1) Robert Nozick offers the “experience machine” as a thought-experiment designed to tell us something about what makes a life worth living. Describe the thought-experiment. Robert Nozick designed the “experience machine” as a thought experiment to analyze what matters to people other than our experiences and the feelings we attain from them. The “experience machine” is a machine that is expertly designed to preprogram lifes’ experiences including the lives of others and is able to give you any experience you desire. The machine provides a large selection of experiences from which one can select life experiences for a selected period of time; after such you will have a selected period of time out of the machine to reselect another set of life experiences and return back to the machine. Nozick’s thought experiment includes everyone in the population as servicing the machine is not required and one does not know if they are inside. The thought experiment explores what truly matters to us apart from our experiences or the temporary moments of bliss we arrive at. 2) …show more content…
Nozick’s experiment shows us that even though the machine may provide us with momentary bliss, we feel intuitively that something is missing from the expertly designed machine. We value the experience and its temporary pleasure, but its’ appeasement does not last long. His thought experiment shows us that there is something additional to experience that we value and that even if we could design such a machine that would be to perfection we would lose our desire to “live” our true lives in
This conclusion was disproved from Milgram’s experiment. The majority of the subjects obeyed the experimenter to the end. There were several reactions to the experiment. Some people showed signs of tension or stress, others laughed, and some showed no signs of discomfort throughout the experiment. Subjects often felt satisfaction by obeying the experimenter.
As humans we are constantly in search of understanding the balance between what feels good and what is right. Humans try to take full advantage of experiencing pleasure to its fullest potential. Hedonism claims that pleasure is the highest and only source of essential significance. If the notion of hedonism is truthful, happiness is directly correlated with pleasure. Robert Nozick presented the philosophical world with his though experiment, “The Experience Machine” in order to dispute the existence and validity of hedonism. Nozick’s thought experiment poses the question of whether or not humans would plug into a machine which produces any desired experience. Nozick weakens the notion of hedonism through his thought experiment, claiming humans need more than just pleasure in their lives. Nozick discovers that humans would not hook up to this machine because they would not fully develop as a person and consider it a form of suicide.
To prove his point he references the experience machine, similar to The Matrix. What if you could choose a life, plug into that machine and live the rest of your life plugged into it? This is assuming that as soon as you plug in you forget that you are plugged in. Nozick believes that value is good in itself but that there are some independent of happiness. Such a moral commitments, like who you would leave behind. The actuality/authenticity of experiences. Although, most importantly we value interconnectedness with humans. Genuine contact. In the experience machine you lose autonomy as well. There is not room for growth because you are no longer the author of your own life. It is for these other values that stand apart from happiness, which Nozick believes we care about far more than life
...raumatic for some, the acknowledgement that you can make a choice in your own environment, which controls who you transform to be, should provide encouragement, although illusionary that choice may be, its effects are not.
Today the world is overflowing with technology that the population nearly completely depends on, from our cell phones, tablets, or computers, that are used to assist us with daily tasks. What if this technology begun to alter the way we live our lives? As a society, we are reshaping our lives by consistently attempting to appeal to our followers on social media. For instance, we constantly photograph daily events in our lives and then proceed to utilize filters so that they appear as photogenic as possible. It’s almost as if we are trying to create an entire new identity, one who’s life is more interesting than our own. What if, however, there was a place that you could travel to, for an outrageous expense, to be immersed into an alternate form of life. In the television series, Westworld, this place previously described can become a reality. Inside the mock society called Westworld as well, the individuals are known as guests, which as a guest you cannot be harmed. The robots posing as people are known as hosts, and to a guest they are known as your servants. Every other person is an automation, built to look and act exactly as
Susan Wolf, born in 1952, is widely considered one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th and 21st century. One of Wolf’s most renowned works is The meanings of Lives, which drew a lot of attention in the philosophical world for a number of questions that arose from it. Arguably her most widely debated and questioned assertion in The meanings of Lives is “If you care about yourself you’re living as if you’re the center of the universe, which is false.” This however I don’t not believe to be true. Every human being, no matter how successful or unsuccessful, has the right to care for them sleeves and not believe they are the center of the universe while doing so.
Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World illustrates a colorful, fantastic universe of sex and emotion, programming and fascism that has a powerful draw in a happy handicap. This reality pause button is called “Soma”. “Take a holiday from reality whenever you like, and come back without so much as a headache or a mythology.” ( Huxley 54 ).
Skillings, Jonathan. Newsmaker: Getting machines to think like us. 3 July 2006. 18 March 2014. .
Many refinements of this concept have been put forth by various authors. One simple one that appears to improve greatly upon the original formulation is that knowing what it is like to have an experience is equivalent to the ability to recognize that experience by its phenomenal quality.
First, it condemns others to ‘meager hand-to-mouth existence. Indeed, Bob no longer pursues his conceptions of a good life, even though his goals should be equally respected with dignity. Second, the first-come, first-served doctrine of appropriation that Nozick accepts is unfair. As a fair procedure of appropriation, the system which equalises chances for appropriation is better than a first-come, first-served doctrine of appropriation. However, Nozick’s proviso permits a first-come, first-served doctrine of appropriation even when chances are unequal. Due to this counterexample, Nozick’s proviso is inconsistent with the idea of treating people as persons with dignity. Therefore, Nozick’s formula is inconsistent with Kantian principle. Nozick’s formula
...uld be in Nozick’s framework (Rawls, 76). For Rawls, the purpose of society is to minimize disagreement and generate a cooperative social order that benefits the least well off. He continues on to argue that under Nozick’s framework it would compel individuals to join societies, making it unfair to individuals. For Rawl’s the Nozickian framework is naïve, blissfully assuming that individuals will be inclined to peacefully coexist if they are given opportunity to pursue their own life projects.
For years, authors and philosophers have satirized the “perfect” society to incite change. In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley describes a so-called utopian society in which everyone is happy. This society is a “controlled environment where technology has essentially [expunged] suffering” (“Brave New World”). A member of this society never needs to be inconvenienced by emotion, “And if anything should go wrong, there's soma” (Huxley 220). Citizens spend their lives sleeping with as many people as they please, taking soma to dull any unpleasant thoughts that arise, and happily working in the jobs they were conditioned to want. They are genetically altered and conditioned to be averse to socially destructive things, like nature and families. They are trained to enjoy things that are socially beneficial: “'That is the secret of happiness and virtue – liking what you've got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their inescapable social destiny'” (Huxley 16). Citizens operate more like machinery, and less like humans. Humanity is defined as “the quality of being human” (“Humanity”). To some, humanity refers to the aspects that define a human: love, compassion and emotions. Huxley satirizes humanity by dehumanizing the citizens in the Brave New World society.
Nozick‘s experience machine creates experiences based on selections made by human beings themselves for their own individual. Every two years they are required to make this selection whilst feeling some distress (in reality they exist in a floating tank). Then they submerge into a fake world for another two years and so on (Timmons, 122-123). He believes that rational humans would choose not to plug into the experience machine because they would want the actual experience of life instead of a virtual existence. It is a shallow reality that they are provided which will not satisfy them for long. Especially because it does not allow them to develop their own person, or personality, it strips away their human qualities and turns each of them into an “indeterminate blob” (Timmons, 123). In fact, this is a man-made world that provides nothing but a selection of experiences to choose from, it is not an actual experience an individual can have. It is ...
The book is a collection of stories, references to the bible, references to ancient times, and examples all to help the reader understand what optimal experience is, and how to achieve this state of consciousness.
In life, many things are taken for granted on a customary basis. For example, we wake up in the morning and routinely expect to see and hear from certain people. Most people live daily life with the unsighted notion that every important individual in their lives at the moment, will exist there tomorrow. However, in actuality, such is not the case. I too fell victim to the routine familiarity of expectation, until the day reality taught me otherwise.