Experience machine
A thought experiment by Robert Nozick: would you agree to plug yourself for ever into a machine that gave you exactly the experiences you desire?
Definition
Nozick proposed it in 1974, in Anarchy, State, and Utopia. The machine is perfect: you would not know you were in it, and you would live a fulfilled life. Yet most people refuse. Nozick concluded that we do not only care about experiencing things: we want to actually do them, to be a certain kind of person, to be in contact with reality.
The thought experiment has stopped being a distant fiction. Artificial companions, made-to-measure worlds, answers to everything: some of our technologies look like gentle experience machines. Nozick’s question becomes practical — what, in a life, cannot be simulated without being lost?
See also
Related notions
In the essays