The experience machine: would you plug in?

The experience machine is a thought experiment about whether a life is good only because of how it feels. Imagine a machine that could give you any experiences you wanted, so convincingly that you could not tell them from real life. Would you plug in for good? Robert Nozick used the question to argue that something matters to us besides experience, and that anyone who answers no has already said so.

The machine

Nozick describes the case in Anarchy, State, and Utopia, published in 1974. The Wikipedia article on the experience machine summarises it: psychologists have found a way to stimulate a person's brain to produce pleasurable experiences that the person could not tell apart from the experiences they would have outside the machine. The question is whether, given the choice, you would prefer the machine to real life.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy adds that the person floats in a tank, with experiences indistinguishable from reality. So there is no catch in the offer: you would never find out that it was not real, and you would never be unhappy.

What Nozick says we want besides experience

If you hesitate, Nozick asks you to say why. The Wikipedia article lists three reasons he gives. We want to do certain things, and not just have the experience of doing them. We want to be a certain sort of person. And plugging in limits us to a man-made reality, to what we can make ourselves. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts a related point: it matters to us to make a difference in the world, and not only to seem to.

What the case is meant to show

The machine is a test for hedonism, the view that how a life feels is all that makes it good for the person living it. If that were true, the machine would offer everything of value. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says the case is meant to show that something matters to us in addition to experience.

The argument is not that pleasure does not matter. The machine gives plenty of it. It is that, if most people would still refuse, pleasure cannot be the only thing they care about. The Wikipedia article states the conclusion as: being personally happy is not the greatest value everyone carries.

The pushback

The case has been questioned on whether people's answers can be trusted. The Wikipedia article reports the idea of status quo bias, that people may refuse the machine because they prefer what they know, and not because they value reality. Joshua Greene suggested rewriting the experiment to take that bias out. De Brigard argues that a decision not to step in has more to do with wanting the status quo than with preferring one's current life.

De Brigard ran a version of the study in which people imagined they were already living inside a machine. The article reports that, of those told nothing about their real lives, 54 percent wished to disconnect. It reports other figures for other versions, which changed with what people were told about their life outside.

So the result is not simple. The way the question is put changes the answers, and that is part of what makes the case worth discussing.

What to take from it

You do not have to accept Nozick's conclusion to learn something from the case. Whatever you answer, the reasons you give show what you count as a good life: the feeling, the doing, the being, or the contact with what is real.

We look at the larger question on the page about pleasure and the good, and at what makes a life matter on the pages about whether meaning is given or made and whether the meaning we make still counts. You can read about Nozick on his own page.

If you would like to see where your own answers to questions like these place you on the map, you can take the walk.