Description du poste
Experience machinesIn the experience machine thought experiment, you choose to either continue your life as you are currently living it, or spend the rest of it inside a machine that cultivates a world perfectly fitted to you. It was introduced to argue against hedonism, but we can imagine the machine pushing for any metric we care about—it doesn’t necessarily have to be pleasure. For example, we can consider a non-hedonistic experience machine which makes you feel a perfect balance of happy, challenged, loved, fulfilled, empowered, or anything else you care about.
The philosophical tension in this formulation is supposed to be between any experience-based ethics and some intuitive feeling that the experience machine is inherently deceptive. The thing that feels wrong is that the experiences don’t seem real in some important way. Robert Nozick, the creator of the original thought experiment, says “we want to do certain things, and not just have the experience of doing them.” This allows us to ask: Does Nozick's objection[1] make sense? Can we explain what realness is or why it matters to begin with?
Interestingly, I have found that many people are unable to understand what this thought experiment is getting at. They say things like “I wouldn’t want to go into the experience machine because part of what makes life enjoyable is the fact that you sometimes struggle, feel pain, etc.” But if this is true, our non-hedonistic experience machine would account for it! By construction, we are considering an experience machine which is simulating the ideal world for you. Still, people think we cannot artificially construct a world better than the one we already have. I try to explain, “Well, imagine your life, with nothing changed, but without kidney stones, broken AC in the summer, etc. Surely there are some adjustments to your life which would make you happier?” I think people do think the world can be better but not in a way an experience machine could create. These people