Is it Better to Exist?
The old Experience Machine example is becoming popular again; I keep seeing people refer to it. The idea is this. The Experience Machine is an offer to have any experiences you want to have, for the rest of your life. Then at the end, you painlessly die. The experiences will be as great as you want: a professional football quarterback, say, whose team wins the Super Bowl; CEO of a Fortune 500 company with three homes and four successful children; or, if you prefer alternative lifestyles, you could be a monk in a simple monastery who says prayers seven times a day, takes care of the garden, and attends to the needs of other monks as you all age. It’s your choice: any experiences you want you can have. The deal is: none of these experiences will be real. The Experience Machine will make you think and feel that you are having these experiences, but in reality you will be in some sort of cocoon. You won’t know it; you will think that the “experiences” you are having are real. This is because, from the moment you enter the Experience Machine, you will forget you are in it; you will have only your “experiences.” But these won’t be really happening. The question is: Will you enter the Experience Machine? And if not, why not?
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This thought experiment was around long before the Matrix films; it is usually attributed to Robert Nozick, a philosopher of the last century. In contemporary terms, his point is that there is a difference between “virtual reality” and reality; that the virtual version is not real. The difference, however, is not in what you think or feel but simply in the fact that merely virtual experiences are not real experiences. Reality occurs with our embodied selves in the world God created.
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This is a deep question about being human, and although it is only a recent possibility that we have the technology to make (sort of) “virtual reality,” the questions are very old. Pondering Jesus’ resurrection, Christians came to understand (in line with much Jewish thought) that life after death will not be the life of a mere soul (i.e. “virtual”) but rather embodied life.
I used to think this could be any old body: that God would give me a new body made of whatever he wanted. But along the way I learned that Aquinas insists: the resurrection body needs to have “material continuity” with our present body. (That’s an implication of Jesus’ tomb being empty: his risen body is made out of his mortal body.)
Recently I found evidence of the breadth of the discussion of this idea. Caroline Walker Bynum writes: “Christian preachers and theologians from Tertullian to the seventeenth-century divines asserted that God will reassemble the decayed and fragmented corpses of human beings at the end of time and grant to them eternal life and incorruptibility.” This is from her 1991 book, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion. Her final chapter is titled “Material Continuity, Personal Survival, and the Resurrection of the Body.” I look forward to having more to say about material continuity.
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But to answer the question in this week’s title, Yes. It is better to exist; and for human beings to exist is to have bodies, “both now and for ever and unto the ages of ages.”
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Out & About: I am to preach at St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Dallas this Sunday, February 16, at the 9 and 11:15 a.m. Eucharists.
The next Good Books & Good Talk seminar is on Sunday, February 23, at 5 p.m. also at St. Matthew’s. We’ll be discussing Bessie Head’s novel, When Rain Clouds Gather—I hope you read it and, if possible, come to join the discussion by a remarkable author from Botswana. It is a deeply human novel.