What is the one thing that everyone in the world can agree on?

Everyone wants to be happy. And everyone has a different idea as to how happiness might be achieved. But people want to be happy so much that even people who deliberately seek ways to be sad do so because it fulfills them at some level and thus makes them happy.

The whole world is quite a big market. What if someone could create a machine to satisfy this entire market; that is, make everyone happy? If you think about it, that is what all machines are designed to do, but in a very limited setting. All machines are satisfying some need, and that satisfaction makes the user happy. The problem is, each of the existing “happy machines” is focused on satisfying just one of the myriad ways of being happy instead of solving the overall problem itself.

What would the ultimate happiness machine do? How could it make everyone happy, regardless of who uses the machine?

Chemicals?

One answer might be to inject chemicals into the brain. The brain is the source of our happiness, and the brain runs on chemicals. So, if we isolate the chemical that makes a person feel happy, and inject that chemical into the brain, will we then have a universal happiness machine?

On further thought, injecting a chemical to make a person happy would not be sufficient. A person who is happy won’t feel a need to change. Yet, regardless of how people feel, if they sense that someone or something they care deeply about is about to be destroyed, they’ll try to save it. That is not a state of happiness. Also, people also get bored of feeling the same thing continuously, and will want to change anyway.

So, we can see that happiness does not reduce to injecting chemicals into the brain to evoke feelings. Our conscious experience also plays a role in our sense of happiness.

A simple machine?

Now let’s assume we have a machine that can manipulate our conscious experience, perhaps with virtual reality goggles. Will this be sufficient to make people happy? Virtual reality can be very immersive, but even then the same two problems occur. VR will not keep people from sacrificing happiness to protect what they love, nor is it guaranteed to keep them from getting bored.

Or … the mind confabulator!

But let’s assume we have a machine that can access and manipulate the internals of the human mind. It can modify memories, so people cannot remember that there is something else they should be doing. It can read a person’s interests in order to give them experiences that satisfy their interests. I call this mechanism the mind confabulator.

confabulate, verb – to fill in gaps in memory by fabrication (Merriam–Webster )

Can the mind confabulator be the ultimate happiness machine?

The mind confabulator would seem sufficient, but it is not. The fundamental problem is one that no technology can overcome, no matter how invasively it controls the human mind. This problem has a name; it is known as the halting problem.

The halting problem deals with the ability to decide whether a computer program will stop. This problem is impossible for computers to solve. Such a simple problem, with no obvious real world impact, you think. Yet, the halting problem is logically irrefutable, and cuts at the very root of all technology.

How does the halting problem prevent the mind confabulator from giving us eternal happiness? As we saw previously, happiness is a state of the human mind. So, to bring about eternal happiness, the mind confabulator needs to transform every possible state our mind can be in to the happiness state.

If we think of the mind as a program, then the confabulator must adjust the running mind program so that it terminates at the happiness state. This means the confabulator must be able to predict the effect of its interventions on the mind. In particular, it must predict whether the modified program will terminate. However, as all programmers know, it is easy to make an endless loop that never terminates.

Since the halting problem means the confabulator will never know in all cases whether its interventions will create an endless loop and never terminate, then it can never known whether its interventions will bring about the happiness state. Thus, the confabulator cannot guarantee that its interventions will bring about happiness, and consequently the ultimate happiness machine is impossible.

So, what is the upshot? We have proven that it is impossible for technology to ever make us ultimately happy. So, anyone who wants to be ultimately happy needs to look elsewhere.