Philosophy · 11 questions

The Experience Machine

Nozick's offer: every experience you value, none of it real. A higher percent means you refuse. Contact with reality did the work.

About this test

Robert Nozick's experience machine, in Anarchy, State, and Utopia, is a thought experiment against the idea that only felt experience matters. You would float in a tank while a machine gave you the experiences of friendship, achievement, and pleasure. You would not know it was a machine. Nozick thought most people would refuse, and he took the refusal as evidence that we want to do things, be a certain way, and touch a world that is not our hallucination. These items are original variants. A high score is a refusal. Entering the machine is not scored as weakness.

Question 1 of 11

What this test asks
  1. I would refuse a machine that gave me only pleasant experience, if the life was not real.
  2. If my experiences were wonderful and stable, I would not care that they were simulated.
  3. I want to actually do things, not only to feel as if I did them.
  4. A machine that included the feeling of real achievement would still be missing the achievement.
  5. For someone in unrelievable pain, a pleasant illusion could be the better life.
  6. It matters to me that the people I love are not simulations, even if I could never detect the difference.
  7. I would not plug in even if the machine made me forget that I had chosen it.
  8. Pleasure is the only thing that can make a life go well.
  9. I might visit for a weekend. I would not move in.
  10. Moral courage that never happened is not courage I want credited to me.
  11. A perfect simulation of the people I love would be as good as being with them.