The experience of talking to someone somehow depends on the person we talk to. Consider, for example, an act of communication or the reception of a compliment or of a seemingly ordinary hug. Consider some scenarios in the reality we, you and I, find ourselves in, not hypothetically, but actually. It would only be you, your experiences, and the experience machine, that would form your reality. He believes that nothing in the machine would actually care about who the person attached to it would be. According to Nozick, there would be nothing in the experience machine that would actually be, but only someone that would experience. Is someone courageous, kind, intelligent, witty, loving? It’s not merely that it’s difficult to tell there’s no way that someone is’ (Nozick, 1974). ![]() ‘Nothing about what we are like can matter except as it gets reflected in our experiences. But what does being entail? Searle (1980), a linguist, mentions a very important ingredient of the richness of human experience that, I believe, contributes to us being a unique subjective self, namely the ability to produce and experience meaning. ‘What else can matter to us, other than how our lives feel from the inside’ (Nozick, 1974)? Nozick himself proposes it is the desire of being. He assumes that there is more to life than mere experience. In 1974, Nozick came up with his thought experiment of the experience machine to question the hedonist assumption that the Chief Good, the answer on how to live a good life, would come from pleasurable experiences alone (Bergsma, Poot, & Liefbroer, 2007). Would you give it a shot? ‘Would you plug in’?Īccording to Robert Nozick, an influential American philosopher, you wouldn’t. Of course, you’d have no idea you were being detached from reality, because the experience machine would form your actual reality. Your entire life, you would be floating in a tank, having electrodes attached to your brain. If you say yes to it, you say yes forever. It is as powerful as to stimulate your brain with any kind of experience you could possibly desire. It’s not one of those ordinary machines, but a special one, as you can see. 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’ (Nozick, 1974). ‘Suppose there was an experience machine that would give you any experience you desired. I invite you to imagine the following scenario.
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