QuestionsWhat is happiness?The experience machine: happiness is not only pleasure
What is happiness?Virtue and wisdom

The experience machine: happiness is not only pleasure

The experience machine

Robert Nozick 1938 · 2002In his lectures he devised a case where one is responsible without having been able to do otherwise, before Frankfurt published his.
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What it claims

Something matters to us in addition to pleasant experience: doing, being someone, touching reality. Happiness cannot be reduced to felt pleasure.

Why

Many would refuse to plug into a pleasure machine: they want to do things and be someone, not just feel as if they did.

In short

"The experience machine: happiness is not only pleasure" is an argument by Robert Nozick (Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 1974, pp. 42-45) on the question "What is happiness?" (answer: virtue and wisdom). Its claim: Something matters to us in addition to pleasant experience: doing, being someone, touching reality. Happiness cannot be reduced to felt pleasure. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P4). AskPhilosophy presents 1 objection, 0 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 1974, pp. 42-45
Valid with an implicit premise

Imagine a machine that would give you, for your whole life, all the pleasant experiences you want: writing a masterpiece, having friends, being loved. You would float in a tank, electrodes in your brain, and believe it was all real. Would you plug in? Nozick thinks almost no one would, and draws a conclusion: if pleasure were all that matters, we would say yes. So something else matters. This is not a proof but a test of our intuitions, and that is exactly what his critics discuss.

P1If only how our life "feels from the inside" mattered, we would agree to plug for life into a machine that guarantees all the experiences we want.
P2Yet many people refuse to plug in: they want to do certain things, and not just have the experience of doing them.
P3They also want to be a certain sort of person (courageous, kind, intelligent), which one cannot be floating in a tank, and to be in contact with a deeper reality than one men have constructed.
P4 · implicit premiseThis refusal expresses what we really value: it does not come from a mere reflex, a fear or a bias that would distort our judgement.
Therefore something matters to us in addition to pleasant experience: doing, being someone, touching reality. Happiness cannot be reduced to felt pleasure.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P4, the computer finds a world where pleasure is all that matters, but where people refuse the machine out of sheer fear of the unknown: the refusal then proves nothing about what has value.
P1 says: if pleasure were all, we would plug in. P2 and P3 recall that we refuse. By contraposition, pleasure is not all. But this assumes P4: that the refusal really comes from our values, and not from a fear or a prejudice. Nozick does not prove it, he takes it as obvious. This is the premise his critics attack.
Analogy. You are offered a video game in which you would always be the best, never losing. You might be happy, but many would say: "I haven't really won." Nozick goes further: even if it is guaranteed to feel exactly like a real victory, you would still want to win for real.

Objections

1

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

F
Felipe De Brigard 2010 · attacks premise 4

If the experiment is inverted (you are told you have long been plugged in, and offered the chance to unplug), many people refuse to leave their present life. So Nozick's refusal might come from status quo bias (we prefer to stay in the life we have) rather than from a love of reality. Results vary with what people are told about the real life awaiting them.

no reply
Nozick did reply, but that text is not yet in our corpus.
The debate goes on (our summary) Nozick died in 2002: he cannot answer this 2010 article. Nozick's defenders say De Brigard's study does not show that reality does not matter, only that it does not always matter more than everything (in the study, some do choose to unplug). A hedonist would add a more radical reply: the fear of the machine is itself a feeling, hence a state of experience, and does not prove that anything other than experience matters (our summary, no specific author). Still, the inverted machine, like Nozick's, measures intuitions rather than reasons.
What today's voices say
Criticize it
David ChalmersAnswering Nozick's experience machine, he says its objections do not apply to virtual reality, where you make your own choices and can live a meaningful life.