Today's Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal raises in interesting philosophical issue.
The comic posits a machine that makes your life perfect and happy, and asks if people would get bored of this. The response given is that this can't happen as long as the machine is working correctly. Feeling bored, unfulfilled, etc. are negative emotions that the machine must eradicate to make you feel happy. The final panel asks
But if an outside device is directly adjusting your thoughts and emotions, will you even feel like you're you anymore?
The answer is along the same lines:
I will if it tells me to!
Basically it's arguing that all your feelings are just a result of stimulation of appropriate neurons in the brain, so the machine can make you feel anything it's designed to stimulate.
Is there a flaw in this argument, other than the sheer impracticality of a machine with that level of detailed control of the subject's mind? We have anti-depression drugs, but they have negative side effects, and they're not able to counteract the emotional impacts of these.
Or is there something contradictory about being happy when there's nothing to be happy about? It seems like it's just the artificial high that comes from taking psychedelic drugs. In the real world you can tell that this is dream-like, but the comic suggests that the machine can cancel that, so you don't know your happiness is artificial.
It seems like this is a realization of Plato's shadows on the wall, not unlike The Matrix if it didn't have the bugs that allowed some of its citizens to tell that they're inside a machine and take control of it.
