Nozick's Experience Machine

Is happiness the most important thing in life? Are pleasurable sensations and experiences the ultimate goals of living? Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick didn’t think so, and he devised a thought experiment to prove it. Imagine there exists an “experience machine” that can simulate any experience you’d like to have. You hook up to the experience machine and you would think that you were giving a great speech, or writing a novel, or going on a fantastic date… but, you’d actually be floating in a tank, hooked up to electrodes. You could choose to feel happy, important, and loved. From time to time you could exit the tank and select new experiences.

The question is, would you choose to live in this simulated reality? Would you describe this as a good life? We could all agree that it would be a happy life, but would it be a good one? If happiness is the primary goal of life, then life in the tank should satisfy all our desires.

Nozick argued that many of us would have misgivings about hooking up. He said that a life in the tank would be an empty life. No real projects or goals, or other things we consider valuable. His point was that there’s more to life than feeling happy, and that even if this simulated feel-good machine were on offer, most of us would not describe that kind of life as a life well lived.

What’s more important than feeling happy is feeling that our lives are significant, meaningful, and worthwhile. Emily Esfahani Smith would say there are other feelings that supersede happiness too: affection, peace, and well-being. Because simulated realities are not genuine, not real, they are unsatisfying. Many of us would choose reality, even if that reality meant more unhappiness. We’d choose authenticity over eutopia.

(Elaborations on this thought experiment are recounted in Emily Esfahani Smith’s “The Power of Meaning” and Sam Harris’s Making Sense podcast episode #266)