2012-05-29
Explanation
This comic is a riff on Robert Nozick's famous "Experience Machine" thought experiment from his 1974 book Anarchy, State, and Utopia. A woman asks a man whether he would enter a hallucination machine that provides perfect pleasure for the rest of his life. The man gives the classic philosophical response: he would not, because he values experiencing reality with all its ups and downs, preferring the "blinding light of truth" over artificial bliss.
The punchline deflates his noble stance entirely. When the woman reveals that the machine actually exists and she has one, he immediately abandons his principled position and says "Okay I'm in." The joke highlights the gap between how people respond to hypothetical philosophical questions and how they would actually behave when faced with the real choice. It suggests that our high-minded philosophical objections to hedonistic pleasure may be nothing more than cheap talk -- easy to maintain only so long as the temptation remains safely theoretical.