitments and projects dominate the decision, and switch off temporary desires which, at a deeper level, we do not identify with. But the alternative is also possible. The person who wants to be lazy or to eat might switch off his desire to lose weight, so that88 his enjoyment would be undisturbed by guilt or self-criticism. The man who wants another woman might switch off his desire to be faithful to his wife.

The outcome depends on whether the central desires the person identifies with are stronger than the immediate and distracting ones, at the time of the decision. In this way, our position with the new technology would resemble the present. For, whether or not I eat more than I should depends in our present world on whether my immediate desire to eat is stronger at the moment of decision than my longer-term desire to lose weight. The technique of brain stimulation would just give us the power to eliminate whichever desire loses the contest. (It may also be easier to switch off a desire than to continue resisting it over time.)

In our present-day life, there are two extreme possibilities. There is the person whose central projects effectively dominate his life, and who succeeds in regulating all other desires, so that they fail to divert him from the activities be has decided to be most important. At the other extreme is the person whose actions are always dominated by immediate impulses, and who has either no long-term commitments or else only ineffective ones. Most of us are at points on a continuum between these extremes, being relatively strong-willed about some things and quite a bit at the mercy of immediate impulses about others. Having the ability to switch off desires that lose the contest seems likely to make us more sharply different from each other. The strong-willed person will be even less influenced by distracting desires, as they will be eliminated. The impulsive person will become even more so, as be will eliminate the longer-term desires when they threaten to impair his immediate pleasure.

The implications of self-modification would in this way vary for different people. But for those with a reasonably coherent dominant outlook, the new techniques would help rather than binder self-creation across a lifetime. For such people, this would count in favour of these new powers over their desires.

8 Conclusions

The greatest and the nearest threats from new techniques for controlling desires and behaviour are that some groups of people, perhaps governments, will gain further power over others, and put this power to bad89 ends. Few of us need reminding of this. Many of us are also alarmed by the benevolent use of behaviour control. Our objections have partly to do with the danger of the controllers making mistakes, and with the irreversibility of their power over us, and partly to do with the inequality between controllers and controlled. We also fear an imposed uniformity. But there is a deeper objection which remains when these first ones have been met. Whatever the quality of the world in which we are controlled, we are reluctant to purchase it at the cost of no longer directing our own lives, and no longer choosing what sort of people to be. When techniques of self-manipulation are given to us, our project of self-creation may survive or even be helped. When the techniques of manipulation pass to others, this central feature of our lives is lost. None of this is to say that manipulating other people is never justifiable. At present, for important social purposes, we try to influence people's desires and behaviour by crude and only partly effective techniques, such as the threat of prison. And it may be that sufficiently large social gains could justify the use of more intrusive techniques. (One person having the ability to switch off another's aggression might give great protection to many who are now victims of acts of violence.) But any proposed extension of behaviour control has to be assessed, not only in terms of whatever immediate advantage it offers, but also in the context of the sort of world we will end up with if each piecemeal extension is allowed.

1 The Experience Machine

The extreme case is one of a machine developed to stimulate the brain in such a way that the person has a sequence of enjoyable experiences.1. This idea has been discussed from time to time by philosophers, usually in the con text or such machines being a possible objection to utilitarianism. One or the most interesting recent discussions is by Robert Nozick: Anarchy. State and Utopia, pp. 425. I borrow the tern 'experience machine' from him. These bear no more relation to the external world (apart from the machine's programme) than dreams do. But the experiences would be an improvement on most dreams in that they would be indistinguishable from the equivalent real life experiences. Subjectively, the only difference from real life would be that a different set of experiences would be had: there might be more experiences of swimming or of making scientific discoveries, and no experiences of going to the dentist or of being dismissed from a job. The reality behind these experiences might be, as Robert Nozick suggests, that all the time you are floating in a tank with electrodes attached to your brain.

Some of us would be prepared to try the experience machine for brief periods. As an entertainment, it might be like an improved version of the cinema. It could also be a preferred alternative to anaesthetic, for those periods where we now choose to opt out of reality, such as during a painful operation. But most of us would not choose to be plugged92 into the machine for the rest of our lives, and would be appalled at any suggestion that we should be compulsorily plugged in. Yet the intensity of our resistance seems to need explaining. Is not pleasurable experience a lot of what we seek in life? Some people think this is all we ever seek. Even if this is an exaggeration, there surely have to be some strong reasons for turning down a lifetime of pleasurable experience. What are they?

2 Some Primitive Objections

The primitive objections to the experience machine are those which suggest that it would not even be satisfying from the subjective point of view. In the first place, we have great psychological resistance to the idea that the machine's reproduction of experiences would be perfect When we try to imagine being on the machine, we find it bard not to imagine some loss of quality, so that things are fainter, or the colour is not quite right. Then we also think, as some of us do about the traditional picture of heaven, that a life designed to provide perpetual bliss would become very boring. But neither of these sources of resistance is theoretically interesting. Each can be dealt with by stipulating certain features of the machine. The reproduction of experiences is stipulated to involve no loss of quality. The experiences have the ideal amount of variety to suit each person. And, if pure pleasure becomes cloying, the programme will include just the right amount of misery and discomfort to add the required savour to the other experiences. The experience of success will only come after the experience of a bit of failure. The experience of a bot bath will sometimes be preceded by the experience of being cold and wet. But life on the machine will still differ subjectively from real life. In ordinary life there is for most people a surplus of distress, frustration and failure, over and above that required to flavour the rest of experience. The primitive objections miss the point, as our resistance remains even when the machine is modified to meet them.

The same holds for certain practical objections to the experience machine, such as whether it would break down, or how it would be maintained, or how costly in energy it would be. No doubt there would be many such problems. Forget them, or assume them overcome. (The93 experience machine is a thought experiment, not an election manifesto.) The point is that even without worrying over the practical problems, and even when the experiences would be subjectively very satisfying, we still object to a lifetime on the machine.

3 Internal and External Perspectives

When we are thinking about a kind of life, and trying to evaluate it, we can adopt an internal or an external perspective. An internal perspective involves seeing things from the point of view of the person concerned. Consider a couple whose whole life centred on bringing up their children, and who both died just as the children were reaching adult life. Suppose, two years after their death, all the children are killed in an air crash. We may think it a mercy they did not live to see this. If we say that the air crash came too late to make the couple's lives less good, we are adopting the internal perspective. On this view, what matters is how they saw things, and a disaster to their project does not wreck their lives if it happens when they are past knowing about it. From an internal perspective, a life like that of Cezanne or Frege, ending in death without recognition, is in that way a tragedy.

To adopt an external perspective is to allow in considerations other than how things seem to the person involved. These other considerations may be information not available to the person, but available to us. We know the children were killed in the air crash. We know about the posthumous recognition of Cezanne and Frege. Or, there may be no difference in the information available from the two perspectives, but a difference in attitude, as between an enthusiastic jockey and someone who loathes horse racing. There are as many different external perspectives as there are differences of information or attitude.

If we think that how a kind of life seems from the internal perspective is all that matters about it, we will find the experience machine a fairly cheering prospect. But most of us do not take that view. The life of an extremely cheerful mental defective is not one we would choose, however satisfactory from the internal perspective. Nor would most of us choose a lifetime on the experience machine. Why not?

4 Other People

To most of us an essential ingredient of a happy or worthwhile life is contact with other people. On the experience machine we inhabit a private world, and never again make contact with others. This is enough to rule it out. It may be said that we will think we are meeting other people and having relationships with them. This may be enough to make the experience machine subjectively satisfying, but from our external perspective, it is still appalling, because our desire is to have relationships, not to think we are having them.

Another point important from our external perspective is that one person going on the experience machine may be bad for others. Suppose a man with a boring and badly paid job decides to spend the rest of his life on the machine, having the experiences of a rich and successful film producer. The effect on his family is likely to be disastrous. They lose his company, and they lose even the low income be brought in. (His wife will not get the social security benefits given to widows, and may have problems over getting his unemployment pay.) Such considerations would put many people off the project.

There are two theories, psychological hedonism and psychological egoism, which would make us surprised that concern for other people's interests would put someone off the experience machine. Psychological hedonism says that people are only motivated by pursuit of their own pleasure. The experience machine would be everyone's utopia if this were so. Psychological egoism says that we are only motivated by our own interests. This is a broader theory than hedonism, as it allows that we can have interests other than pleasure, but it too rules out altruism. If you hold this view, you will think people will never be put off the experience machine because others need them. If you think, as I do, that many would be put off, you have to reject psychological egoism. The experience machine does not satisfy our desires for others, but only makes us think they are satisfied.

5 Activity

We prefer active lives to passive ones. Life imprisonment in a cinema seat is not an agreeable thought, even for the more sedentary of us.

We like to be physically active partly because of the pleasurable sensations and other experiences involved, and these could be duplicated on the machine. We like to be active because it keeps us healthy, and this too could be taken care of. Our preference for activity goes deeper than these benefits of physical exercise. What is terrible about a lifetime in the cinema is not just the lack of exercise, but that we become merely passive consumers. We would take no more decisions, and never put any decisions into effect. It matters to us that we are in control of what we do. It matters to us that what we do makes a difference to the world, and that it stretches us. These things would all be absent from life on the experience machine. We would think we were active, and that what we did made a contribution, and was quite hard. But really, we would be passive consumers of the machine's programme.

Our concern to be active is not always just a concern with the results of that activity. A scientist who fails to solve a problem may not be quite consoled by hearing that someone else has succeeded. This is brought out by Robert Nozick, who sees the importance of activity as an objection to the experience machine. He points out that we would not think our objection met by the addition of a result machine, 'which produces in the world any result you would produce and injects your vector into any joint activity'.2. Nozick: Anarchy, State and Utopia, p. 44. Our concern that we should make a difference is not just a desire that a difference should be made.

6 Identity Objections

As with the abolition of privacy, and control of behaviour and mood, one of our concerns about the experience machine is its threat to our identity. As No1Jck puts it, 'Someone floating in a tank is an indeterminate blob. There is no answer to the question of what a person is like who has long been in the tank. Is he courageous, kind, intelligent, witty, loving? It's not merely that it's difficult to tell; there's no way he is. Plugging into the machine is a kind of suicide.'3. Ibid, p. 43.

This identity objection is really a cluster of different ones. There are four quite separate reasons that could be given for thinking of going on the machine as a kind of suicide. The first, and most radical, would96 be that life on the machine would not be that of a person at all. The second is that, while there will be a person on the machine, he will not be me. The third has to do with my desire to have certain characteristics, such as being courageous, kind, intelligent, witty or loving. And the fourth has to do with the desire, discussed in the previous two chapters, for my characteristics to be at least partly dependent on my own decisions and choices.

7 The Kantian Objection

The first line of thought is that a lifetime on the machine is not compatible with being a person at all. The suggestion, ultimately derived from Kant.4. Kant: Critique of Pure Reason, 'Transcendental Analytic', chapter 2. I have drawn on the discussion of Kant's argument in P. P. Strawson: The Bounds of sense. London. 1966. pp. 97 112. In the 'Kontlan objection' presented here, no attempt is mode to separate the contributions or Kant and Strawson. I do not know how far either or them would think the objection applies to the experience machine as described. Strawson in particular argues only against the view that 'a possible experience, the contents or a consciousness, could theoretically consist or a succession or intrinsically disconnected sensory data somehow linked by memory and expectation' (p. 103). It is not clear that he would regard the experiences on the machine as 'intrinsically disconnected'.
I have not here been able to pursue the interesting issues raised by the later stages or the argument. There the suggestion is that, if I cannot ascribe experiences to myself, there will be no distinction between what is experienced and my recognition or it, and, without this, nothing can even rate as an experience. is that the existence of a person involves more than just the occurrence of a series of experiences. It also involves some selfconsciousness: some idea that the stream of experiences is not merely happening, but belongs to you. And for this, the argument goes, you need to be aware of the contrast between yourself and the rest of the world. Walking across Bodmin Moor, you do not interpret your experiences as an impersonal awareness of a series of changes in a fluid world. You recognize that the moor is something stable, existing independently of you. You know that there are many other angles from which it can be seen, but that you see it from your own changing point of view.

The objection is that it would not be possible for someone who spent all his life on the experience machine to form this concept of himself. For the machine gives us no contact with any world independent of our97 own experiences. So we will not be able to make the necessary contrast between changes in our experiences and changes in the world. As a result, we will be unaware of any frontier between ourselves and the world, and so unaware of ourselves as having a distinct existence. Perhaps those who had formed the idea of themselves in the ordinary world might retain it after the transition to the machine. But the suggestion is that the experiences the machine provides would not alone be enough to generate such an idea. And, if we accept this, we may start to worry about whether a long time spent on the machine will erode the distinction, that we have built up in our present state, between ourselves and the world.

The heart of the Kantian objection is the way it applies to the extreme case, where someone is on the machine from birth. Is it really true that he would never be able to form a conception of himself, distinct from what he experiences? It is tempting to say that the suggestion is absurd, as we can so easily imagine spending time on the machine, and we can imagine retaining our sense of identity just as much as we do in the cinema. But this objection is too brisk. As Strawson points out, it is not enough to show what we, with our history, can imagine. Nothing follows about what the person permanently on the machine can conceptualize. But even if this extrapolation from our own conceptions is too quick, there may still be something wrong with the Kantian suggestion. For the person on the machine has exactly the same subjective experiences that be would have had if he had grown up in part of the ordinary world that had the features selected by the machine's programmer. And, if this sequence of subjective experiences would have been enough in the ordinary world to generate the distinction between himself and the world, why should the same distinction not be generated by the same experiences when produced by the machine? It is true that, when a sheep runs across my path in the Bodmin Moor of the experience machine, my experience is not caused by the activity of any sheep that really exists. But I do not know this, and so it might be expected that I should build up all the beliefs and concepts that I would build up on the basis of similar experiences in the ordinary world.5. For a different view, sec Hilary Putnam: Reason. Truth and History, Cambridge. 1982, chapter 1. Perhaps most of my beliefs would be false, but I might still acquire concepts and draw distinctions on the basis of them. The view that someone brought up entirely on the machine would98 never develop the distinction between himself and what he experiences is unproved, and does not have much plausibility. And, if that anxiety is not a serious one, we need hardly worry about the effects plugging into the machine would have on those of us who have already developed a robust sense of our identity.

8 Will It Still Be Me?

The second identity objection is the fear that the person on the machine will not be me. It is this that makes plugging into the machine seem a kind of suicide. But this objection suffers from the obscurity of the idea of personal identity in an ordinary lifetime, people can change drastically, but we do not normally have worries about whether they are still the same person. Outside philosophical discussions, these worries only arise in rather extreme cases, such as loss of memory, and no doubt they will arise if surgeons start to offer us brain transplants. Philosophers have tried to make us articulate our concept of personal identity more clearly by presenting us with a wide range of imaginary cases, involving people making amoeba-style divisions, or transfers of memories from one brain to another. The answers given to the questions raised by these cases vary. Some say that bodily criteria are the central ones: so long as my body has an uninterrupted path through space and time, that embodied person will still be me, whatever changes in memory and personality I have had. Others say that mental criteria, and particularly memory, are central: if my body or brain cannot survive, but my memories and outlook can be transferred unimpaired to some other body and brain, then I have survived in a different body. Yet others say that, in these puzzle cases, the question 'Will it still be met' does not admit of an a ll-or-none answer. On this last view, personal survival may be a matter of degree.6. On these issues, see Sydney Shoemaker: Self-Knowledge and Self-identity. Ithaca. 1963; Derek Parfit: 'Personal identity', Philosophical Review 1971; Bernard Williams: Problems of the Self. Cambridge, 1973. chapters 1 and 4; Anthony Quinton: The Nature of Things. London. 1973. chapter 4; Amelie Rorty (ed.): The identities of Persons, Berkeley. 1976; David Wiggins: Sameness and Substance. Oxford. 1980. chapter 6.

If the bodily continuity view of personal identity is the right one, the person on the experience machine will be me. On the other hand, if99 psychological criteria are the ones we ought to invoke, whether or not the person on the machine will be me depends on the answers to questions such as how much memory is left of my life before being plugged in. And, on the last view, this is just another case where we cannot give a yes-or-no answer to the question 'Will it still be me?' So it is not at all clear that going on the machine would be the end of me. And this thought is perhaps bolstered by a negative version of the experience machine, where what is produced is pure nightmare rather than pleasure. Threatened with a lifetime on such a machine, some of us would feel more filled with dread than we would if we knew that some unknown person was to be subjected to this horror. Our inclination seems to be towards the view that we do survive the transition to the machine, at least to some degree.

9 Personal Characteristics

The third identity objection has to do with our desire to have certain characteristics. If I want to be courageous, kind or witty, going on the machine will frustrate these desires, although I will not realize it. My desire is to be courageous, not just to have experiences as though rescuing someone from a burning building, or as though being given the George Medal. Nozick suggests that this identity objection cannot be the whole source of our resistance to the experience machine: 'Imagine a transformation machine which transforms us into whatever sort of person we'd like to be (compatible with our staying us). Surely one would not use the transformation machine to become as one would wish, and thereupon plug into the experience machine! So something matters in addition to one's experiences and what one is like.'7. op, cit, p. 44. But, while Nozick is surely right that concern to be a certain sort of person is only part of our objection to the experience machine, it is doubtful if the, idea of combining it with the transformation machine is really coherent. This idea seems to presuppose that what you are is quite independent of what you do. If I am a miser who would like to be generous, and so use the transformation machine and then go on the experience machine, where I have many pleasurable experiences as though of giving away money, it is not clear what sort of person I am. Can a visit to the transformation100

machine turn me into a generous person, despite the fact that I never really perform a single generous act? If this doubt is right, and what I am depends on what I do, the experience machine, even supplemented by the transformation machine, is still open to objection on the grounds of the sorts of characteristics we want to have.

The fourth identity objection is that, even if it is allowed that I have these characteristics when on the experience machine, they are not the product of my decisions while on it. For, at most. I have experiences as though I were taking decisions. The reality is one of passive consumption. And this objection is quite correct.

1 The Dreamworld

Let us first turn the machine into one which allows the person on it · to choose between alternatives (the active experience machine). The world presented through the machine would be like one of those films where everything is seen from the perspective of a participant, whose angle of vision is that of the camera. But unlike a film, the sensory experience would not be limited to sight and hearing. Watching a film, I am passive: the camera's movements are independent of my will. The 102active experience machine would be different. I could decide where to go, and where to look, whether to listen or to block my ears, what to touch, smell or taste. And my decisions would be followed by the appropriate changes in my experience. (I experience myself controlling what I do, but not having magical control over the rest of the world.) In the subjective world of the active experience machine, I control everything I do and say, to the same extent as in the ordinary world. Let us call the experiences offered by such machines 'active dreams'. In an active dream there are limits on what I can do, just as there are in the ordinary world. Because the point of an experience machine is to provide experiences that are as a whole more satisfactory than those of ordinary life, the limits on what I can do may be less restricting than they are now, but the constraints are still there, even if set in different places. Exceptional achievements by the standards of the active dream will require exceptional effort, determination or concentration.

Let us next have different people on different machines, which are all controlled by a synchronizer. The function of the synchronizer is to coordinate the different active dreams. You have a part to play in the experiences I have, and I have a part in yours. Our decisions affect the parts we play, not only in our own dreams, but in each other's. The synchronizer ensures that when you, in your active dream, come and see me. I experience a visit from you in my dream. Let us call the world presented in these synchronized active dreams the dreamworld. The synchronization involved in the dreamworld sets limits to the kinds of possible improvements over our ordinary world. This can be seen by asking the question whether people in the dreamworld would be able to act in ways that harm each other. If the answer is 'no', we are back with the drawbacks of behaviour control. We have lost a large range of possible choices, and have correspondingly lost some of the role our choices play in creating our own characteristics. (Being considerate, for instance, would no longer be a characteristic we could freely choose from among other possibilities. The difficulties parallel those in theological discussions of bow far God could have made a better world while allowing people freedom.) But suppose the answer is 'yes': that people would still be free to do normal things to each other. We can then see that many of the drawbacks of ordinary life would persist in the dreamworld, in a way that they would not in the simple103 experience machine. Although this sets limits to the improvement of life in the dreamworld, it does not rule out the possibility of Life still being much better than in the ordinary world. In the theological debate, even if we accept the arguments about human freedom offered by God's defence lawyers, we may still want to press questions about why He created earthquakes, diseases and other evils which are independent of human activity. And in creating the dreamworld, it is the experience of these independent evils which would be eliminated in order to make life there more attractive.

Suppose each person in a community is plugged into one of the machines and enters a dreamworld. How far does such a dreamworld meet the objections to the primitive version of the experience machine? It is tempting to say that all of them are met. The case for this is simple. I am, in the important ways, active. I take decisions in the dreamworld, and put them into effect there. The activity can be quite demanding, because of the constraints on what I can do. And it is not futile, as what I do makes a difference to other people, whose experiences will be affected. When we all enter the dreamworld, I can continue having relationships with the same people as before. There will be no need for a result machine, as I can do in the dreamworld all the things for others I intended to do in the ordinary world. If we retain memories of life before, and a reasonable continuity of character, entering the dreamworld will not be a kind of suicide. Since what I do in the dreamworld will depend a lot on my decisions, there will be scope for having particular characteristics. I can be intelligent or stupid, brave or cowardly, generous or mean. The decisions I take will largely determine the character I have.

When the case is put like this, the dreamworld seems merely to be a different environment, and the idea of having deep objections of principle to it seems no more sensible than having such objections to living in Madagascar. But it may be said that this representation of the dreamworld as a different environment in which I still do the same things is misleading. The objector will say that in the dreamworld we are not really doing things, but only having a kind of collective hallucination that we are active. He will say that the dreamworld, like the simple experience machine, is excellent from the internal perspective. But, from our external perspective, we rejected the simple experience machine because we prefer really doing things to having experiences as if we were104 doing them. The suggestion is that the dreamworld falls under the same objection: a flexible shared hallucination is still no adequate substitute for reality.

2 Is the Dreamworld Real?

The question of whether the dreamworld meets the objections to the simple experience machine depends on whether we count what goes on in it as really happening.Ifwe do, then the objections about activity, identity and other people are all met. But u we think that the dreamworld is just a shared hallucination, the objections about activity and identity are not all met. How should we decide whether or not the events in the dreamworld really are taking place?

Our normal tests for reality pull two ways here. On the one hand, we usually regard something as real u our own senses agree (it looks and feels like a brick wall) and if we have the support of other people, who say their experience fits with ours. In the dreamworld, we would be in contact with other people in the sense of centres of consciousness. Your thoughts would be communicated to roe, and rolne to you. U the arrangement included memories of how we entered the dreamworld by hooking up to the machine, and of our life before that, we could come to think of the normal world and the dreamworld merely as alternative environments. We might not regard either as unreal. But, on the other hand, the causal dependence of the dreamworld on the normal world, combined with the possibility of one day 'waking up', makes us inclined to think of the dreamworld as unreal. A 'world' that is created within, and dependent upon, another one (as the 'world' of a film or a play depends upon our everyday world) is not taken to be real.

The limitations imposed by this causal dependence seem particularly striking when we ask whether or not our projects in the dreamworld could include scientific research. We could have experiences as of being in laboratories and carrying out experiments, and we could think critically and theorize on the basis of the results we seemed to be getting. But, while we remain within the confines of the dreamworld, there is no question of us making empirical discoveries about the ordinary world on which the dreamworld depends. Our 'research' might consist in105 discovering things about the ordinary world already known to the dreamworld's programmer, but not known to us. Or it might consist in discovering things only 'true' in the dreamworld: solving puzzles set by the programmer, with no relevance to the ordinary world. At best it might consist in theorizing on the basis of true empirical data about the ordinary world, fed in by the programmer. On any of these interpretations, dreamscience seems a poor substitute for science, and this reduces our inclination to think of the dreamworld as real.

That inclination is further reduced by thoughts about having children. Suppose a couple and their present children, Adam, Benjamin and Rebecca, all decide to enter the dreamworld. Being able to communicate with each other, they may take the view that the dreamworld is just an alternative medium, no less real than the ordinary world. The couple decide to have more children, and soon the family has been augmented by Ingrid and Ingmar. The whole family knows about having entered the dreamworld, and they remember which things happened before they did so, and which things came afterwards. The parents sometimes have slight feelings of unease about Ingrid and Ingmar. These feelings might be related to the thought that Ingrid and Ingmar are only dreamchildren, not themselves plugged into a machine. When time is short, and Adam and Ingrid both want help with their homework, should they be given equal time? Or is there something wrong with diverting anything from the original children in order to be fair to Ingrid and Ingmar? Compared with the simple experience machine, the dreamworld has a superior claim to reality, partly because of the coherence of different people's experiences. Adam, Benjamin and Rebecca can share experiences and communicate with each other. But suppose the parents and two of the original children are unplugged, and so leave the dreamworld. Benjamin, the remaining original member, finds his experiences fit exactly with those reported by Ingrid and Ingmar. But he may find this less than completely reassuring.

The points about dreamscience and dreamchildren illustrate the central weakness in the dreamworld's claim to be real. Neither the science nor the children have any independent life of their own. They are products of the programme devised in the ordinary world. The causal dependence they illustrate makes us reluctant to concede the reality of events in the dreamworld.

I said that our tests pull both ways here. The dreamworld provides106 coherent experiences that different people share. On the other hand, these experiences are explained by their dependence on our ordinary world. When we focus on this dependence, the dreamworld seems no more real than the world of a film. But other reflections push us the other way. It is not like seeing a film from the cinema seat: it is like being a conscious participant in a film where the other characters are conscious too. And this is so unlike anything we have experienced before that we do not have a ready-made answer to the question of whether it is real. Perhaps in this sort of case. Ernest Nagel's inclination to ban the word 'real' has point. In ordinary life, the various tests we use to find out whether something is real rather than hallucinatory, imaginary, etc, normally converge on the same answer. But the dreamworld divides these tests. In doing so, it casts doubt on whether 'being real' is a unitary matter. We tend to assume that whether or not something is real is a fact, perhaps of a profound kind, for which the results of our tests are evidence. But perhaps there is no fact about the reality of the dreamworld beyond those results, ft may be that, when we know about the intersubjective coherence of the dreamworld, and about its causal dependence on the ordinary world, there is nothing more to know about its reality. Rather than trying to settle the issue of whether the borderline of the word 'real' should be drawn on one side or the other of the dreamworld, it may be more fruitful to ask what it is that makes the reality of things important to us.

3 Deception, and What We Want

When we want something, say friendship, this is not just a matter of wanting to have a (possibly false) belief that we have friends. Someone's brilliant and sustained pretence that be is my friend may be, from my point of view, subjectively indistinguishable from the reality. Yet, thinking about the question. I can separate the two possibilities, and have a strong preference for the reality over the pretence. This preference is very common. So. when we are given the subjective experiences that go with the thing desired, it does not follow that we have been given what we want.

A second, related, point is that in general we prefer not to be deceived. Where the world is not as we would wish, we are reluctant107 to make ourselves more cheerful at the cost of our beliefs becoming divorced from reality. There are cases where some of us do prefer deception, or at least ignorance. Perhaps some people would rather not know that their illness is fatal. But these cases, where 'human kind cannot bear very much reality'. only show that some fears or horrors are sufficient to override our normal preference for our beliefs being true and as complete as possible. Perhaps our general concern that our beliefs should not be divorced from reality is partly explained by our wish to avoid unpleasant shocks later, and even more by the importance of true beliefs in guiding effective action. Whatever the explanation, the resistance to distorted beliefs seems an important part of our psychology.

These two points count against the simple version of the experience machine. Many of our desires are not satisfied by it. If I want to make a substantial contribution to physics, my ambition is not realized by going on an experience machine which happens to be playing the 'Einstein' cassette. And the satisfaction involved depends on my having a whole system of false beliefs about being Einstein. But it is doubtful whether these points have any force against the dreamworld. This is because it is not clear that what goes on in the dreamworld is unreal. And so it may be that my desires to do various things are being realized, despite my being in the dreamworld. And, if so, there may be no false beliefs involved, especially if the dreamworld is an 'open' one, where I have full knowledge of having entered the dreamworld, and of my life previous to that. So unless there is some independent way of establishing its unreality, I may not be entitled to object that the dreamworld fails to satisfy my desires in general, or that it goes against my desire not to be deceived.

4 The Objection That the Dreamworld is Mind-Centred

Another source of resistance to the dreamworld, which may underlie criticisms of its 'unreality'. is that it is totally mind-centred. In the dreamworld, things only exist for consciousness, and there" is no room for anything having any value independent of its contribution to the life of some conscious mind. For many people, there are things whose value is not in this way mind-dependent, and so for them the dreamworld108 fails to accommodate all they care about. It is worth looking briefly at this line of thought, and at an opposed one, which can be called the mind-dependence view.

The disagreement is not a new one. Henry Sidgwick supported a version of the mind-dependence view when he said, No one would consider it rational to aim at the production of beauty in external nature, apart from any possible contemplation of it by human beings.1. The Methods of Ethics, Sixth Edition. 190 I. Book I. chapter 4. See also Book III. chapter 14. sections 4 and 5. And G. E. Moore took a strongly opposed view in his comment on Sidgwick:

(Moore puts the point in terms of human awareness, but it can be generalized to cover minds of any sort. And both Moore and Sidgwick discuss the issue in terms of rationality, which adds an extra complication. When that is eliminated, the mind-dependence issue remains.) It is hard to see bow to argue for or against the mind-dependence view when presented with Moore's alternatives. Neither Sidgwick nor Moore gives us much of an argument: Sidgwick tells us what he thinks no one would consider rational, while Moore tells us what he cannot help thinking. And Moore's thought experiment is problematic. If we feel disgust when we imagine the world full of filth, we may not be 109quite clear what this is a reaction to. If our imagining it involves having images, we may be disgusted by them (experiences we are having) rather than by the possibility of an unseen heap of filth. This is not to make some Berkeleyan point about the impossibility of imagining unperceived things, but to suggest that our discrimination between the different potential objects of our dislike may be too crude for the thought experiment to be reliable.

Perhaps neither Sidgwick nor Moore is irrational or confused. The question is about what we value, and we may not all agree. My sympathies are strongly on the side of Sidgwick here, being quite unmoved by any of the excellences of universes eternally empty of conscious life. But, like Sidgwick and Moore, I have no argument to prove the other attitude wrong. If, travelling in a train through the middle of a ten-mile railway tunnel, I saw a man leaning out of the window into the darkness, I might wonder what be was doing. If it turned out to be G. B. Moore spraying the walls of the tunnel with paint, because painted walls are better than unpainted ones, even if no one ever sees them, I should not be able to prove him irrational. But I should not accept his offer of the use of a second paint spray, except possibly out of politeness.

5 The Mind-Dependence View

The mind-dependence view is strongly opposed to Moore's position. On this view of value, minds are the centre of the universe. That is, the value of anything ultimately derives from its contribution to the lives of conscious minds. Two features of minds are relevant here. Minds have experiences. And minds care about things. The first feature is only important as a condition of the second.

It is important that minds have a subjective side. Take the children in the dreamworld. To use Thomas Nagel's phrase, there is 'something it is like' to be Adam, Benjamin or Rebecca. They know from the inside what it is like to play a game or think of a good joke. But there is nothing it is like to be Ingrid and Ingmar: they have no 'inside'. There is nothing more to them than their contributions to the experiences of the others. On the mind-dependence view, things can be good or bad because of their contribution to the lives of Adam, Benjamin or Rebecca.110 But, because Ingrid and Ingmar have no subjective side, mere relationship to them cannot alter the value of anything.

On this view, having subjective experiences is necessary for being a source of value, but it is not sufficient. Minds above a very primitive level have attitudes and responses to what they experience. It is because of this that they are sources of value. Consider a mind that never rose above mere consciousness. It might have a series of visual experiences, but no kind of attitude or emotional response to what it saw. It would be like a conscious television camera. There seems no reason why merely being observed by this mind should confer value on anything. So the mind-dependence view makes minds that care about things the centre of all value.

From this perspective, the rest of the body is a support system for the brain, and the brain is only important because of its connection with mental states. The ordinary world and the dreamworld are alternative media through which minds communicate. What matters is that there is some shared world, upon which minds can act, and through which they can make contact with each other.

To some people this will seem to involve an absurd downgrading of the body. To them it will seem a view that would only be put forward by some sedentary philosopher, who cared about thinking but not about physical activity. But this is a misunderstanding. The mind-dependence view supports no preference for the passive over the active. An athlete may opt for the dreamworld if the experiences involved in athletics are what he values. And the same applies to sex. A couple, having entered the dreamworld, would share all the experiences they now share. The issue is not the crude one suggested by opposing mental and physical activity. It is the more subtle question of what it is we value in activity of either kind. The mind-dependence view should not be confused with an egoistic version of it which could be called 'moral solipsism': the outlook which puts other people on a par with physical objects, so that they are only of value because of their relationship to my mind. This would put Adam. Benjamin and Rebecca on a par with Ingrid and Ingmar, all only of importance because of their role in my experiences and activities. To say that all value derives from the experiences and activities of minds is a variant of the view that, unlike things, people are ends in themselves. And this view does not single out any particular person as more important than others.

The mind-dependence view is not the mere platitude that things can only be valued by minds: that we care about things while trees and rocks do not. It is a claim about what things are of value, not about where valuing takes place. It is a claim that G. E. Moore disagrees with, while he has no need to deny that things are valued by minds. His mind values episodes in uninhabited universes, while some other minds do not. My own sympathies are closer to the mind-dependence view than to Moore's view. I would not attach any value to spraying the tunnel walls. This is because of a belief that some contribution to the life of a conscious mind that cares about things is a necessary condition of anything having value. But it does not follow that states of consciousness themselves are the only things of value. It is possible to believe that what matters is a set of conscious activities and relationships between minds, in a certain context. This can be brought out by considering a version of the 'mind-centred' objection to the dreamworld which seems persuasive.

6 Claustrophobia

It matters that the dreamworld is causally dependent on our present world. Dreamscience would not oe as good as science, and for the human race to settle for dreamscience would be like someone sticking his head into a bag for ever. The claustrophobia we feel at this prospect is because of the value we place on the open-ended quality of human history and human thought. We are part of a universe larger than ourselves, rather than one of our own creation. ( And so they tell us that Anaxagoras answered a man who was raising problems of this sort and asking why one should choose rather to be born than not - "For the sake of viewing the heavens and the whole order of the universe."3. Aristotle. Eudemian Ethlcs, 1216 a 11.) There is so much more to find out, and so much more to affect our lives in ways now unpredictable. We cut off all this if we retreat to a world of our own making, where our present limitations become the permanent boundaries of our world.

The importance of being able to transcend our present limitations, of having an open-ended future larger than ourselves, is not a value very near the surface of our consciousness. This is because we do live in a 112mainly unexplored and only partly understood universe. This value fits our actual position so well that we are not challenged to articulate it. It is a value brought to the surface by a threat such as the dreamworld. Things are good or bad because of their contribution to the activities and relationships of beings who are conscious and who care about what happens. So the development of consciousness has a central value. Perhaps when we have eliminated misery and horror from the world, the expansion of our consciousness will be our most important project. But this development of consciousness is not something private and passive, which could come from drugs or from the simple experience machine. It is bound up with contacts between people and with activity. It is not something enclosed, which could be provided by the dreamworld. It depends on our growing understanding of a world larger than we are, and on a future not limited by the way we see things now.

1 Cooperation and Expression

Some people like to work on their own and perhaps the calm absorption of a composer or a sculptor requires isolation. But part of the pleasure of many other kinds of work is cooperation in a shared enterprise. One ingredient of this is that companionship is something we like. But this is not all, as sharing work is often more satisfying than working while someone else stands beside you making conversation. Another aspect is the importance to people of gaining the respect of others doing similar work. Even a sculptor or composer may be glad to work near to others so that mutual criticism and encouragement is possible. And people take pleasure in the shared success of a collaborative enterprise. Because these things are important to us, it matters that work should not all be broken down into isolated components. We do not all envy the tranquil job of a lighthouse keeper.

It is also important to our sense of our own autonomy that, as far as possible, we take the decisions about our work ourselves. The case 116for workers' control, for decentralization, and for smaller units, is a familiar one. The importance of these things for making work satisfying is obvious, and needs no further emphasis here.

We care about autonomy in most aspects of our lives, but work is one of the areas where it is most important. This is because satisfying work is not just productive, but is also a means of self-expression. We often hope, through our work, to make some difference to the world. And tied in with this is the hope that the difference will somehow express our particular characteristics. This is not to say that most of us have grandiose fantasies about making a difference on the scale of Mao Tse-Tung, Henry Ford, Einstein or Picasso. It is rather that, just as we are familiar with the way in which the work of even a minor artist is self-expressive, so we should recognize the importance of this for many other kinds of people. Self-expression may be just as central to the work of doctors, carpenters, teachers, gardeners, lawyers, builders, civil servants, nurses, industrialists and chefs. Studs Terkel, in his book Working,2. Working. Harmondsworth, 1977. quotes someone with the apparently unpromising job of a parking-lot attendant:

2 The Journey, Not the Arrival

Self-expression requires that work makes demands on us. Although in many of us there is the countervailing drag of laziness, we often prefer more demanding to less demanding activities. As John Rawls puts it, Human beings enjoy the exercise of their realized capacities (their innate or trained abilities), and this enjoyment increases the more the capacity is realized, or the greater its complexity.3. A Theory of justice, Oxford, 1972. p. 426. Rawls points out that Aristotle and Mill made similar remarks. And, as Rawls 117also indicates, greater complexity allows greater development and expression of personal style: chess allows for more of this than checkers (draughts). But constraints which demand effort can be as important here as the complexity needed to give scope for personal style. We may feel a need to be stretched, so that our commitment and determination find expression, as well as our tastes and style. It would be frustrating rather than exciting to have divine or magical powers, so that a gesture could bring about anything we wanted. There would be no satisfaction in something which, demanding no effort or skill, gave nothing to push against.

Because of this, it is a mistake to think even of those activities which give little room for the expression of personal style only in terms of results. The saying that the journey, not the arrival, matters, may apply to them too. There is an illustration of this in Tove Jansson's agreeable series of children's books about Moomins. One of the characters in the early book Comet in Moominland is a Hemulen who regards everything else in life as a series of tiresome interruptions to his main activity of collecting stamps. His absorption keeps him happy, in a mildly cantankerous way. In the next book, Finn Family Moomintroll, the Hemulen appears again as a very miserable character. His collecting has been so successful that he has made the transition from being a collector to being the owner of a complete stamp collection. This ruins his life until someone puts him on to collecting plants.

3 Results and Replacement

Although the results of work are not everything, they can still be important. We often care that what we do makes a difference to the world. Think of being a train driver, about to be replaced by a robot control, but whose job is saved by the union. The new arrangement is that you sit operating the levers, but the robot operates an identical set. Most of the time your decisions agree with those of the robot, but where they do not, the robot levers override yours. This work would seem intolerable because it transparently makes no difference to the world, and is at the same time not sufficiently interesting or demanding to be done, like a sport, for its own sake.

We know that there are machines able to out-perform us, not just at 118simple skills, but also at many complex ones. Some people argue that the highest intellectual feats could never be duplicated by a machine. Whether or not this is true, it is clear that so far we have handed over only a fraction of the mental tasks where they could replace us. Some of the scientific discoveries we take most pride in might have come more easily to suitably programmed machines. (Interpreting X-ray pictures of DNA as a double helix is a case in point.) We can imagine the stage where discoveries come more quickly if a scientist just thinks up the ideas, and leaves a team of computers to do the research. The final point is where the machine turns out to be better than the human brain even at having the ideas and thinking up the research programme.

Perhaps the whole of science will become a field where we are redundant. We could do the work, but the computer sitting next to us would be quicker and better. We enjoy research, so we might decide not to make such machines. (Although the physical presence of the computer makes a psychological difference, the position is essentially the same if we know how to make it, but decide not to do so.) We may keep a lot of intellectual activity for ourselves, but it will be a kind of sport. The computer could solve a problem, but, as we find it enjoyable, we do it ourselves.

This kind of redundancy might not seem important. People who try to improve their tennis are not worried by the thought that some tennis playing machine might be much better than they are. (Two such machines might keep up a rally for ever, but after a while the spectators might start to lose interest.) Most scientists are now, as individuals, replaceable by other people. Some great feats of the scientific imagination may not be Like this, but in much of science, if one team bad not found something out, the overwhelming probability is that some other group would have done. The fact that most scientists are unworried by their replaceability is encouraging. Perhaps, when we have become replaceable, we will adapt to the idea that the exercise of skill is something done for its own sake. We can imagine a mixed policy, where discoveries urgently needed for eliminating some disease would be made more rapidly by machines, while theoretically more absorbing fields with less urgent applications, such as astronomy, would be left for our intellectual sport. (In all this. I assume we do not consider our highly intelligent machines to be conscious, and so do not worry about giving them a fair share of interesting work.)

Our concern to make a difference, to contribute something to the world, is not always threatened by the possibility of replacement. Some painters, novelists, poets, musicians and a few others are in their professional life irreplaceable. For many others, the work they do could be done by someone else, and yet it can still seem satisfying enough. If I help some friends shovelling snow, everything I contribute would have been brought about by the others if I had not been there. Yet, although I am replaceable, I can still feel the satisfaction of making a contribution. What I contribute means that less work is needed from the others. In the case of the replaceable pieces of scientific research, the claim must be that my doing it, while not lightening anyone's burden, releases other scientists to do different work. But this will no longer apply when all the work can be done by available machines. Then the claim about making a difference will have to be scaled down to the more modest one that the end is desirable, whether or not it could be brought about without me.

If our desire to contribute is partly to make a contribution which is in principle unique, this is already unrealistic for most of us, outside relationships. Our present machines' great-grandchildren will only make this far clearer. We will still be able to contribute in the limited sense of doing something which is wanted, even if our doing it is replaceable. The more grandiose picture, of being irreplaceable in principle, will have to be confined almost entirely to relationships. And, even in relationships, our unique contribution is threatened if we contemplate the science-fiction possibility of producing new people who are, in every detail, even down to apparent memories, duplicates of existing people. Confronted with this possibility, some people are tempted by a very strong form of belief in irreplaceability. This is the thought that our contribution to the world depends on something other than our, perhaps reproducible, empirical pattern of abilities and character traits. This rests on the idea that I am a disembodied self, which could have 'owned' a totally different set of physical and psychological characteristics. It also presupposes that this self contributes something additional to the contribution made by the set of empirical characteristics that belong to it. So the science-fiction duplicates of me, having all my physical and psychological features, will not be able to substitute for me in relationships, because they will not be me. But, sadly for this most ambitious form of the desire to make a unique contribution, the whole line of thought 120is misguided. The theory of the disembodied self, detachable from all empirical characteristics, is irredeemably obscure. Even if we could understand the idea, such a self, just as a result of having no empirical features, could make no detectable impact on the world.

There seems little reason why we should ever want to produce duplicate persons. But there are obvious reasons for producing machines which match or surpass our skills. If we think of this possibility only, it is clear that our conception of ourselves as making a unique contribution will need to be modified. The sphere of our uniqueness will be relationships. Work and relationships overlap, but, apart from this, almost all work will be in the sphere of replaceability. It will be done for its intrinsic enjoyment, rather than because our participation is essential, rts satisfactions will be all those which do not depend on inflated beliefs about our own indispensability.

4 Circles

Part of the anxiety about replaceability is the fear that it may make our work meaningless. The train driver, whose job is reduced to acting redundantly in parallel with the robot, may rightly feel that his working life has become pointless. It starts to resemble the circular life of Sisyphus, condemned for ever to roll a stone to the top of a hill, where it rolls down for him to start his labour again. But activity may not become meaningless simply because of the possibility of replacement. The work of the train driver and of Sisyphus have a special futility, setting them apart from many other jobs where we could be replaced. Perhaps Watson and Crick, in discovering the structure of DNA. were doing what we could now make a machine do. We do not as a result class their work with that of Sisyphus. Replaceability and futility are not the same. What is the difference?

Variety is important to us. Part of what is terrible about Sisyphus is the extreme narrowness of the circle he is confined to. And it makes a difference to the train driver's life if he is on a varied and beautiful mountain route with many complex junctions, or if he is on the Circle Line on the London underground. But where the fundamental activity is pointless, variety is only a mitigation, and not a redemption. The work of Sisyphus becomes more tolerable if each hill is a new one, with 121obstacles needing new kinds of ingenuity. But it would still be discouraging to be advised to take it up as a career.

It also makes a difference if what we are doing is a contribution to something larger than ourselves. Sticking stamps on thousands of envelopes may not seem a task for Sisyphus if we know it is helping the Church or the Party. Work may have more point if it fits into some great cause. But the larger context is not always necessary. A family spends a few days cycling on Romney Marsh. TWs is not part of a larger project. It is quite enough that it is something they want to do. TWs suggests that perhaps what stops activity being futile is simply that we want to do it. From an unsympathetic perspective, anyone's life can look like that of Sisyphus. We eat and rest in order to be able to work, and we work in order to earn money for food and rest, and so on. The circles of our lives may seem to differ from those of Sisyphus only in complexity. But this is an unsympathetic description, and what it leaves out is our wanting to do many of the activities that come up in the circle.

TWs tine of thought has been developed by Richard Taylor.4. In Good and Evil. New York. 1970. chapter 18. He suggests that we consider a modified version of the life of Sisyphus. In this, Sisyphus has a compulsive desire to roll stones. Taylor at first seems sympathetic to the view that this does not give any more point to what is still the same endless cycle of futile activity. But later he says that this version of Sisyphus should not be dismissed so briskly. He suggests that our lives are like that of Sisyphus, but that, 'at the same time, the strange meaningfulness they possess is that of the inner compulsion to be doing JUSt what we were put here to do, and to go on doing it for ever'.

This idea, that the point of an activity must ultimately come from our own desires and interests, is right. In many cases, the criticism that what someone is doing is pointless can be met by the reply that he simply wants to do it. And, even where an activity is given point by its contribution to something larger than ourselves, not any larger project will do. As Thomas Nagel has pointed out, our lives would not seem to have more point if we discovered that other beings were rearing us for food.5. "The Absurd". Journal of Philosophy 1971. reprinted in his Mortal Questions. Cambridge. 1979. The larger context has to be one we can identify with or 122endorse. Isolated actions or larger projects are only saved from futility by our wanting to carry them out. But our desires, while necessary, are not sufficient.

5 Negative Circles

That our wanting to do something may not save it from futility can be seen by considering the melancholy account of human motivation given by Pascal. He said,

Pascal is persuasive about our preferring the bunt to the capture, and perhaps hustle and bustle are partly means of avoiding staying quietly in our room. He is less convincing that gaming, feminine society, war and high office are popular only as a distraction from thoughts of death. We have other motives too. But let us think what it would be like if Pascal were right in saying that the only good thing for men 123is to be diverted from thinking of what they are. Our only motives for action would be negative. We would want to do all the things we now want to do, but only to kill time. We would bunt, make love, fight battles or compete for office, but only to deaden the pain of consciousness. These activities would be as desirable as taking an aspirin to deaden a headache. Our state would be on a par with that of someone for whom we might now think death a mercy: a person in such pain that his whole life is devoted to maintaining his supply of a drug. That kind of life is pointless. So the fact that we want to do things is not enough. The desire must be positive, not the negative aim of avoiding something disliked. If the circles of our life were only motivated by negative desires, we would be no worse off unconscious, or even dead.

To avoid futility, positive desires are necessary: but they are not sufficient. Sisyphus, modified by the compulsive desire to roll stones, may not feel as optimistic about his life as Richard Taylor does. If be is happy to have this dominant desire, he will perhaps think his activity worthwhile. But be may not identify with the desire. He may try psychoanalysis or behaviour therapy to get rid of it. Where we are motivated by a positive desire, but the desire itself is one we would as soon be rid of as satisfy, we have only a more subtle version of a negative circle. What we do may seem as pointless as in the cruder version.

We need positive desires, and they must be ones we can identify with. There is the view that even this is not enough to silence doubts about whether our activities have any point. One such line of thought is expressed by Thomas Nagel. He says that humans have the special capacity to step back and survey themselves, and the lives to which they are committed, with that detached amazement which comes from watching an ant struggle up a heap of sand. Without developing the illusion that they are able to escape from their highly specific and idiosyncratic position, they can view it sub specie aeternitatis &emdash; and the view is at once sobering and comical. Nagel explains how this scepticism about our lives arises: We step back to find that the whole system of justification and criticism, which controls our choices and supports our claim to rationality, rests on responses and habits that we never question, and that we should not know how to defend without circularity, and to which we shall continue to adhere even after they are called into question.7. Nagel, op. cit.

It is true that justifications have to come to an end somewhere. Every one of our beliefs, whether about what is worth doing or about what the world is like, can be questioned. And, in defending it, we have to draw on the resources of other parts of our system of beliefs. If you question my belief that smoking causes cancer, l will give you some evidence. If you doubt that the issue should be settled by evidence, I may have to explain the role of evidence in science, and mention the success of science in telling us what the world is like. But if you share none of these beliefs, either about the world, or about bow to investigate it, evidence and reasoning will make no impact on you. I will be unable to convince you. Scepticism about all the beliefs someone holds gives him no possibility of defending his system.

The same applies to doubts about our beliefs about what is worthwhile. If we construct a detached perspective from which to view those beliefs, we will be unable to defend them against scepticism from that position. But perhaps this should not worry us. This perspective has been constructed precisely by eliminating all beliefs that anything is worth doing. It is a possible perspective, just as scepticism about all our scientific beliefs is. But the mere possibility of a sceptical perspective need not move us at all. A painter may know some philistine person who thinks all art is rubbish. This gives him no reason to weaken his own commitment to painting. We need defer to some other view only where it reveals some limitation or bias in our own. This holds for the sceptical view of our activities only if our own commitments are limitations or biases. The case for seeing all our concerns as being limited or biased by comparison with an attitude of total detachment needs more supporting argument than it has ever been given.

We can escape from a negative circle by having some positive desires that we identify with. And a life which escapes in this way from being merely negative need not have its point undermined by the possibility of a totally detached viewpoint. But it does not follow from this that any such life will seem worthwhile from our own present position. This can be seen by considering another variant of Sisyphus.

The original Sisyphus bad a life of bell, condemned for ever to roll stones. Sisyphus Mark Two was not so straightforwardly in Hell, as he wanted to roll stones. But be was still trapped in a negative circle if be would have preferred to give up both the desire and the activity. Sisyphus Mark Three escapes from a negative circle. Genetic engineering, 125or behaviour therapy, has made him the kind of person who both wants to roll stones and is pleased to have this dominant desire. Although be escapes from the negative circle, his life is not one which we, with our values, need admire. From our point of view, there is still nothing much to be said for trying to become like him, and much to be said against it.

6 Systems

We have seen some of the values implicit in the idea of worthwhile work. They are cooperation, self-expression, being stretched, and making a contribution to the world. Underlying these is the idea of activity performed for its own sake, motivated by a positive desire with which we can identify. These values can play two roles in decisions about our future. They can be just an uplifting irrelevance, like talk about 'improving the quality of life' tacked on to a political manifesto. Or they can be taken seriously, in the belief that whether human activity can avoid being futile is of some importance. If taken seriously, they change the debate about the aims of an economic system.

Some familiar issues about economic growth have been at the centre of that debate. Critics stress the social and environmental costs of growth, and the pressure put on scarce resources. They sometimes also question whether more goods lead to greater happiness. Defenders of growth say it is necessary for better housing, for better standards in health and education, and for the elimination of poverty. The debate often takes place at a primitive level, because it is assumed that the only choices are to be 'for' or 'against' growth.

The first step towards a more sophisticated discussion is to distinguish between different components of growth. If cars are made to last only half their present lifespan, twice as many may be sold. This is growth, but there may be no benefit to anyone. But growth can also include the mass production of equipment needed for medical diagnosis, which may make us healthier or save our lives. As one of the aims of an economic policy, growth directed towards what people want is more defensible than random growth.

The second step is to recognize that some of the hopes people place in economic growth are self-defeating. This is because, as Fred Hirsch 126has argued8. Social Limits to Growth, London. 1977., the value to us of some of the things we want depends on not many other people having them. The value of a weekend cottage in the country depends on how much the view is spoilt by other people having weekend cottages. If higher education is partly valued as a route to the best jobs, its value will be reduced if it is made available to more people. This 'social scarcity', as Hirsch calls it, applies not only to the products of an economic system, but also to other things people want, such as high status. (Imagine the project of expanding Who's Who to include everyone.) Hirsch argues that, as well as material goods, there are 'positional goods': those which in this way depend on what other people have. The suggestion is that many of the things people want from economic growth are unrecognized positional goods, and that this is why the results of growth often seem less satisfying than was hoped. As Hirsch puts it. 'if everyone stands on tiptoe, no one sees better'. So, In deciding what to create more of, we have to avoid self-defeating attempts to give everyone benefits which are positional. Once a system is set up, it can be rational for each person to compete within it. If a PhD. is made a requirement for the best jobs, each of us has a motive for writing a thesis we might otherwise think pointless. And demand for graduate places creates pressure for more to be funded. Although each of us has a reason to participate, it would be better if the whole cycle had never started. We are worse off when we all end up on tiptoe.

It is possible for an economic system to avoid self-defeating goals, and to be directed towards giving people what they want, and yet to be open to the criticism of futility. This is made more likely when the system not only satisfies desires, but also shapes them. We can imagine a society where people in their role as producers are persuaded by financial inducements and by 'personnel managers' to want to produce goods, which the same people in their role as consumers are then persuaded by advertising to want to buy. (Imagine?)

This production-consumption circle is one where most activity would have merely instrumental value. Working for money, and buying things because we think they will impress the neighbours, we would come close to what Bertrand Russell once called 'worldliness'. He wrote, in a letter to Colette Malleson, I want to stand… against worldliness, which consists of doing everything for the sake of something else, like marrying 127for money instead of love. The essence of life is doing things for their own sakes…9. Quoted in Ronald W. Clark: The Life of Bertrand Russell. Harmondsworth. 1978. p. 436.

A satisfactory economic system must at least avoid this kind of 'worldliness': there must be some things and activities desired and chosen for their own sakes. And there are requirements beyond this: the desires must be ones that people are glad to have. Otherwise they are in a negative circle, like Sisyphus Mark Two. And, even where those in a society identify with their desires, this may not be enough to persuade us, viewing it from outside, that the system is a good one. We may still regard it as a case of Sisyphus Mark Three. But at least such a society satisfies the minimum condition, that what people do has some justification beyond being a contribution to a negative circle.

7 Transcending the Economic Problem

Wars and over-population, as Keynes saw, may stop us solving the economic problem. Both can (at least) keep us back where we are now, with most of the human race having lives below any acceptable material minimum.

Even if we avoid war, limit our population, and find abundant resources, we can still prolong the economic problem. We may fail to see positional goods for what they are, and so demand production of more of the things which leave us still frustrated when we have them. Or, even if we understand about social scarcity, we can prolong the economic problem by locking ourselves into a system requiring the endless generation of new desires for goods.

II we reach the stage where, in material terms, everyone has an acceptable life, we will not thereby have eliminated the economic problem. That will require a further decision. We will be able to choose whether to prolong or to transcend that problem. Because we can always create new demands for goods, it is possible for the whole future of our species to centre round the cycle of production and consumption. The alternative is to relegate goods to the background, and to make activities and relationships the central focus of life. The boring, unsatisfying tasks would be given to machines. But, although machines could replace us, we 128would not hand over those things which we like doing for their intrinsic satisfaction. Economics would be largely about arranging things so that people could express themselves in freely chosen work. The decision to shift the emphasis from goods to activity is not the kind to be taken by some government on a particular day. Rather it may slowly emerge as attitudes change. But if we do take that decision, the obsession with 'standard of living' will then be over, and the liberated stage of our history will begin.

1 Self-Development and Self-Expression

We care about what sort of people we are, wanting to have skills or personal qualities some of which we could not have on the simple experience machine. We do not want individuality to be curbed by the sorts of pressures that could arise in a world where we were transparent to each other. But it is not just a matter of wanting to have certain characteristics, and particularly ones that mark us off from other people. We want our development, at least in part, to be a reflection of our own choices and values. At each stage of Life, we are partly the creation of our earlier selves. This is something we value, and do not want to hand over to benevolent controllers, whether human or mechanical, whether they use brain stimulation or drugs to alter our desires or experiences. On the other hand, this is a reason for welcoming technology giving us greater control over our own desires.

This project of self-creation is expressed in activity. This is why work is important to us in ways that go beyond its economic results. To express ourselves, we need control over what we do, in a way that is impossible for the passive consumer of a programme on the simple experience machine. And the activity has to be wanted for its own sake rather than part of a negative circle: there is tittle self-expression in taking an aspirin to avoid a headache. And the further requirement, that the positive desire is one we identify with, is also bound up with self-expression. A desire we would as happily eliminate as satisfy plays no part in our project of self-creation.

2 Contact and Variety

We mind about having contact with other people to such an extent that, for some of us, this alone is enough to rule out the simple experience machine, however great its other advantages. And, whatever133 reservations we have about a world of transparent relationships, some of us can see real advantages in the shared understanding it would bring.

We value not only contact with others, but also activity that is shared, where we can contribute to each other's projects. But we also want their projects very often not to overlap with ours, perhaps even to conflict with ours, because we want many different styles of life and ways of seeing the world to exist and be expressed. We are not attracted by cloning, or by any world where psychological technology has increased conformity. And our relationships with each other depend on the interlocking of our individual responses (shared or contrasting). So we are wary of drugs designed to 'improve' our emotional state in detachment from our beliefs and our perception of things.

3 The Development of Consciousness

Consciousness is central to our system of values, but is focused on a world outside itself. Blissful states of consciousness are not all we care about. We resist the simple experience machine because we do not want to have beliefs that are systematically false. Even the dreamworld seems stilling because we want a world bigger than ourselves to explore. But consciousness is the centre of value. We do not value an uninhabited world, of whatever size and complexity. We want a world transcending ourselves because of the opportunity it gives for the development of our awareness and understanding, in ways now unpredictable.

(As the writer of this book on philosophy, I feel unease about a value system giving such prominence to intellectual activity. So many people think the universe centres on what they do. The possibilities of professional deformation and self-deception are obvious. Sometimes it seems that interest in philosophy, literature, the arts, or the more theoretical parts of science is a luxury: the product of a material comfort not shared by most of the people in the world. Relative freedom from material worries, which lets people write books, is the product of other people's work. Even if conditions down mines have changed, George Orwell's point remains true:

Writers, philosophers and artists eat food that others have grown and use energy that others have worked to provide, and perhaps do not think enough about the value of what is given back. This line of thought tends to push intellectual activity low down the list of priorities, as the marginal luxury of the comfortable. But I hope that some of the considerations suggested by the thought experiments will partly check this tendency. These activities are not a dispensable frill, but are central to some of the values that give life a focus and a centre, once basic needs for food, shelter and health have been satisfied. Some of the values—relationships between men and women, parents and children, which can be of a quite unintellectual kind—are at least as important. But even here, relationships change with ways of thinking and seeing. So, if writers and others do interesting work, perhaps something is given back. Though this too may be self-deception.)

Suppose Stone Age men had been given an opportunity to have the happiest life they could imagine, but at the cost of giving up any chance of further intellectual or emotional development. (The choice could not have been put to them in these terms, but this does not affect the point.) We may think, from our perspective, that accepting this offer would have been a disaster far beyond anything they could understand. And, when we consider handing over control of our brains to machines designed by us now, we cannot tell what expansion of consciousness we are giving up. But we can understand that there is such a loss, and so we are reluctant to accept any modern equivalent of the Stone Age offer. We hope that machines will liberate us from the cycle of production and consumption. But we want to be liberated for, not from, new kinds of activity and understanding.

4 Beyond Conservatism about Human Nature

With each of the technologies considered, whether genetic engineering or the developments in the thought experiments, there are many obvious surface objections and dangers. Genetic engineering may involve mistakes or large-scale accidents. Brain technology may involve exploitation by bad governments or for profit.

Below these obvious surface objections is often a conservatism about human nature, which was rejected in the discussion of genetic engineering. Suppose we give up this idea that any major change in what we are like is to be resisted. We then open up possibilities of behaviour control, thought reading, brain stimulation and other such techniques. It is by looking at the deeper reasons for the mixture of fear and occasional hope which these inspire that we come on values whose defence is not mere conservatism. It is not just any aspect of present human nature that is worth preserving. Rather it is especially those features which contribute to self-development and self-expression, to certain kinds of relationships, and to the development of our consciousness and understanding. And some of these features may be extended rather than threatened by technology. This applies to devices where we operate directly on the brain to alter our own desires.

If these are some of our values, we can be guided by them in welcoming or opposing the developments scientists will offer us. We may for once have some idea of what we do and do not want before the technology is irreversibly with us. Yet there is a remaining source of unease. These, perhaps, are our values. But genetic engineering and the other techniques open up the possibility of producing a world of people with very different values. We may not like some of these possible worlds. But their inhabitants might prefer them. To what extent should decisions about future generations be taken in the light of our present values and outlook? This is the question of the last part of the book.