Sober Philosophy: The Experience Machine (Gabriel presents)

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A philosophy-club gathering considers Nozick's experience-machine thought experiment and its arguments about action, identity, and reality.

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In Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) Robert Nozick proposed a thought experiment: There’s a machine that can give you any experience you want for the rest of your life, whether writing a great novel, living in a high fantasy world, or simply experiencing endless pleasure and no pain. Would you forgo real life and instead live inside the machine? Nozick argues that if only the experience of life mattered, entering the machine would be a no-brainer, and yet most people's intuition is that they shouldn’t. Therefore, concludes Nozick, we value something more than just the experience of life. He posits three candidates: 1. We want to do certain things, not just have the experience of doing them: “In the case of certain experiences, it is only because first we want to do the actions that we want the experiences of doing them or thinking we’ve done them.” 2. We want to be a certain sort of person: “Someone floating in a tank is an indeterminate blob… Is he courageous, kind, intelligent, witty, loving? It’s not merely that it’s difficult to tell; there’s no way he is. Plugging into the machine is a form of suicide.” 3. We want contact with a reality deeper than one we built ourselves: “There is no actual contact with any deeper reality, though the experience of it can be simulated.” Philosopher Joshua Greene suggests that the intuition against entering the experience machine may be motivated by status quo bias.

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