PHLA11H3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Experience Machine, Consequentialism
Document Summary
Suppose there were an experience machine that would give you any experience you desired. Superduper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book. All the time, you would be floating in a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain. (p. 644) Further details: you wouldn"t know that you were plugged in. Nozick believes that most people would choose to not live in the tank. The thought-experiment is challenging the hedonism portion of utilitarianism. Hedonism can recognize that things like knowledge, friendship, achievements, do make our lives better. Nozick but for hedonism to be true. It needs to be that what is good about knowledge, friendship, success, love etc. is just the pleasure, or relief from pain, that they give us. The experience machine challenges this: pleasure and freedom from pain cannot be the only things that are intrinsically valuable.
