Hedonists think that our experiences are all that matter for how our lives go for us. Specifically, they think that the experience of pleasure (feeling good) is the only thing that ultimately makes our lives go well for us and that pain (feeling bad) is the only thing that ultimately makes our lives go badly for us. So a Hedonist shouldn’t care if their pleasure comes from genuine interactions with other real people or illusory interactions with computers or psychoactive substances. Of course, a Philosophical Hedonist, who cares about getting the most net pleasure over their lifetime, wouldn’t go straight for the heroin because addiction seems to lead to ever decreasing amounts of pleasure and ever increasing health and lifestyle problems, which ultimately result in less pleasure and more pain. But as virtual reality technology and neuroscience continue to advance, wonderful experiences without side-effects may soon be possible and very appealing.

Robert Nozick begs to differ. Back when all the cool kids were playing the world’s original first-person shooter game, Maze War, Nozick published a book with a very important thought experiment in it [2]. Nozick asked readers to imagine a machine produced by “super-duper neuropsychologists” that could give you any experience you could think of without you realising it was all a computer simulation [3]. Nozick suggests that you could team up with the experts to create a wonderful menu of experiences for your new machine life. Assuming the machine works perfectly, and disregarding any real-world responsibilities you might have, should you plug into this Experience Machine? If all that matters is our experiences, doesn’t the machine offer us the best possible life?

What do you think, dear reader? Would you want to trade in your real but frequently average or painful experiences for a set of wondrous, but entirely digitally mediated ones? Nozick thought that no sensible person, including philosophers attracted to hedonism, would choose the Experience Machine life. He argued that what really matters to us, and should really matter to us, is living a life in close connection with reality – really living our lives for ourselves. [5]

Would you want to trade in your real but frequently average or painful experiences for a set of wondrous, but entirely digitally mediated ones? 

But isn’t Nozick dead wrong? That’s the kind of argument great grandparents would use on any children they see playing Fortnite or liking their friend’s first makeup tutorial vlog (or a combination – see picture below). Pleasure, pain, and all of our other experiences really happen in our minds. In fact our current feelings are probably the things we can be most sure of in life. For all we know, we are already brains in a vat, …

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