The experience machine
Robert Nozick · Anarchy, State, and Utopia · 1974
Imagine a machine that could give you any experience you desire. Neuropsychologists would stimulate your brain so that you believed you were writing a great novel, making wonderful friends, or living the most thrilling adventures, while in reality you floated in a tank with electrodes attached to your skull. Once plugged in, you would no longer know the experiences are simulated: from the inside, your life would feel perfectly happy. You can program an entire lifetime of happiness in advance, with no risk of malfunction. You are offered the chance to plug in for the rest of your life.
Would you plug in? If you hesitate, what does that reveal: that a good life requires something more than pleasant experiences, however perfect they may be?
What it does in the debate
Objects to Hedonismattacks the position
If we refuse to plug in for life, it is because we want more than pleasure: to act for real, to touch the world, to be someone.
- If pleasure were the only good, plugging in for life to a machine giving the perfect illusion of every pleasure would be the best possible choice.
- Yet almost no one would plug in forever: we want to do things and not merely believe we do, to be someone and not merely feel ourselves to be, to touch the real and not to dream it.
- This refusal reveals that we value things, acting for real, being in contact with the world, that felt pleasure alone does not contain.
Therefore So pleasure is not the highest good: a life of pleasure without reality lacks something we take to be essential.