To the Moon is an interactive novel-style game that focuses on two workers on one of their jobs of entering the memories of people on their death-bed, with the purpose of altering what they believe to be the course of their life, in order for them to die contently.
With that in mind, the main story follows the pair inside the memories of one man who wants to go To The Moon. In order to do that they go back through his memories in order to find a place to put him on the path of becoming an astronaut and uncover a particularly interesting and emotional life in the process.
I shall not mention any more, as I recommend the experience thoroughly. However I would like to focus on a key point that is mentioned in passing, and what one of the bonus episodes, not included in the main game, touches upon: the ethical factor. A company such as the one in To The Moon is one that if it were real, people would have a lot of problem with. The main job of the company is to enter people’s dreams before they die to alter their memories. Of course, your memories are particularly important to your character and who you are. So some people would find this idea unnatural and therefore upsetting.
In the bonus episode, we see that outside of the building where the character work there are a whole bunch of protesters. So the question is: is it really so bad?
On the one hand, of course living naturally is really important and one should never underestimate the importance of their story they created while alive. On the other, surely people have the right to die happy, as if even for a fleeting moment they could believe they were amazingly successful and be content with that, that ought not really be a problem.
One way we can reason the value of each side would be under the belief of an afterlife. It would appear that is one believes death is final, then allowing them to die happy doesn't really have any major problems. However, if these memories of your life persist into the beyond, then perhaps that is a bit more an issue. However, we have no way of knowing if there is an afterlife, so it's not a point I will push.
One thought experiment we can use is that of the experience machine by Robert Nozick in 1974. Nozick claimed that the increase of pleasure alone isn't the only reason we do things: even if most of the things we do are things that result in increased pleasure. What he hypothesised is that if we could just plug ourselves into a machine for the rest of our life and only have positive experiences, then we would not want that. We would not have the things that come with the positive experience, just live a pleasurable life indistinguishable from the life outside of the machine.
The idea here is would we really prefer a life of heightened pleasure if the pleasure wasn't natural, or real, or full of negative experiences, too? Perhaps it seems most people would prefer the "whips and scorns of time" (Shakespeare quotes for the win!) as there is added value to the hard work and reality of the pleasure we experience.
Is this thought experiment the same, however? As rather than genuinely feeling those fake pleasurable experiences we have opted into, we are just choosing to, on our deathbed, have believed we lived a better life than we did. That in itself is only one pleasure filled with inaccurate memories of success. So if we change the experiment to briefly only having one pleasurable experience at the cost of your memories - maybe more people would be willing to opt in for that.
It seems if we had the choice to gain a pleasurable experience at the cost of nothing, we likely would all opt in for it. So what cost is too much a cost for that pleasure? These are the kinds of thoughts that play on your mind off the back of the story To The Moon. I want not to ramble on too much about this topic, but I figured it was interesting food for thought. Would you opt in for the treatment of having your memories changed on your deathbed, or do you treasure your real life events too much?
Do let me know, I'm always up for a discussion. I would also be happy to return to covering this game again if people are interested - I think there's a lot of great stuff going on in this story.
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