Substance dualism is a view about the mind claiming that an immaterial substance (the mind, or, sometimes, the soul) exists in a way that is over and above the physical goings-on to which it is connected. Substance dualism is often, but not always, associated with theistic view of a Christian afterlife, as ‘survival’ of the destruction of one’s body might be plausible in light of it.
Nozick presents in his paper “The Experience Machine” a machine that can give its user the experience of anything he or she wishes.[1] If you choose to experience being a professional golfer for a year, you will enter the machine and have a year-long experience of being a professional golfer, after which you will return to your regular life. Nozick’s hypothesis is that no person should wish to use the experience machine, on the grounds that we value doing things, which it does not provide; it does not contribute to your qualities as a person (that is, you will not develop any relationships or real-world knowledge in the machine); it does not provide “actual contact” with the world; and you are essentially an “indeterminate blob” trapped by the machine.
With the substance dualist’s conception of the mind, one could say that Nozick’s experience machine provides experience to your mind, but not to your body. However, this difference is not sufficient to make Nozick’s hypothesis compelling. Indeed, Nozick later offers the “transformation machine,” which transforms you into any person with any life you wish to have, and he maintains his hypothesis that you should not wish to enter the machine. What’s the point of life if anything you wish for can happen in a snap, and no desire goes unsatisfied?
Nozick’s hypothesis might then be stated (in substance-dualist vocabulary) as: your mind and body’s participation in real experiences in the real world is the only thing you can rationally pursue as valuable experience. Or: a person S has valuable experience if and only if S has a mind and a body and is in direct contact with the external world. A mind’s participation in experiences without the body is likened to complete immobility and disability of all of one’s senses while receiving periodic squirts of dopamine: superficially pleasurable, but ultimately dismal.
Seen this way, the Christian afterlife seems to me rather undesirable. Considering that one’s body has been destroyed and that one is not interacting with the external world, from this way of seeing it, the value of the experience of the Christian afterlife disappears. If the experiences we value depend on the mind, the body, and the real world, what do we desire of the afterlife?
One possibility is that the Christian afterlife is designed in such a way to make the mind (or soul) alone sufficient for valuable experience. This solution, however, still subverts Nozick’s conception of valuable experience, allowing a lifelong (pleasurable) comatose dream to be considered a ‘good life.’
The believer in the Christian afterlife might further argue that earthly valuable experience is of a different type from valuable experience. My response is that heavenly valuable experience could in that instance not be properly evaluated from an earthly perspective. One could not rationally call it desirable, as words like “value” and “experience” are stripped of meaning.
Under the substance dualist’s conception of mind (or soul), Nozick’s thought experiment shows a strong argument that the Christian afterlife cannot be justifiably desired, as its experience is either valueless or is possibly valuable but is so in such a way that to claim to desire it is to render it incompatible with our known values.
[1] Nozick, Robert. “The Experience Machine,” from Introducing Philosophy through Film. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.
*This is an informal paper I wrote for a non-philosophy class.
