I was recently thinking about how language fails to express so much of what we experience. If I tell you everything about how an apple tastes—the crisp as your teeth dig into the skin and the juices coating your taste buds—you would still never truly understand what it’s like if you have never eaten an apple. You may get a rough idea, but it is drastically different. In this way, words (no matter how we string them together) can never capture the experience of eating an apple or frankly most experiences.

You could think of the experience of eating an apple as existing in $n$ dimensions, while any language representation exists in $m$ dimensions, where $m \ll n$. We can project the experience of eating an apple from $n$ dimensions to the $m$ dimensions of language, but you lose so much information. This is true of any other representation—images, videos, and audio.

A Thought Experiment

What if there was some medium to fully represent experiences? Let’s say there exists some technology that is able to transfer person A’s experience to person B. Some rules and restrictions:

  1. Time: It takes the same amount of time for Person B to gain this experience as Person A took to originally have this experience. Person B cannot gain an experience in the snap of their fingers.
  2. Asynchronous: Person A doesn’t necessarily have to be present at the same time as Person B. You could imagine that Person A uploads their experience to some device, which is stored and can be transmitted to others at another point in time.
  3. Preservation: Person A doesn’t need to necessarily “record” any of their experiences. If they remember it, they can access it for other people to experience. Obviously, memories decay over time, but in this world we’ll assume Person A still holds a preserved version of the original experience.
  4. Non-parallelism: Person B can only have one experience transerred to them at a time.
  5. No knowledge transfers (i.e. defining an experience): Person A cannot directly transfer knowledge to Person B. I define an experience as a person’s response over a time period to stimulus from the world. The act of learning something (which would qualify as an experience) can be transferred to Person B, but because of (1), this essentially is the same as just learning yourself.

An example: Person A climbs Mount Everest and sees these incredible views. Person A uploads the experience of summiting Everest (suppose the final ten minutes). Person B downloads this data, replays it, and goes through the same experience of summitting Everest. Person B experiences everything—the adrenaline rush, the feeling of accomplishment, the pain, and the reward—all while sitting at home.

What does the world look like with this technology?

The world becomes more empathetic. I think most, if not all, disagreements stem from the different ways people have had their values shaped by past experiences. If this technology exists, core experiences that shaped people into who they are can now be accessible to others. People are able to connect more with each other; empathy feels close to solved. If someone doesn’t understand where someone else is coming from, experience transfer should greatly help.

Academic progress grows. The restrictions of no direct knowledge transfers (5 from above) significantly hampers the ability to make exponential scientific progress. But sharing experiences still should allow for those at the top of their fields to share creativity. You could imagine a physicist sharing their experience of solving some equation to another scientist and perhaps the chain of thinking can be applied to biology. Connections that were once stumbled upon now are much more common.

Experiences become commoditized. Capitalism inevitably kicks in and people at the top of their crafts sell their experiences to others. For example, a person who recently skied down Everest for the first time sells their experience, sharing all the thrill with none of the risk. There is now a catalog for experiences you can peruse through; some people/companies have monopolies over certain experiences which naturally would be worth a lot. The more people who have done an experience, the cheaper it is. There becomes a select few groups of people who risk themselves to explore new unique experiences for the rest to enjoy.

People begin to prefer most forms of hedonistic pleasure through this experience machine instead of experiencing it themselves. Why would you ever go on a roller coaster and take the risk of something going wrong when you can get the exact same pleasure from the machine? You’d prefer the machine for many reasons: a) safety, b) guaranteed pleasure (no chance you get dizzy or throw up), and c) the ability to do it while sitting at home.

This applies to many areas. Why would you eat unhealthy food that clogs your arteries when you can eat healthy but still enjoy the taste of a perfectly cooked fried chicken sandwich through the machine? Why would you drink when you can protect your liver and still feel buzzed? Why would you step out of the house to soak in sunshine when you can protect your skin and feel the warmth while sitting inside? The experience machine lets you avoid all risk and gain the upside.

Individualism becomes less important. Since experiences are transferrable, they become devalued. The world eventually converges on a set of experiences that bring the most utility for people, so experiences are no longer unique. Any experience can now be experienced by all of humanity, which makes people appear more as a collective. Having your own imperfect experience that makes it uniquely you is harder to justify when you can get a better, curated experience.

Empathy is great, but I worry that this world leads to one where people lose their identity. If you hold onto your own core experiences, not sharing them with others, you’re at a disadvantage because you cannot connect with others as deeply and easily. So the trade-off becomes whether you value your individualism or your community.


Something about this makes me sad. It feels like this world devalues your own experiences. Maybe it’s a good thing that language doesn’t capture everything we’re feeling? Maybe the ideal world is one where experience transfer lets you feel 80–90% of the experience, enough for empathy, while still preserving the incentive to create your own.