Robert Nozick's Experience Machine Thought Experim Essay Example
First, I’m going to state what Robert Nozick is trying to show, before laying out his argument through the Experience Machine thought experiment. After that I am going to argue whether it is successful or not by providing arguments from both views, and finally showing that Nozick successfully provided a convincing argument through the experiment.
What the Thought Experiment is supposed to show
Throughout the thought experiment, Nozick has been arguing against hedonism – pleasure being the only intrinsic good, he also refutes ‘the mental state account of well-being’. He is trying to show that pleasure is not the only factor contributing to our well-being. Assuming Nozick is wrong that pleasure is indeed the only intrinsic good; then, everyone would have opted to be plugged to the machine as there is no reason to not do so.
Lay out of the Thought Experiment
Now I am going to lay out Nozick’s Experiment Machine thought experiment.
Nozick advises us to ignore queries such as who is ultimately going to run the machine, because these questions does not differ the results adversely. He repeatedly asks his readers “would you choose to plug in?” as he opposes it using three distinct reasons, namely: ‘we want to do certain things, and not just have the experience of doing them’; ‘we want...to be a certain sort of person’; we are limited ‘to a man-made reality, to a world no deeper…than that which people can construct’.
If plugging in to the experience machine provides more pleasure, then we should just follow the idea. However, that’s only applicable if pleasure is all that matters to us. Nozick’s reply to this hedonistic argument is that we should not choose to connect to the machine, and thus, pleasure is not the only thing that matters to us.
He provides us a cyclical argument that brings us back to choosing reality as the final choice of not being “plugged in”. Starting from arguments of the experience machine, to the transformation machine, in which he
What the Thought Experiment is supposed to show
Throughout the thought experiment, Nozick has been arguing against hedonism – pleasure being the only intrinsic good, he also refutes ‘the mental state account of well-being’. He is trying to show that pleasure is not the only factor contributing to our well-being. Assuming Nozick is wrong that pleasure is indeed the only intrinsic good; then, everyone would have opted to be plugged to the machine as there is no reason to not do so.
Lay out of the Thought Experiment
Now I am going to lay out Nozick’s Experiment Machine thought experiment.
Nozick advises us to ignore queries such as who is ultimately going to run the machine, because these questions does not differ the results adversely. He repeatedly asks his readers “would you choose to plug in?” as he opposes it using three distinct reasons, namely: ‘we want to do certain things, and not just have the experience of doing them’; ‘we want...to be a certain sort of person’; we are limited ‘to a man-made reality, to a world no deeper…than that which people can construct’.
If plugging in to the experience machine provides more pleasure, then we should just follow the idea. However, that’s only applicable if pleasure is all that matters to us. Nozick’s reply to this hedonistic argument is that we should not choose to connect to the machine, and thus, pleasure is not the only thing that matters to us.
He provides us a cyclical argument that brings us back to choosing reality as the final choice of not being “plugged in”. Starting from arguments of the experience machine, to the transformation machine, in which he