Visualising the Realism of Life and Actuality

In the fourth episode of the first season of the animated series, Rick and Morty, the Zigerion Scammers have kidnapped Rick, Morty, and Morty’s father, Jerry (they don’t know they have been kidnapped) and placed them in a virtual simulation of the earth. In this virtual earth, pop tarts are sentient creatures living in toasters and driving around in miniature toasters, and human beings are no different from robots - living programmed lives with computerised responses to interactions and glitchy motor sensors (stupid Zigerions. If you’re going to trick people into believing the simulated world they live in is real, at least have great CGI with heightened attention to detail!). Anyway, these three individuals are living in a simulated replica of the world, and no one knows this except Rick.
Rick then convinces Morty that he too isn’t living in the world he thinks he’s living in and Morty after much doubt, realises this. And so our heroic duo of eccentric supergenius grandfather and his often-perplexed but very reliable sidekick of a grandson embark on a mission to save humanity and prevent the Zigerions from succeeding in their mission: to steal Rick’s universally-famed concentrated dark matter recipe.

Meanwhile, as our heroes go about doing heroic stuff, Jerry is driving to a sales pitch, getting ready for possibly the biggest day of his career as he prepares to pitch what he believes is the next best one-liner ad copy since "Got milk?" His anxiety levels are off the charts. Eventually, he gets to the boardroom, pitches his idea to the executives, and gets a resounding unanimous, "Yes". He is stunned and over the moon. He goes home to have the best sex of his life with his simulated wife (of course he is completely unaware of this), and the next day at work, he goes to pay his boss a visit in his office to talk about deserving an award for his clever one-liner copy. To his utter amazement, his boss responded in the affirmative. He can’t believe his luck. Soon after, he is standing on a stage in front of an audience of co-workers and executives giving an acceptance speech when his accolade and the audience give away to an empty metal chamber in a spaceship - the real environment he had been in all this while, upon which all the people and experiences of his day had been layered.

Rick and Morty, in the end triumph over the Zigerians, and all is restored to normal. Jerry is bummed that the euphoric day he had was all a lie to which Rick in an attempt to comfort him, said:

In 1974, Robert Nozick in his book Anarchy, State, and Utopia proposed a thought experiment. He crafted this thought experiment as a rebuttal to hedonism’s claims that pleasure was the ultimate good. Nozick’s thought experiment was about a hypothetical device he called the Experience Machine (also Pleasure Machine), which simulates a reality of perpetual pleasure for whoever uses it. The question Nozick posed to his reader was, if given a choice, would you choose the machine over real life?
If you’re anything like me, you like to live life to the fullest. You like to explore, to try new things, to learn, grow, and just experience life to the max. If you’re like me and you prioritise your happiness as your ultimate ambition, constantly seeking avenues to maximise your pleasure and minimise your pain, then you’re a hedonist, and Nozick came up with this thought experiment for people like you and me.
Nozick’s reasoning was that if you believe that pleasure is the ultimate good, shouldn’t the realness of that pleasure matter at least? Of course, when in the experience machine, you get to live any kind of life you want. You can be rich, famous, powerful, sexy, even fuck your celebrity crush - anything at all. And you won’t even know that none of it is real. The difference between actually doing these things and merely having the experience of them is indistinguishable in the experience machine. It should be like the holy grail to a hedonist. But Nozick believed that most people still wouldn’t plug into the machine. He says that this is because there is some inherent value in reality itself, even in the midst of all the chaos and calamities that come with it. He said that we want to do to certain things and be certain things, and rather than just having a mere experience of being or doing these things. That the value of existing was in the tangibility of it, not just how much pleasure came with it.
But tell that to the religious folks who dedicate their entire lives to living according to the tenets of their religion so they can gain eternal life in paradise. Taking as an example the Bible’s account of the kingdom of heaven, we would be like angels and have no need for the physical pleasures that our human bodies have got so accustomed to. If that is the case, then life in heaven is no different from the experience machine, is it? Those who make it there are living in a world of eternal bliss but with no actual sensations to revel in. How is that any different from simply experiencing the pleasure of doing something but without actually doing it?

But why should we care much for reality? For all we know, the reality each of us currently lives in could as well be fake. Bertrand Russell explained the concept of what epistemologists call Global Doubt through a thought experiment he called the Five Minute Hypothesis. He suggested that we could be living in a universe that was only created five minutes ago by an intentional designer who made everything such that we would all believe the universe is billions of years old, and planted false memories of our entire lifetimes in our minds to make us believe we’ve been alive for years. If this is true, we really have no way of knowing it, much less disproving it. But whether or not it’s true wasn’t Russell’s contention. The question for him was, does it matter?

René Descartes also expounded this concept through his idea that we could all be living in a false reality created by an evil genius who has implanted us with the false idea that everything we’re experiencing is real — sort of like in the movie, The Matrix. In Descartes’ opinion though, reality mattered, and he embarked on a person journey of radical skepticism which led him to come up with the iconic phrase “cogito ergo sum”.

I can’t say I care much for whether or not my life is real. I’ll hook myself up to that machine one hundred times over and bask in the euphoria of the undetectable intangibility of my existence. If like Jerry I experienced that short-lived false reality, I would cherish it for the rest of my life because for me, the mere experience of living my dreams, even for a day, far supercedes living in a lees-than-ideal reality. This perspective is best elucidated, in my opinion, by Cypher from the movie The Matrix when he said, while dining in a simulated restaurant:

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