Intro to Ethics - The Experience Machine (Nozick)

Describe the experience machine. 

It’s a machine that could give you any experience you desire. You’d float in a tank with electrodes attached to your brain, and neuropsychologists would stimulate your brain so you’d think and feel you were, for example, writing a great novel or making a friend. You could pick your experiences for the next two years, then get a short time outside the tank to choose again. While inside you wouldn’t know you were in the tank. 

What are Nozick’s three reasons for thinking most of us would not plug in? Be able to explain each. 

• Doing: We want to actually do certain things, not just have the experience of doing them. We often want the experience only because we first want to do the action. 

• Being: We want to be a certain kind of person, but someone floating in a tank is an “indeterminate blob.” There’s no answer to whether he’s courageous, kind, or witty, because he simply isn’t any way. 

• Reality: The machine limits us to a man-made reality, with no actual contact with any deeper reality, though the experience of it can be simulated. Many people want to stay open to that contact. 

What does Nozick conclude from the further machines? 

Nozick imagines further machines, like a transformation machine that makes you the person you’d like to be, and a result machine that produces the results you would produce in the world. We still wouldn’t want to use them, so something matters besides experiences and what we are like. He suggests what we want is to live our own lives (an active verb) in contact with reality, which machines can’t do for us. 

How does the thought experiment map onto Parfit’s three theories? What does it most directly threaten? Which can agree with Nozick? 

The experience machine most directly threatens Hedonism, since it says only how life feels from the inside matters, and plugging in gives the best feelings. The Success Theory can agree with Nozick, because we have desires about our own lives (to do things, be a certain way, and be in touch with reality) that the machine doesn’t actually fulfil, even if we never know. The Objective List Theory can also agree, since it says things like knowledge, achievement, and real contact with reality are good for us whether or not we want them. 

Would you plug in? Why or why not? 

No. I’d want my accomplishments and relationships to be real, not just feel real. Being a certain kind of person (kind, hard-working) and having real contact with other people matters to me beyond how my life feels. I might use a machine that helps me do things in the real world, like one that helps me learn or recover from illness.