The Thought Experiment Against Hedonism

If you know what film this is from, good for you!

Robert Nozick (1938-2002) in his book Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974), attempts to demonstrate that there are more things in life than the pursuit of happiness, as hedonists would have you believe.  He tries to isolate the process of achieving happiness with a thought experiment and in turn, shows that there are other aspects of life that we value aside from happiness.  This is rather difficult to show in a real life situation since many things we do cause happiness and it is easy to reduce all of them down to the pursuit of happiness.  Nozick, instead, uses an aspect of complete virtual reality to make his point.

In his thought experiment, you’re given a choice to enter a machine that would give you any experience you desired.  In this world, the neuropsychologists have invented a machine that 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.”  You can choose any experience you wish to have and you won’t know that you’re in an experience machine while you’re in it: it will seem completely real to you.  You can choose the experience that you’ll have for the next 2 years and after the 2 years, you can have a short amount of time to come out and choose the experience you’ll have for the next 2 years, and so on.  Nozick asks the reader if we would plug into such a machine, after all, it is a life of complete bliss except for the few moments you come out to decide the next few years of life.

Through this experiment and our supposed answer (no, we do not want to use such a machine for the rest of our lives), Nozick tries to show us that there’s more to life than just the experiences we perceive to have.  There are more to life than just being happy.  It is true, that the machine provides us with the maximum amount of happiness we could ever want but Nozick states there are other things in life we want more.  He says that we want to do certain things and not just experience doing them.  Nozick states that these experiences matter because we actually do them rather than the experiences we have of these actions.  Secondly, we want to be a certain way.  He speaks about the importance of individuality and the unique persona that each of us hold and take for granted.  He says that someone floating in a tank hooked up to a machine can neither be courageous, kind, intelligent, witty nor loving.  He compares hooking up to such a machine with an act equivalent to suicide.  Lastly, he mentions that the machine limits us to a man-made reality and nothing deeper.  The machine may provide an experience that mimics certain aspects of this deeper experience but a man wants to make himself open to encountering this deeper significance in life.

In response to Nozick’s criticism, one might suggest that if we wish to be someone, we could, in addition, just hook ourselves up to a transformation machine that transforms us to whoever we want to be.  However, Nozick argues that this does not solve the problem of our desire to be someone.  Once we are transformed, we would still have higher goals and other ways we wish to progress ourselves.  We could go on about other possible machines that provide us with all we want but Nozick considers the thought that perhaps, ultimately, we desire to live ourselves, in contact with reality which these machines cannot do for us.