Robert Nozick Experience Machine

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Consider the kind of "experience machine" that Robert Nozick describes on pages 27-29 of *The Ethical Life*. (a) Would you "plug in" to the experience machine for a week? Why or why not? (b) Would you plug in to the experience machine for the rest of your life? Why or why not? (c) Would you want someone you love to plug in to the machine for a lifetime? Why or why not? (Answer all three parts--a, b, and c.)

Robert Nozick used the idea of an "experience machine" to refute the idea of hedonism. Hedonism is defined as the ethical theory that pleasure (in the sense of satisfaction and desires) is the highest good and proper aim of human life. In simpler terms, hedonism states that any component in life that is not considered to be pleasurable does nothing directly to increase one's well being. Nozick used his idea of the "experience machine" to refute this idea, and I believe that it worked.

Nozick asks us to imagine a machine that could give us whatever desirable or pleasurable experience we could want. Nozick then continues on to ask, if given the choice, would a person prefer the machine or real life? Nozick …show more content…
I would never want to be in it for a week or a life time let alone a day. I find pleasure by actually traveling and exploring new places, by actually being there. I would never want to be hooked up into a machine like a video game. To me it wouldn't be the same pleasure/excitement as to actually physically doing something. I want to do certain things, I do not want to just have the experience of doing them, and I believe that the plugging into an "experience machine" limits us as human beings to a man-made reality. Traveling the world, eating new foods, meeting new people, experiencing different cultures, or even simply hitting a baseball for the first time, are all different types of experiences that I believe an "experience machine" would not be able to
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